Amazon will never do something to fix this problem. Fake goods and garbage products that break almost immediately after delivery are their bread and butter. They need those fake reviews to sell a huge percentage of their merchandise. They would much rather just close accounts of the people who complain or whose shopping habits their algorithms don't like.
Amazon's Fake Review Problem
41–50 of 336 posts
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your argument. How do reviews drive revenues? If all fake reviews were taken down, wouldn't buy less stuff from Amazon.
Many people look at # of reviews and average review as "social proof" about the quality of a product. The reason we do this is because it can be a useful short-cut to performing an intellectually rigorous evaluation. If Amazon removes a bunch of reviews they're removing incentives that users use to buy products.
No. You’re at Amazon.com, you will make a purchase.
Reviews affect which purchase.
The incentive that matters is the sentiment or belief you should go to amazon.com in the first place. That’s what’s at risk.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#43I am much more wary about buying from Amazon than most of my peers, who easily click and buy on a whim or out of habit. I went to buy a toy at a brick and mortar, and compared the price to Amazon while there - $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! I think they've marketed them to be the low price leaders but that's definitely not the case. I'm also concerned about counterfeit products - I don't care as much about…
This is happening because people now assume Amazon's prices are the best - always. But, that is not the case. There are times where people are knowingly listing a product about market prices to catch people who are caught unaware. Once upon a time, I bought two boxes of Ener-G. It was only later I found out I have paid 100% markup on those boxes. I felt stupid that I hadn't verified the prices on the manufacturer's s…
People also do this with drop shipping.
They'll scrape products from X and list them on Y for cost+markup then drop ship. Even if they use thin margins coupon codes and promotions from a customer rewards program do a lot of offset the occasional return that you can't pass up the line or order that happens after a price hike but before your scraping software can catch up.
If you have a discount you can use that to undercut your competition and appear high up when people sort by price. You get a X% coupon code for some product from Y then scrape Y's online store and relist it on Z for retail less X plus your margin and costs. Fraudulently purchased gift cards can also be monetized through web scraping and drop shipping.
When the cost difference is negligible I prefer to buy from drop shippers rather than have my payment info and PII sitting around in yet another database waiting to be stolen.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#44I don't care much about the reviews, but I care a lot about the fake / phony / not-as-described merchandise: http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-am... . I've actually changed behavior and tried harder to buy from the original maker, if possible.
Unfortunately all goods at Amazon are intermingled including those Amazon itself ships. The only exception is companies who specifically pay not to do so in which case you lose access to prime shipping.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#45If Amazon starts penalizing products for fake reviews then it's probably just a matter of time until that's weaponized by competitors to tank competing products. Then I imagine Amazon will have to come out with a "disavow review" tool similar to Google's disavow backlinks (to counteract targeted negative SEO).
I've been out of the google loop for way too long... I had no idea they introduced a way to disavow backlinks. I logged in to webmaster tools for the first time in 5 years and there's a LOT of new stuff. Thanks for randomly mentioning it. Time to read up on site snippets and structured data...
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#46Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...
Third-party sites are not "easily" detecting them. They have no idea what the performance of their "detection" is, in either direction (false +, false -).
One problem is getting "ground truth." I think Amazon has a pretty good idea of a lot of near-certain true positives.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#47[deleted]
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#48Amazon is starting to feel more and more like eBay. The same product sold by multiple vendors under different names, questionable reviews, clearly fraudulent sellers and so on. I used to love Amazon but now when I look for something I dread to do so on Amazon because I don't feel I can trust anything there.
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Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#49Amazon is starting to feel more and more like eBay. The same product sold by multiple vendors under different names, questionable reviews, clearly fraudulent sellers and so on. I used to love Amazon but now when I look for something I dread to do so on Amazon because I don't feel I can trust anything there.
I wish that Amazon could split the market place off. I disliked it from the first day they introduced it. I want to buy from Amazon not some company I've never heard of.
It's if course never gonna happen. It's too convenient for Amazon and most users probably don't even understand that they aren't buying from Amazon.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#50Amazon is starting to feel more and more like eBay. The same product sold by multiple vendors under different names, questionable reviews, clearly fraudulent sellers and so on. I used to love Amazon but now when I look for something I dread to do so on Amazon because I don't feel I can trust anything there.
Same here. I used to buy everything off of Amazon, but now I have to scrape the Internet for reviews to make sure that I can trust the thing I'm buying is actually going to be of good quality.
Yeah the fake reviews are bad for business. I'm buying much less because I know knock off Chinese white label products are being marked up 5~7x the wholesale price from Alibaba.
I don't like being used as an arbitrage opportunity. I think that if unaddressed it could harm Amazon in the long run.
Validating authentic and genuine reviews is still a very much under-developed solution, still relying on an equally weighted consensus when it's overwhelmingly skewed to positive bias (fake reviews up the average rating).
I now read the bad reviews very carefully. they are often always sandwiched or quickly buried by broken english reviews.
I can't remember how many times I bought a 4.8 star item and realized it was from Alibaba with just a different logo. I definitely won't be needing Amazon Prime anymore.......
but where else will I take out my shopping binge desires?