On a positive note, Amazon has been wiping out thousands of reviews this month. Whether blatant manipulations or legitimate reviews, dozens of sellers have lost their reviews. Amazon has been cracking down hard this month, and erring on the better safe than sorry side as usual with their wide nets. The only problem is that Amazon can't keep up with China.
Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
131–140 of 273 posts
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fakes I’m not too worried about, I can usually spot those. The problem is that many categories are flooded with garbage products with inflated reviews. Try to find a bathroom scale. Tons of choices with 4.5 stars and above, but most of the reviews are fake, so it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent product. Same for most things I’ve wanted to buy recently (hiking poles and a daypack are two…
I find that it's usually pretty clear from the bizarre language, excess enthusiasm, and lack of detail which reviews are fake or paid for, without need to refer to any 3rd-party websites. For many products with fewer than 100 ratings, it's clear that all or almost all of the ratings are fake. This often happens when there are several versions of essentially the same product, presumably all from the same factory in Ch…
Bear in mind that the existence of obviously fake reviews doesn't imply that all fake reviews are obvious. Maybe it would be prohibitively expensive to do a really good job of producing fake reviews at scale, I don't know -- but surely some companies manage to avoid the obvious tells.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#133Try to get a valid review on a forehead thermometer on Amazon. It can’t be done.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#134"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
This is actually very likely to be true.
Over the entire amazon catalog, spanning some completely ridiculous number of items.
That of course, makes it a pointless statistic, and hopefully, not something, they seriously tell themselves matters.
I'm sure it sounds great for the press though!
IE you really want to know STH like "What percent of reviews are fake for the first two pages of items in the top 100/1000 categories on amazon"
or something that is weighted towards things people see/look at, not "amazon's entire catalog"
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#135"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
The fakes are a relatively new phenomena. A book like say 1984 has thousands of reviews over twenty years that are legit. They don’t break down fakes by year or tell you that 1% of new reviews are fake. Also you have grey fakes with solicited reviews. I have a few vendors who offer significant discounts in exchange for reviews.
Fakes are at least three years old. At least, that's when the great I Was Given This Product For Free Or At A Discount plague started.
Plus these Chinese companies just rebrand and post new product listings free of the bad reviews, leaving the old ones to die.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really should never be shopping on Amazon for high margin products that are easy to fake. This means perfume, cosmetics, sunglasses and name brand clothing. These items are cheap to manufacture (even the real ones), but get their high perceived value from brand. Those Raybans you love? A $250 pair costs Luxotica around $5 to manufacture. So items like these are common to fake because the fakers can often get a pr…
>BTW, because of the way Amazon’s FBA service works, even ordering items that are “sold by” a reputable retailer but “fulfilled by Amazon” gets you a high chance of receiving a fake. This is because they mix FBA stock and don’t discriminate what stock it comes from when filling that item, regardless of who the seller is. Is this also true with items sold directly by Amazon?
If you sell anything on Amazon and get items back from FBA before they hike up prices near the holidays you will see items returned which were not what you shipped...books for example.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can handle getting some crappy set of headphones but a big let down for a child's Christmas is just so upsetting to a point that maybe I've got unaddressed issues. I have a toddler and I think I'll gladly pay the premium to buy Toys R Us stuff I can touch and play with in the store.
> Toys R Us Um, I have some bad news for you.
wut?
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#138Simple hack to this problem is forget about buying stuff online.. go to the store and get it right away.
The Internet can not believed for much and is easily manipulated for the better of those smart or immoral enough (however you view it) to use it to line their pockets.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#139I hate it too but rather than just complain is it a solvable problem?
Reply All had an resent episode about it
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player
first they had fake reviews. Amazobn required actual purchases so companies would pay people to purchase and return. you can't ban returns otherwise there would be no negative reviews.
how can this be solved? some kind of reputation system? how would you lose rep?
I love to hear your ideas?
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can handle getting some crappy set of headphones but a big let down for a child's Christmas is just so upsetting to a point that maybe I've got unaddressed issues. I have a toddler and I think I'll gladly pay the premium to buy Toys R Us stuff I can touch and play with in the store.
> Toys R Us Um, I have some bad news for you.
They seem to be strong here in Canada. I hope that lasts. Walmart is the only other option and it's not really an enjoyable experience.