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Amazon Dark Patterns

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Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#51

Post by IshKebab »

sigotirandolas wrote: post #15
rkachowski wrote: post #7

An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site. I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales

I’ve also noticed that they don’t let me ship a lot of products (mostly food, but also random harmless electronics) to shipping points or Amazon boxes in my city (in Spain), telling me they are full (they are not, they let me ship other products there and it tells me it’s full with literally any shipping point or Amazon box). They only let me ship it to a home address. I can’t prove it’s not a bug, but it seems such…

Understandable why they won't ship food to Amazon boxes. No idea about electronics though, and they should have a better error message than just "it's full".

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#52

Post by ryanlol »

This guy is having some truly strange experiences with amazon.

Why would he have to ship the damaged weights back? Amazon essentially never insists on that.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#53

Post by techaddict009 »

I Was recently purchasing Macbook Battery from Amazon.in it was Rs.3100 and when I checked out and reached payment it showed 4199!

I said WTH did it happen? I cancelled payment and found that Prime Membership Renewal was added to the cart without my permission.

When I didnt want to renew it why did Amazon add it on its own?

One more similar experience with AWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#54

Post by jdietrich »

mike_hearn wrote: post #45
Aeolun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the person who wrote the post could immediately identify the clearly fake reviews I see no reason why Amazon could not use the same method.

I did a lot of work on anti-botting some years ago. It's not as easy as it looks. Often you spot a pattern that is obviously fake, like here, but discover it can't generalise without huge numbers of false positives. For example I would expect lots of legitimate users to review the same small set of TV shows or video games if they buy into a series or franchise.

FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews.

I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#55

Post by mike_hearn »

jdietrich wrote: post #54
mike_hearn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of work on anti-botting some years ago. It's not as easy as it looks. Often you spot a pattern that is obviously fake, like here, but discover it can't generalise without huge numbers of false positives. For example I would expect lots of legitimate users to review the same small set of TV shows or video games if they buy into a series or franchise.

FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews. I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical…

How do you know what their FP rate is?

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#56

Post by ritinkar »

rkachowski wrote: post #7

An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site. I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales

Recently I wanted to purchase something from prime now, I added the product and during checkout where I put in the OTP ( 2FA is mandatory in India ), I changed my mind about purchasing and quit the app, knowing the purchase would fail. Amazon then quietly changed the order from prepaid to cash on delivery without asking me and went through with the order.

I thought that was a shady way of closing a sale.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#57

Post by carlmr »

ashelmire wrote: post #34
TorKlingberg wrote: post #24

This rant is not well written. The first issue looks like a bug on Amazon's side. I'm not going to assume malice without something pointing in that direction. The author writes "What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?" Well, would it? I see no indication it would. Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts. The…

I can actually verify and tell you why. Amazon will not allow you to criticize Amazon or their platform in a review (they said as much). Only the product. They probably do automatic sentiment detection for negative phrases containing Amazon and don’t allow them to be posted. The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.

To a certain degree. There really should be two ratings. Shipment rating and product rating.

I don't want to get a TV that gets shipped badly, sure. But if the only problem with shipping is that it is slow, maybe I'm still interested in the product because I don't get it anywhere else and I can wait. In that case I'm mostly interested in the product review.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#58

Post by zelos »

k__ wrote: post #2

I also had to implement this pattern for app reviews. Show a custom review dialog, if the user gives 4-5 stars send them to the app store for the real review, if not just say "thank you" and close the dialog. Repeat until one day they'll give you a good review.

I believe recent iOS SDKs have implemented a system-controlled UI to ask for reviews to prevent apps doing this. I assume it's enforced via app-store review.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#60

Post by seren »

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page.

This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com and once translated on a local amazon site. This is slightly infuriating.

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