This is why I am starting to do almost all of my shopping by googling "Wirecutter [product category]". Or CNET for electronics. Amazon's reviews have become so useless and corrupted that I question why anyone would even bother with a genuine review. Luckily, Wirecutter gives fantastic, detailed guidance in just about any category you can think of. I'm finding them so valuable that I believe this would be a great space for more sites to compete in.
Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
231–240 of 273 posts
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#232Earlier 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…
> it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent [bathroom scale] Maybe it's different in the USA, but when I needed a bathroom scale for our new apartment I went over to the store and bought the first one they had. If I would have come home and it wouldn't have worked, I'd have gone back and had either gotten repair under warranty or cash back (if they don't want to repair it, you can rescind the…
It's called living in the suburbs. I don't order everything on Amazon, but if I need some basic item (hangers, laundry detergent, vent cover, bathroom scale etc) it's a huge time saver! It would easily take me 45 minutes round-trip to drive to the nearest, say hardware store, locate what I need (assuming it's in stock) and drive home. On Amazon, I find the item, swipe right and wait two days. No need to stay at home waiting for the package, I live in a safe area.
Honestly I've had zero issues with counterfeits, but then again I don't have any kids yet, so I'm not buying many toys. I also typically pay more for name brands due to quality concerns in general, so that probably insulates me to a degree. I'm not denying people's experiences, but honestly Amazon's reputation is still fine to me. They're a marketplace like any other and they never really marketed themselves as premium. Curation and trust was never part of the deal IMO. I don't trust Walmart or Best Buy either.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#233Anecdata, sample size 1. I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality. So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review. A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email. Several weeks lat…
I've had vendors on Ebay selling obviously fake products[1] refuse to refund my payments until I removed negative reviews and/or made positive full 5-star reviews. I've also received products where there was a note included, offering either free stuff or 10/20/30% off my next purchase, if I made a full 5-star review and sent them a screenshot. When you're just one of thousands and thousands of vendors on a platform,…
It sounds like you didn't even try. A few days after you've contacted the seller you can escalate to Ebay customer support and they side with the buyer and issue a refund so fast I'd be terrified to sell anything on that site. You can find it written in the Ebay terms that for misrepresented items seller has to pay for a return shipping label. I only ever had one seller refuse to and Ebay c/s said keep the item and we'll issue a refund.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#234My own anecdote hints that it's even worse than just fake reviews... I actually just wrote a detailed multi paragraph 1-star review of auto parts I received from Amazon, with several photos, too.
They, Amazon, would not post it because they claim it doesn't "adhere to the guidelines".
The review was exactly as follows:
These are "SURTRACK/TRAKMOTIVE" brand axles, part numbers BM-8040 and BM-8041. I only installed the left side but since it didn't fit properly on my 2006 BMW 530xi I'm returning them. The OE part number is: 31607570275 and MFG part number is: BM-8041.
The problem was that the inner boot fits improperly and deforms/creases from being stretched when installed (see images).
Looking at the product images for this product on Amazon, as well as elsewhere online, you can tell the boot is very different from the product I received.
/end
Can anyone find anything that goes against their review guidelines in above?
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#235I have found https://reviewmeta.com/ to be an interesting place to look at the reviews and get a bit more insight into them.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think that Amazon would have the machine learning resources to detect likely-fraudulent items with high accuracy, should they be interested in preventing such obvious fraud.
Would this be the same machine learning that was recently in the news for incorrectly identifying 28 lawmakers as people that had been charged with some crime? Maybe it is, and that's why it can't spot the fake reviews?
The 28 were incorrectly indetified, because they ran their tests using default settings, which aren't fit for such an use case.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had vendors on Ebay selling obviously fake products[1] refuse to refund my payments until I removed negative reviews and/or made positive full 5-star reviews. I've also received products where there was a note included, offering either free stuff or 10/20/30% off my next purchase, if I made a full 5-star review and sent them a screenshot. When you're just one of thousands and thousands of vendors on a platform,…
It sounds like you didn't even try. A few days after you've contacted the seller you can escalate to Ebay customer support and they side with the buyer and issue a refund so fast I'd be terrified to sell anything on that site. You can find it written in the Ebay terms that for misrepresented items seller has to pay for a return shipping label. I only ever had one seller refuse to and Ebay c/s said keep the item and w…
Oh I did get my money back and left negative reviews. Not sure how you got the idea that I didn't. Ebay almost always rules in the buyer's favor.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#238I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories. The number of products impacted must be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole cat…
Does Amazon accept these faulty items back and refund the customers if they ask? Do they pay the return shipping cost? Assuming yes, surely this is costing them a lot as well.
So my understanding is this: as a seller, buy subpar version of whatever item. Send it to Amazon to be comingled with every other item sent to Amazon for that SKU. Sit and wait, Amazon will use some of your stock to fulfill orders from this listing (so other sellers' sales will result in buyers receiving some of your stock). You'll also make sales yourself, and Amazon will send whatever stock from that pool of item (so not necessarily the exact ones you sent in, and most likely the genuine/better quality ones other sellers sent it). You make the sale, keep the money. Meanwhile, the buyer who got your item when buying from another seller will complain and return their item. The seller (not you!) will have to issue the refund and eat the cost. Voilà, you've exploited amazon's comingling to your profit and actually made money off of it.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#239I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories. The number of products impacted must be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole cat…
For things like headphones you should definitely try to find domain experts who have put significant effort into researching and documenting the difference between products, and then purchase based on their review until you're able to make the purchase on your own based on trying the product out in person.
I knew nothing about headphones, bought a few based on expert reviews (maximizing quality in my price range), and now I feel confident when trying out "floor models" at my local audio store.
If anyone's interested in the head phone website, I can provide it. Just didn't want to seem like I was shilling a blog. If you search Google "site:reddit.com in ear monitor review blog" you'll find it, and this is a pretty good formula in my experience for researching consumer products that have a high information asymmetry.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent [bathroom scale] Maybe it's different in the USA, but when I needed a bathroom scale for our new apartment I went over to the store and bought the first one they had. If I would have come home and it wouldn't have worked, I'd have gone back and had either gotten repair under warranty or cash back (if they don't want to repair it, you can rescind the…
It's called living in the suburbs. I don't order everything on Amazon, but if I need some basic item (hangers, laundry detergent, vent cover, bathroom scale etc) it's a huge time saver! It would easily take me 45 minutes round-trip to drive to the nearest, say hardware store, locate what I need (assuming it's in stock) and drive home. On Amazon, I find the item, swipe right and wait two days. No need to stay at home…
I live in NYC and I'm definitely not taking the subway three stops just to get to a place to buy a bathroom scale, I would just order that from Amazon. Getting to certain varieties of stores in urban locales is pretty annoying and time consuming just like in the suburbs.
In my old neighborhood there was one place to buy bathroom scales , however, they were not sold with warranties and were basically getting what you receive from Amazon at a higher price.