Shocking! Next they are going to tell me the sky is blue!
Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
251–260 of 273 posts
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#252I'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…
My approach has been (1) to filter the reviews by critical reviews and read them quickly - that has tended to show the real problem that the shallow 5-star (or 1-star) reviews hide. The aggregate rating (4.5 stars) is totally useless now. I also look at the product's fakespot rating when I remember to do so.
1: when I have to buy from Amazon, i.e. none of my other options such as Walmart (90 day returns, fast shipping with no membership), Best Buy, etc. have the item
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#253Always look for that extra gratituitous detail, a common trait in fabricated stories.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#254I'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.
They do, but sadly, the remote control trucks that I bought had incredibly cheap packaging. Once I unpacked them, the kids immediately put them to use and everything got scattered to the wind (it's Christmas morning, after all) and I couldn't find enough of the packaging to do a return. I should have, though.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#255"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.
Lots of people hand out 5 star reviews too easily. They buy the cheapest headphones on Amazon, and if they make any sound at all it's five stars.
Isn't that fair? If cheap headphones work you are getting what you paid for. No one should expect a $12 headphones to be as good as $100 headphones. A 5 star review for one means something different than 5 stars for the other.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#256"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.
I mean, I'm incredibly happy with my $24 Chinese bluetooth headphones.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#257Amazon should buy Fakespot and integrate into their reviews.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#258I'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), an…
When researching a pair I blindly sleuthed around before asking an audiophile friend of mine who referred me to http://head-fi.org which is where I ended up narrowing my selection down prior to finally examining models at stores. Build quality and noise cancelling were significant factors in my purchase.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They need to give customers a way to sort by review counts in a time-weighted fashion. In other words, a product with 1,000 reviews and a 4.5 average that had been sold for five years would rank higher than a product with 1,500 reviews and a 4.8 average that had been sold for three months. This would help identify the quality products from stable manufacturers. Major improvements have been needed in Amazon's search…
Any ranking system you can suggest can and will be gamed and exploited. The problem is that Amazon is trying to rank products at all, not whatever opaque algorithm they are using to do the ranking. They need to turn off all the ranking and rating, and start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.
> They need to...start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.
I agree they need to start actually vetting their suppliers. But I disagree with you about the ranking. "Sort by average ranking" is broken obviously brain dead ways. They need a transparent ranking system that correctly balances number of reviews with average rating. I don't want to user their actually opaque "relevance" ranking.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#260I find that even books are plagued with this issue. Some obscure technical books selling for more than 80$ will come in a very poor quality print, like they had been printed from a scan. Clearly the book has ran out of original prints, and somewhere they print it cheaply just to make the sell.
Actually these books are likely counterfeit, being produced overseas and sold on Amazon as the real deal. It's easy because neither the publisher nor Amazon (nor the customer for that matter) can know that someone listing a product is shipping a fraud.