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FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

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Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#111

Post by ABCLAW »

ams6110 wrote: post #75
ABCLAW wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the affiliate links, but I mind dishonest or low quality churned reviews. When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/ They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equiva…

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/

I don't have an issue with consumer reports. I used to browse their material occasionally.

However, most of the time, I spend very little and make few purchases. The ones that are low-value - lets say vegetable peelers and compressed air canisters - I don't need ratings for. The large ones (Appliances, Misc Electronics, Suits, Cars, etc.) I research online anyways.

So if I'm not using their product 95% of the time, their subscription business model doesn't line up with my expected use-case. So I don't use it. I would love to pay for better rating data and don't mind shelling out for information, but I do need to pay for it when I'm consuming it, not in a prophylactic manner.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#112

Post by elteto »

function_seven wrote: post #76
Guest10928391 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of cour…

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

This is what I do as well. I append the word “reddit” at the end of all my google product searches if I want to get an honest, high quality review.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#113

Post by baroffoos »

samat wrote: post #26
mc32 wrote: post #18

Crowdsourced reviews are problematic (often but not always lacking context). Paid reviews make them worthless. Perhaps this is one use of a blockchain which could add credibility to reviews. Still by and large I prefer independent professional reviews (combined with authentic crowdsourced reviews), the problem with these, like CR, is that they’re not scalable to thousands of new products periodically, so we have to r…

How on earth would blockchain help?

Didn't you hear? Blockchains solve every issue in the world. You just put your stuff on the blockchain and it all works.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#114

Post by pessimizer »

vonmoltke wrote: post #60
duado wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopping on Amazon is like shopping in Chinatown now. The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. This shit must be working, for some definition of working. Personally, anything that touches my child, or goes in my body, is not allowed to be bought on Amazon.

> The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. Why? How do we "know" they have the data? How do we "know" that can act on whatever data they have? People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve.

> People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve.

I'd describe it as a level of basic knowledge about their own product. You don't have to be a god to analyze Amazon's data, especially if you're Amazon.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#115

Post by sourthyme »

dawnerd wrote: post #97
acchow wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews. Does anyone know why they don't do this?

Doesn’t matter, won’t solve anything. The fake reviewers will email people and tell them to buy the product and they’ll be reimbursed. I’ve gotten a few emails asking me to do this (would never of course). They even explicitly mention that you need to buy it so it gets a verified tag. They’re not even trying to hide the scam anymore, Amazon doesn’t care.

There's a solution to this. Reviewers are anonymous to the sellers. Sellers should not be able to link a review to a purchase.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#116

Post by ams6110 »

kiba wrote: post #93
ams6110 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/

I have a problem with being nickeled and dimed with every subscription service.

CR is $7.95 a month. Sign up for a month when you're making a major purchase. If it saves even 10 minutes of research time, that's value enough for me.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#117

Post by lightedman »

FTC: We are too lazy to go after the most egregious abuser - Amazon - so we're going to go after some indie site.

For once, I wish the Gov't would actually nail the big fish, instead of playing hook, line, and sinker with the smaller fish.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#118

Post by CobrastanJorji »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #6

There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (read: headphones), products that have only been listed for a month somehow have hundreds of 5 star glowing reviews. When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid rev…

I have to assume that there's a team of about a dozen engineers at Amazon whose entire job is solving this problem, and every so often their boss has to write a report up to SVPs about how their attempts to solve the problem are going. I imagine it involves a lot of really cool machine learning algorithms and also some simple but obvious hacks, like just blacklisting certain wide IP ranges of known bad reviewers. I imagine that the report makes a big deal about how it's successfully stopping the vast majority of these fake reviews, and it's removing more fake reviews than ever before. There's probably a series of pretty graphs that go up and to the right.

I imagine that writing this report makes their boss very nervous because I would also be nervous if I had to repeatedly tell Jeff Bezos that I was failing to stop the slowly increasing flow of people's trust away from Amazon's retail site.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#119

Post by yeutterg »

elektor wrote: post #30

Last year I bought a set of cheap Bluetooth headphones on Amazon which I use on a daily basis. It's obvious they have an affiliate program because I often seem on those daily deal roundup posts that a lot of tech blogs now have. Recently, I've been getting emails from the vendors asking me to leave a review in return for a free product. Here is a copy and paste of one: Dear Customer, Thank you for purchasing our (HEA…

Amazon seller here. It is against the terms of service to ask for positive reviews. It is also against TOS to offer a free product in exchange for a review.

You can, however, ask customers for a review in a neutral way. For example, "Would you be open to leaving us a brief, honest product review?" That is how we ask it.

Some companies, especially supplements companies, have a funnel that gives you a "second month free" in exchange for privately sharing product feedback and your email address with them. Here's how it works for one brand I purchased from recently:

- You receive your first purchase

- You go to a landing page and enter your name and order ID

- They send you an email after 2 weeks asking for your private feedback of the product.

- Once you provide this private feedback, they will send you the free product.

- Before you leave the survey, they ask you if you are open to leaving a product review. They ask in a neutral way and are explicit that it is completely optional. This is to be clear that they are not giving you a product in exchange for a review—you already got your free product for sharing private feedback.

You could argue that this is a gray area, for sure. But for small brands, reviews are incredibly important, and it helps to be able to market to past customers (which Amazon does not allow you to do through their system). Getting a 2nd month free can help build brand loyalty.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this type of funnel, as long as it adheres completely to Amazon's TOS and doesn't annoy or deceive the customer. The customer has to feel right about writing the review, not like they were manipulated. It's very easy to get that wrong, and most sellers who try do get it wrong.

Note that we do not have such a funnel set up for our product as of this writing.

[Edited one sentence for clarity]

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#120

Post by skunkworker »

function_seven wrote: post #76
Guest10928391 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of cour…

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

An example, for flashlights: https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/
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