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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

#141

Post by lawnchair_larry »

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…

Amazon is the new Alibaba. It’s full of cheap Chinese junk and products from quality brands that actually have a company website are becoming rare.

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

#142

Post by lawnchair_larry »

duado wrote: post #101
sonnyblarney wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies collapse from within, they don't get trounced by competitors. Competitors come along with a new angle that seems innocuous at first, but then turns out to entail 'the thing people want'. It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'. But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users…

My personal theory is that they are doing this very deliberately... they view “selling stuff” as a lousy business and AWS as the real business, and are just maximizing short term retail profits to invest in AWS.

That’s a bad theory. They’re forever optimizing how people buy things, and people will always buy things.

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

#143

Post by Rapzid »

xfitm3 wrote: post #10
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 always search for negative information first. When using a search engine for a product I always append "sucks", "broken", etc. Generally speaking three star reviews are the most informative to me.

"Sucks" is one of the true casualties of today's PC climate. Used to be you could get all sorts of great opposing opinions with that search keyword, particularly in IT.

Sure, it's around here in there. But back in the day if you were going to write about why you didn't like something, you were going to write an article about why it "sucks".

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

#144

Post by gesman »

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…

Actually number of 1-2 star reviews vs time product been listed might be an interesting indicator.

But then - it maybe competitor efforts of course.

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

#145

Post by elliekelly »

spookthesunset wrote: post #58
gumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I send back half of what I get off of Amazon If you return too much stuff amazon will cut you off: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/23/a...

I'm sure the people who get cut off are serious outliers though. Like so far out there it is obvious that they should be cut off.

You’re right, they go after the serious outliers. Amazon announced this policy change right after this case[1] was charged.

Honestly, after reading the facts, I was shocked it took Amazon so long to take action.

But it certainly seems the average shopper/returner has nothing to worry about.

[1]https://bgr.com/2017/10/02/amazon-returns-fraud-theft/

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

#146

Post by kian »

orthecreedence wrote: post #126
inoop wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a really, really hard problem to solve. The sheer scale of Amazon combined with razor thin margins and the fact that Amazon isn't even the selling party on most products means that they can't just throw a bunch of manual labor at the problem. It's a similar problem to YouTube still hosting tons of copyrighted material. Fraud is just super hard to fight.

It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'" There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit: "I haven't used it yet but it looks great" "Seems ok" "It's useful" "The shipping was slow" On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless a…

If it's that easy to fix, and helpful, a chrome or firefox extension seems warranted. Do you have two days to spare? Let me know when you're finished, I'll definitely use it. ;-)

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

#147

Post by cmroanirgo »

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…

Ironically, I haven't bought off Amazon for years, and have never left a review.

I've been seeing all of these posts about gamafication of Amazon reviews and don't understand why Amazon just don't limit the reviews on a product to people who've actually purchased it from Amazon?

Ironically, I came across a small eligibility requirement, (but otherwise seems to allow reviews by anyone for anything):

> To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum.

Amazon's clearly able to disallow reviews unless you've bought it from them. They're also big enough to add incentives to people who have purchases (eg. maybe 1-5% of product value that goes toward future purchases), to encourage reviews. They could even gamify the 1-5% based upon the "I've found this helpful" response, encouraging quality reviews.

I just don't get it. Have I missed something?

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

#148

Post by trumped »

appsonify wrote: post #140
gonehome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the actual outcome is for sales - fake reviews and counterfeit products have driven me to purchase a certain class of items directly from the manufacturer and not on Amazon. Maybe most people don't bother with this though?

I no longer have amazon prime-had an awful experience with getting shit shipped, and come to think of it most were cheap alibaba electronics with markup. but when I need some cables or other mundane things, it's convenient, although I don't really need it ASAP TMR like with Prime. I found that it puts a lot of pressure on the couriers and it just ruins the experience for everybody involved. The end of this quarter fo…

monoprice.com used to be better for cables and stuff like that... haven't use them in a while though..

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

#149

Post by URSpider94 »

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.

Subscription fees are literally the only source of income for Consumer’s Union, the parent company of Consumer Reports. They don’t take ads, they don’t take payments for reviews, and they don’t sell rights to use their ratings in advertising (they sue companies who reference their CR ratings in any kind of marketing material).

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

#150

Post by dawnerd »

sourthyme wrote: post #115
dawnerd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That wont stop them. They still require proof of your review before they refund the other 50% to you.

I don't think there's really a solution at all. As long as people are free to do outside deals there's always going to be review manipulation.

The one thing that could help this is Amazon getting rid of third party sellers or go the route Target announced today and only partner with trusted companies.

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