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Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

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Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#171

Post by andrekandre »

devcpp wrote: post #145
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't give a shit. Amazon only wants to sell more stuff, so of course it's going to take down objective negative reviews and whistle-blowing accounts of review payola. This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now. But thanks to the magic power of Internet leverage and the fact that only giant tradi…

You're thinking like a politician, whose law is a hammer and who sees every issue as a nail. Before regulating, let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself. And indeed it can, it's called competition. Amazon itself claims to be "customer centric" because customer trust ensures sales go up in the long term much better than short gain of abusing the customer relationship. Look at this very threa…

> let's see if the free market can't work it out

or, it could in fact be a result of "free-market competition", e.g amazon being afraid of loosing sellers to competitors and they are afraid of punishing them *

* i have (not at amazon) witnessed this first-hand, so its not outside the realm of possibility at all

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#172

Post by neilv »

Just last night, I was looking to buy some kind of less-expensive version of Apple AirPods, but for each item I checked on reviewmeta.com, they were filtering out 70%+ of the reviews as suspicious. I decided I'd had enough of the appearance of sketchiness for now, and instead bought the cheap (supposedly genuine) Apple wired earbuds as an interim measure.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#173

Post by _carbyau_ »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #144
hbosch wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon suggests that Amazon reviews are worth at least something. More and more it is proven that reviews themselves don't mean much. You should consider your own personal relationship with the brand, or from people you trust. Of course we don't all have the luxury of those things and sometimes you need to read a few reviews. After all, without GOOD and HONEST reviews we probably would not have a company like Anker…

'personal relationship with the brand' Personal relationships with a social construct indicate the need for proffesional help. Amd imaginary friends.

"Amd imaginary friends." Freudian slip? Need something to replace your intel laptop? :-P

But yes, the whole point of brand marketing is to invoke a relationship in the mind of the [potential] buyer. And when you have people who devote their life to it there has to be someone out there who is good at it using whatever pysch tricks they can.

So no wonder some people fall for it. It's almost inevitable.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#174

Post by safetyengineer »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #102

Amazon is sealing its own fate here. I don't want the AliExpress experience, which is what Amazon offers now. I know where to find cheap products and bad information and I don't need Amazon for that. I find it odd that Amazon clings to bad vendors over long standing customers. They are no longer the most customer focused company, if they ever were. What does it say about your company when your company abandons its go…

Amazon is essentially dead to me due to the bad review system, featured/promoted products, and high priced products.

Need a laptop? Bestbuy online

Need kids stuff? Walmart online

Need electronics? digikey

The expensive alternative to all of these? Amazon

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#175

Post by capnheim »

lhorie wrote: post #112
ilamont wrote: post #16

I purchased the same webcam for my high school sophomore in September 2020, as school restarted (all online for him). The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. It looks identical to the one I received (including the email address). Only the reward is different. I didn't try to write a review, I notified customer service in an attempt to report the seller. I documented everything incl…

Sometimes, I semi-seriously wonder if it isn't better to just buy things from aliexpress.com. The products themselves mostly come from China anyways and many classes of items consistently seem to be marked up on amazon. And now we are left to wonder if the price deltas are helping middlemen retailers fund these review manipulation shenanigans, so why not just cut out the amazon exploit portion out of the equation?

Many of the sellers on Aliexpress are the same sellers on Amazon. The FBA model makes it easy to cut out the middleman.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#176

Post by lock-free »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #93
rsync wrote: post #48

Now I remember ... The previous review practice that outraged me was when someone here at HN was producing very detailed analysis of LED bulbs (spectral analysis, etc.) and proving that lots of bulbs on Amazon had CRI and color temperature ratings that were way off . He then described how he posted that in some reviews and they were all taken down. Which is to say, crummy LED bulb on Amazon with an inflated CRI canno…

Amazon doesn't give a shit. Amazon only wants to sell more stuff, so of course it's going to take down objective negative reviews and whistle-blowing accounts of review payola. This is a regulatory problem. If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now. But thanks to the magic power of Internet leverage and the fact that only giant tradi…

> This is a regulatory problem

This is a consumer problem - "you get what you pay for."

If you want to buy something from a retailer that gives a shit about their wholesalers, shop at a local superstore for whatever items your looking for and eat the difference in cost.

> If Amazon was a corner hardware store it would have been fined multiple times and the owner might well have been jailed by now.

If Amazon was a corner hardware store and not a marketplace, they would have been run out of business by all the customers returning garbage and counterfeits they bought from them. But that's not what Amazon is, they're ostensibly connecting buyers to sellers and providing logistics - not behaving as a retailer that selects their wholesalers and manages their supply chain besides getting shit from point A to point B.

What Amazon shouldn't do is have it both ways, either they're an Ebay-esque digital flea market where everything is buyer-beware, or they're a retailer who is responsible for the garbage on their shelves. They don't want to be either, and if there's regulation to be had, it should focus on that difference (as well as regarding their own products - you don't see flea markets driving their merchants out of business by stealing their products and undercutting their prices, while stores can stock generics alongside their curated shelves).

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#177

Post by zdw »

inetknght wrote: post #90
croes wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't really care about customers like the rest of FAANG. It's all about money, data and power. Everything else is just PR and advertising.

> care about customers like the rest of FAANG I think of the five FAANG companies only Apple and Netflix have even a remote semblance of caring about the customer. Google and Facebook certainly don't and that was known since before the announced antitrust lawsuits.

"Companies who spend $$$ to buy ads" are the customer in FB and Google's case...

Normal users of the service are not their customers in most cases.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#178

Post by Guest19023892 »

Why doesn't Amazon hire an independent third-party company to review and compare products and then highlight those in the review section? At least it would make it seem like they care about increasing the trustworthiness of reviews and restore some confidence in the system.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#179

Post by gnicholas »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #33
ilamont wrote: post #16

I purchased the same webcam for my high school sophomore in September 2020, as school restarted (all online for him). The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. It looks identical to the one I received (including the email address). Only the reward is different. I didn't try to write a review, I notified customer service in an attempt to report the seller. I documented everything incl…

I also have gotten fake "Amazon Gift Card (if you submit a good review)" promos with items and gagged. I wonder though if you "innocently" took a photo of the contents of the package, showing the phony giftcard, if then the review would remain up, unless Amazon has non-automated systems (aka humans) who would notice it.

Just make an unboxing video and feign surprise/confusion when you get to the gift card bribery part.

Re: Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews

#180

Post by GordonS »

mancerayder wrote: post #108
ilamont wrote: post #16

I purchased the same webcam for my high school sophomore in September 2020, as school restarted (all online for him). The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review. It looks identical to the one I received (including the email address). Only the reward is different. I didn't try to write a review, I notified customer service in an attempt to report the seller. I documented everything incl…

I wrote a negative review for glass that broke by itself in the fridge 5 times (out of 6 pieces). Amazon removed it. I asked why and was sent a link by a bot-like sender. Some months back I gave a so so review on AirBNB and had it removed. I asked why, I was sent a link and cut and pasted guidelines. Responding using Reason led to being completely ignored. Then I discovered a reddit subgroup where hosts tell each oth…

Does Amazon notify you when they remove one of your reviews?

I've done numerous reviews over the years and have never got such a notication, but your comment has me wondering if my reviews are still there!

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