I think the review system is good for generalities as long as you toss out the hyperbole. Very few products are hyperbolically good. Once you weed that out you can find trends so long as the company is not engaging in fraud or other deception. I also try not to buy anything on impulse so that I can spend enough time researching my purchase. So far I’ve been pretty lucky in that I have not gotten a fraudulent product or something that is not as advertised. How often is the fakery happening? What types of products are commonly fake/bootleg? It may just be that I don’t ever buy the de sorts of things.
Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
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Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#32There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's…
Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!
And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#33Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.
Hyperbole.
I’ve been reading book reviews on Amazon before buying, on-site or somewhere else, for ~15 years.
I’ve almost never seen an item with unhelpful reviews.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#34Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.
I always look at negative reviews. From those you can tell if there's a consistent concern, if someone got a fake, or if there was just a preference mismatch for someone.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#35Not mentioned in the article, but Amazon also hasn't fixed its problem with fake reviews at Audible either. Thousands of 5-star ratings are similarly worded blurbs by accounts with 1 or 2 book reviews.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#36Even when Amazon reviews are legitimate, keep in mind that the reviewer may have been looking for something different than you are. Plenty of times I've bought stuff expecting one level of quality based on review scores, but got something less--all because I had a higher standard of what should be a 5 than most of the people who bought that.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#37Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.
In many of the cases where I've done this, I've had a worse experience. With one company, I wanted to return the product because it was defective but was never able to actually contact anyone. With another, it arrived broken and I was never able to get the company to replace it. In either scenario, Amazon makes it easy to correct the problem.
I want to support manufacturers more directly, but their customer service has continued to be lacking.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#38I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than rando…
The same thing happened to Ebay and Etsy - once they reached a certain level of popularity based on the original premise it turned into a outlet for cheap junk.
I've taken to finding as much as I can at places that DO NOT have a "marketplace" such as Target or Home Depot.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#39From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?).. What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2
I worked for a startup that sold a food product direct, with a significant part of sales on Amazon. We decided to switch our standard size from 12 packs to 8 packs to better fit our customers consumption habits.
But on Amazon that meant creating new listings for new SKUs, abandoning hundreds of positive comments/ratings on each 12 pack flavor SKU, which would crush sales for a while.
So instead we let inventory run out for each 12 pack SKU, then shipped replacement 8 pack SKUs, and renamed the SKUs from 12 packs to eight packs.
They still had some reviews praising them for having a dozen packs, which was weird but the ratings were still there.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#40Even when Amazon reviews are legitimate, keep in mind that the reviewer may have been looking for something different than you are. Plenty of times I've bought stuff expecting one level of quality based on review scores, but got something less--all because I had a higher standard of what should be a 5 than most of the people who bought that.
one of the reasons why reading negative reviews is often helpful: there you often can figure out if the complaints about quality are from people with your standards or from people with higher ones. (after you filter out all the people who don't understand the difference between a product review and a review of their local postal service of course...)