Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

Post by vidarh » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #40

tvanantwerp wrote: post #36

Even 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...)

Post by xxs » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

sdflhasjd wrote: post #48

Bait-and-switch doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't care about fake and paid-for reviews. I was looking for dashcams and came across this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-D... 91% 5-star reviews, a lot of the reviews are from "Top XXX reviewer", and almost every one seems to be reading off a script. If you check out all the profiles of these "Top XX" reviewers, they all seem to be non-stop pur…

Post by dopylitty » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

TravisLS wrote: post #18

There'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…

Post by geerlingguy » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

joseph_grobbles wrote: post #51

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish. The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product…

Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price. These do emerge.

Post by javert » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #32

TravisLS wrote: post #18

There'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.