headline is strange to me. "still" implies amazon had any intention of fixing this problem.
Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
341–350 of 438 posts
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so the investors could wring the value out of the company and throw the remains in the dumpster What does that mean in practice?
> What does that mean in practice? Buy the company with loans, strip the tangible assets for cash, burden the company with the loan repayments and bail out. Basically use the company as leverage to buy it, and then make it pay for having been bought out. It will seldom be able to do so, and eventually will stagger into bankruptcy. Both the company and the creditors lose, but not the 'investors'.
Toys R Us aren't exactly blameless. They were pissing away tens of millions before the buyout for their Times square megastore.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#343Bait-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…
Adding fuel to the fire; I remember reading an article last year which appeared on HN, it was about how sellers create groups on facebook which offer to send people free products in they agree to give 5 star reviews. Apparently this is also a massive problem with thousands of people doing this So not only will the reviews be for the wrong product, there is also a good chance that the reviews were bought and are fake.
Many crappy products I've bought literally have a business card inside the package where they offer you a $5 giftcard for leaving them a 5 star review. You have to send them a screenshot of the 5 star review.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#344I bought a plant growing light a few days ago on amazon. It was the #1 seller in the category, and had nearly 15,000 reviews and sat at 4.5 stars. It was cheap. Mine didn't work. The box said it was 80 watts, but the included adaptor could only do 40 watts. In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my revi…
This is a great encapsulation of the Amazon experience these days. Spot on. You buy the top selling, thousands of five star reviews, Aliexpress piece of junk that doesn't match the description. The seller tries to bribe you to leave them another 5 star review and Amazon customer service tells you to leave them alone and stop messing with their business model.
I very much fail to see how this is supposed to fit in with their "customer obsession".
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter Not for long. How many dependable long-lived brands have been mopped up by hedge funds and private equity and subsequently slapped on the cheapest crap you can make? Remember when Craftsman tools used to be top notch?
Right. Also the regular "optimization" (i.e. of costs, not value). For example, Miele was a decent brand of white-label goods, but I've read numerous commenters here claiming that they're succumbing to plasticpartisis and their products aren't as reliable as before. I also vaguely recall hearing that Anker isn't what it used to be. (Then there are brands spanning great many product categories - like Phillips. I'm hav…
I disagree on Miele. They still produce their products in Germany. That's not something you do if you want to sell plastic knockoffs. Sure, quality may vary, but this is literally their brand identity. So I seriously doubt there is a calculated attempt to be less reliable.
It gets more difficult. Tefal produces great pans in France, and really terrible pans in China and they are almost the same product and have the same price.
What I try to do is to buy D2C if possible, from brands where I know what is produced where. That's only a small subset of needed things, and its expensive, but it usually works out for me. I now know household, electronics and clothing brands that genuinely produce here in this country, for example, and the quality is simply better. I also know that no child labour was involved. So, I feel good about supporting such efforts.
Any brand I see on Amazon I assume to be one more variation of the same rebranded product. If I buy it, I buy it under the assumption that it could break the next day.
I also check whether the established brand name has been bought up, which happens a lot. Most of the eminent electronic brands are merely licensed labels nowadays.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a children’s toy meant to be played with for a few hours. So $23 makes since since this is a simple toy. The thinking that people shouldn’t pay low amounts leads to companies selling the same junk but for $100 instead. Cheap things should be cheap, I think.
Amazing mentality. Of course, no concern for the externalities...
I think externalities should be priced into that $23. Lots of things can be cheap and still account for externalities.
A wacky wall walker [0] is less than a dollar? Does that amaze you? Should it cost more? Should it not exist?
Same with a spinning top. Or a book. Or colored pencils.
I’m certainly concerned with externalities and make my children’s toy purchases accordingly. I am curious and would like to know why you think a $23 plastic drone isn’t very good.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#347This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India. Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed. But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a…
This feels like the kind of tricks Amazon should actively be defending against, with red teams trying to come up with angles of attacks, people looking for forums discussing possible approaches to game the system, etc.
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
tl;dr: I expect to get something with shoddy build quality from Newegg, but at least the reviews seem non-gamed. After a few months of lackadaisically making sporadic attempts to order an RTX 3080, I finally threw in the towel and ordered a prebuilt machine which will come with whatever brand 3080 card is in stock at the time from Newegg. I could really use the CPU upgrade anyway, and the markup on the parts isn't at…
>I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point. Fwiw you still run a risk that the CPU heatsink or something similar will come dislodged during shipping, and tumble around inside like a wrecking ball, smashing up the CPU, 3080 and the other parts you want to keep. I learned this th…
ahem It’s “United Parcel Smashers”
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then wreck it by putting most reviews behind a login wall (sure it’s free but I don’t want another account). Reader mode to the rescue!
I have never seen a paywall for Wirecutter
It's not consistent. It only seems to trigger after a few site visits. (So I don't see it if using a private mode browser, Safari, or temporary containers in Firefox.) Obnoxiously, if you're configured to visit in a fresh browser/container, you have to click away the dickbars on every visit. (And they use similar html obfuscation as facebook, so the dickbar element can't be blocked with uBlock.)
Re: Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
This experience is alien to me. I order from Amazon all the time and everything I get is generally fine. Occasionally something breaks after a while or is missing a part but that can happen anywhere and Amazon has extremely generous return policies. If anything I've come to trust AmazonBasics as a reliable brand if I'm deciding between products.
Same. I really feel like this is one of those things where 99+% of people have zero issues and don't comment on stuff like this. Myself and just about everyone I know order from amazon all the time and have very very few issues. And when we do, the return/replace/refund/whatever process is smooth as butter.
Confirmation bias combined with the fact that unhappy people are more likely to leave “reviews”[a] (like here). I’ve never had an issue with Amazon that they haven’t resolved, and it may seem like I’m a minority, but Amazon is the size they are today because, for ever 1 fsck-up, there’s 99 others who didn’t have problems.[b]
[a]: Complaints. Reviews. Etc.
[b]: Not excusing their bad behavior. Just stating the reality.