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

Post by OJFord » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 11:41 AM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #299

mbesto wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper. That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side. I guess you've never ordered something from a Shopify based store then?

Shopify is Stripe + Ruby. Same strategic idea as PayPal Point being: D2C doesn't solve the trust problem in a scaleable way, except for repeat purchases

Post by baq » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

rendall wrote: post #158

baq wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it'd make sense if you disregard externalities. i sure don't want the usb charger market to sort itself out by the metric of which products burn my house down faster.

The discussion was toy drones, not USBs.

Post by sgerenser » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #330

biztos wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight. In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube. This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers…

You're wise to do so. People believe (speaking of photography / video YouTubers) that Apple generally doesn't give pre-release or demo units to users (except the "inner circle", shall we say - Daring Fireball, etc.). Odd, then, how a whole bunch of photography vloggers, the vast majority of whom made absolutely no mention of loaner / demo units, promotional consideration, etc, all got launch day Mac Pros. "Much antic…

Post by sgerenser » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

dopylitty wrote: post #65

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…

Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests. The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality. Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality w…

Post by tekknik » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

silexia wrote: post #317

kongolongo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also question them. It seems a lot easier to accuse Amazon ratings of being poor especially if it feeds into an already existing confirmation bias against Amazon. For all we know Fakespot could just be making all of it up right? How are Fakespots ratings verified? Do I need a Fakespot for Fakespot too? Maybe rating systemes like these are fundamentally flawed.

Just switch to a reliable vendor like Costco or Target and stop buying from Amazon.