Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 429 posts

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#391

Post by behringer »

piyh wrote: post #361
gertrunde wrote: post #330

I feel like the fake reviews are merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the last 5-10 years, Amazon's main shopping website seems to have gone from a reasonably reputable location to an internet cesspool to rival ebay or craigslist. For example, looking for an item one is presented with a wide variety of almost identical products from a wide variety of almost identical, completely unknown brands, with no trust or confid…

At least with ebay the items are cheaper and I know I'm buying bottom of the barrel stuff.

To be honest, they also sell high end stuff on ebay and you know it's going to be legit just based on the seller feedback and what the item is.

Half the time the manufacturer themselves are selling directly on ebay!

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#392

Post by ouid »

lordnacho wrote: post #251
kioleanu wrote: post #182

Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it. I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they…

As an economics grad, I always wondered why online reviews existed at all. There's no skin in the game for anyone. If your neighbor recommends you a crap lawnmower, he'll have to explain to you why he thought it was good. You can ask him questions and compare his motivations to yours. He'll also end up living next to a badly mowed lawn if he doesn't put some work into it. The seller has every reason to pay people to…

You mean advertising?

Negative reviews are the only actual reviews.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#393

Post by behringer »

grogenaut wrote: post #90
ibraheemdev wrote: post #15

I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.

Forward this to amazon customer service.

Do you honestly believe everybody but Amazon knows this is going on?

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#394

Post by MattSayar »

d13 wrote: post #228
ianmcgowan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Amazon has some smart people looking at the numbers on this, but as just one anecdata, my family has been buying a ton of stuff from Amazon since they were just books. Now we buy things that are repeat purchases or a couple of trusted brands (e.g. Amazon Basics or Anker). For bigger purchases (like a medium-basic coffee machine) we're either looking at Costco and Target, or researching a lot on Consumer Repo…

What happened to Wirecutter?

I just discovered Wirecutter and have been happy with it so far (just bought a new toaster oven!). I'm also curious why they're throwing shade

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#395

Post by 8note »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #110
TylerE wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think reviews are bad, but I think 5 stars is. Should just be thumbs up, thumbs down. Maybe a "meh" in between. Alternatively, ask for ratings as 5 star, treat 4 as a meh, and anything 3 or below as a thumbs down.

No please don’t Netflix the Amazon reviews. There is a huge advantage in granularity. Everything in life isn’t so binary, where you either loved or hated it. There is so much gray area in between that makes ratings useful. Netflix neutered their whole rating system when they introduced the thumbs up and down system.

Stars are also not very granular, vs stuff related to the product itself.

Google's "does this place offer wifi?" type questions seem better than reviews

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#396

Post by Bancakes »

peanutcracker wrote: post #336
vidarh wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I leave reviews for two reasons: To reward a seller when I really like something, and to punish a seller when I really hate something. Rarely in between. Well written reviews are a common good, and there is good reason to believe that leaving reviews encourages others to do the same, and that helps me, so I do it. Yes, I know there'll be fake reviews, but most of the time they are pretty easy to spot. Not least becau…

Why trust the negative reviews? I'm sure it is common to try to hurt the competition by leaving fake negative reviews. If a company is willing to buy positive reviews, why would they stop at buying negative reviews? Worse, that way you would end up avoiding the "fair players" who don't leave fake negative reviews with the competition.

If someone can post fake negative reviews on Amazon, Amazon can certainly afford to false flag negative reviews on everyone else. So either both parties are truthful or both parties are manipulative. Plus, it takes nontrivial effort to plausibly explain how a product is defective.

In case a popular product is simply handled by Amazon or other sellers, they aren't responsible for the quality itself. Bad review of a keyboard on one site is as valid as on another.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#397

Post by meowster »

vidarh wrote: post #329
nkrisc wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make good points, but on Amazon I just have to assume that all the reviews are fake. I've seen how easy it is to buy fake reviews, the lengths sellers go to get people to leave only 5-star reviews, and Amazon's inability or unwillingness to do anything about it. Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? I think any random review you pull up is more likely than not to be fake. Of course, we can't kno…

I think many of the reviews on Amazon are real because a lot of them are negative reviews warning people not to buy the product, and those are generally the ones I look at. That's harder to game, because while a seller certainly could post a negative review citing some irrelevant flaw (and I have seen that), and hope that triggers buyers who don't care, they won't stop other people (like me) from posting negative rev…

Sellers also leave negative reviews for products from competing sellers.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#398

Post by ecf »

mikestew wrote: post #383

Yes, yes, quit buying stuff from Amazon. That's what I said when I went to buy compression socks within the last week. I'll just buy from the vendor (OS1). Hey, they take Apple Pay, too. And, hey, what's this $0.98 that ended up in my cart? "Route package protection"?[0] You mean you're passing on the cost of package insurance to me ? Fuck that, you can just cancel that $100 order for that $0.98. If it's not bullshit…

I got an email from route.com the very same day I purchased a package that was handled via shop.app.

I can only guess that Shopify sold my email.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#399

Post by kvhdude »

I have been bitten by positive amazon reviews buying fake stuff (usually phone/laptop batteries). There is something about seeing two products one bustling with reviews and other not, and the mind biased toward the former. These days i seek outside reviews (wirecutter, reddit etc) before trusting amazon.

Re: Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

#400

Post by toss1 »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #244
toss1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I've completely abandoned Amazon for ANY kind of battery, and other categories of products (and I've been buying from Amazon for two decades). I last (foolishly) tried again a few weeks ago for some SR44 cells. Should be easy, right? Nope, after digging into scores of bogus products and reviews, Fakespot, etc., it was just obvious that there are zero trustworthy products in that category. I found another battery…

I think for generic sizes Amazon basics are fine. Costco is also good for routine sizes. It's the more exotic/industrial sizes that get tricky. It's hard to attribute the lame search and sorting to incompetence at this point, it's starting to seem more like active malice.

Totally agree about the searching. I've considered seeing if Amazon has anything resembling an API, or if using some kind of screen-scraping was possible to create an overlay app that would do actually usable searching, but figure they'd just shut it down legally or technically, since good searching is obviously not what they want. It is so obvious that they don't want good searching that the structure their databases in such a way as to ensure that the result is what I call Data-Mush. E.g., the size and weight of the item needs to be two separate sets of fields, clearly identified for the dims/weight of the item itself, and the dims/weight of the packaged item. Yet there is zero consistency or clarity on even that most basic data. Yuk

On the batteries, even the common 18650 is a hopeless cause, at least if we want to get a battery that is what it claims.

A long time ago, it was useful to sort by average review, but now, I need to look at summing the percentage of 1+2-star reviews, and eliminating the high scores, then among the least-bad, check those for bad reviews (e.g., shipping failure, not the vendor's fault, etc.).

It has become a massive chore to use Amazon and hope to get something that is not crap, so evidently, the management there is optimizing for quantities of crap over quality.

Post reply on HN