If you leave a bad review on a high priced item often you will be contacted and offered a refund for removing the review.
It's also common to get offers of compensation for a good review with the product.
Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
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Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#12Big-name companies have been caught putting out top-performing SSDs and then after the reviews are out, silently shipping drives with worse flash chips, worse controllers, no DRAM cache, etc. Review sites know it happens but don't call it out because then they won't get pre-embargo access to hardware or the company will demand the hardware back. Review sites only really work because they're able to amass a substantial amount of hardware; if everything has to be returned, they can't run comparison tests and the like.
And then you have organizations like the Wirecutter who review vacuum cleaners and include a vacuum one of their staff bought 6 years ago alongside currently sold models.
....and if they'd done the slightest bit of homework they'd know that the company had moved production of that specific model to a different country and cheapened all the materials.
It's like buying a ~2001MY Mercedes because your 1985 E-class was well built. The early 2000's, Mercedes was cranking out cheaply designed/built crap.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#13Personally experienced this. I bookmarked a keyboard I was interested in purchasing in a month or so. When I went back it was a completely different item with the same reviews. Just today in fact, I was looking for an office chair seat cushion and found a very telling reddit comment from 3 years ago[1]. I know Amazon has a bulletproof return policy for the most part but I don't want to be hassled with returning every…
You don’t have to return it. Print the return label and attach it to whatever you want.
I try not to make a habit of so brazenly committing fraud.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#14Yeah, it's a pity. It use to be a no-brainer shopping at Amazon. But now, I waste more time sifting through a bunch of cheaply made home goods that I'm just more inclined to look for sturdy, well-made products elsewhere.
Also, it seems like they mix the inventory from different vendors, so it ends up being a crap shoot whether you get the original, or a knock-off, and the reviews reflect that.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#15If you leave a bad review on a high priced item often you will be contacted and offered a refund for removing the review.
It's also common to get offers of compensation for a good review with the product.
I'm sure! I have thought about this when reading reviews for products. Often they have very similar language used... Pointing out how specific things about the item are really great etc.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#16Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#17If you leave a bad review on a high priced item often you will be contacted and offered a refund for removing the review.
I have had more than one bad review rejected or removed for dubious reasons.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#18I don’t get why we need to have good ratings and reviews at all.
Why not only allow bad ratings (eg a simple thumbs down) and reviews, then run some ML to detect and normalize semantic patterns (“short battery life”), and then word-cloud or summarize those.
Users could then sort ratings ascendingly from least number of bad ratings and scan the semantic patterns.
Voilà - a functioning ratings and review setup…
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#19I don't understand what Amazon thinks it's doing with its legions of data scientists, analysts, product managers and engineers that they consider so much more important than solving this problem, which will destroy their reputation long-term and create space for a competitor. At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.
Ensuring a competitor can’t arise in other ways? Unlike Yelp, Amazon has oodles of expensive and difficult-to-replicate physical infrastructure, hordes of low-level staff, exclusive supply contracts aplenty, enough cash reserves to price-dump anybody into oblivion, and probably many other things I don’t even know I don’t know about.
Competition only works when barriers to entry are absent, small, or at least surmountable. “Disruption” is one way to circumvent that, but it isn’t magic, either.
Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
#20This reminds me of multiple websites. websites that sells specialized items in their niche.
their products, all different companies have stellar reviews left in their website via third party software.
but you can easily tell that those reviews have to be fake. even though they are verified.
you can easily tell fake reviews, its like theyre not even trying to write a fake review.
even more hilarious is they sometimes accidentally write a review for the wrong product for the wrong company
the thing that worries me is this makes me question if the product that i am buying is actually legit. like is this product actually safe as they say it is and is actually non-toxic to a human’s body