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FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

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Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#151

Post by duado »

0000011111 wrote: post #53
duado wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopping on Amazon is like shopping in Chinatown now. The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. This shit must be working, for some definition of working. Personally, anything that touches my child, or goes in my body, is not allowed to be bought on Amazon.

Tooth past, soap, food items like protein bars are so easy to order off the site. It is hard to imagine the challenge of hunting these items down in crowed stores to shop them my self. There are lots of items I regularly buy that are not review dependent and I will keep ordering them for the long term.

Right, but do you get that some of these items are counterfeit? And your Colgate toothpaste may be Bob’s toothpaste from Guangzhou?

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#152

Post by onethree »

joegahona wrote: post #129
ams6110 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/

Does Consumer Reports provide any value over Wirecutter? The latter is free and has negligible display advertising.

I stopped trusting the wire cutter after they shifted from recommending a $40 knife to a $145 as their best chefs knife for most people

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#153

Post by sonnyblarney »

duado wrote: post #100
sonnyblarney wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies collapse from within, they don't get trounced by competitors. Competitors come along with a new angle that seems innocuous at first, but then turns out to entail 'the thing people want'. It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'. But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users…

The alternative: Target.com. Once you try it, you’ll never go back. Amazon is still where I buy a wireless mouse, or a phone holder for my car, but big electronics come from B&H or Newegg, diapers and kids toys and baby food comes from Target.

The 'alternative' is just every other e-commerce store.

Once a lot of other larger companies figure out how to do cheap and quick delivery ... what advantage will Amazon have?

People think Amazon has a leg on Wallmart. I'm not so sure!

Wallmart has a 'distribution centre' (aka a store) only 5 miles from every American!

Wallmart already has the wheels greased for the things we really need.

Wallmart can sell razors, groceries and diapers every day while Amazon sells the not-so-common stuff.

I'm amazed Wallmart hasn't figured it out already ...

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#154

Post by grey-area »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #6

There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (read: headphones), products that have only been listed for a month somehow have hundreds of 5 star glowing reviews. When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid rev…

Amazon needs to move to verified reviews only, tied to a purchase on amazon and with a unique credit card on the account. They could cut out paid reviews with some effort if they took steps to verify identity.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#155

Post by TeMPOraL »

function_seven wrote: post #76
Guest10928391 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of cour…

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

Seconded. I do the same. I also do this whenever I have to explore a new domain of interest, to quickly find my bearings and some high-quality sources to continue with.

This works especially well if the domain is not niche, but has wide general-population applicability. Say, dieting. The amount of content-marketing bullshit on the general Internet makes general topical searches near useless. Whereas just browsing the collected knowledge (pinned posts, wikis) of various dieting subreddits let me quickly find one appropriate regime for me, and then its specific subreddit taught me how to apply it safely.

(Yes, it was /r/keto, and yes, it worked.)

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#156

Post by astura »

0000011111 wrote: post #53
duado wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopping on Amazon is like shopping in Chinatown now. The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. This shit must be working, for some definition of working. Personally, anything that touches my child, or goes in my body, is not allowed to be bought on Amazon.

Tooth past, soap, food items like protein bars are so easy to order off the site. It is hard to imagine the challenge of hunting these items down in crowed stores to shop them my self. There are lots of items I regularly buy that are not review dependent and I will keep ordering them for the long term.

Those are widely counterfeited items on Amazon.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

onethree wrote: post #152
joegahona wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Consumer Reports provide any value over Wirecutter? The latter is free and has negligible display advertising.

I stopped trusting the wire cutter after they shifted from recommending a $40 knife to a $145 as their best chefs knife for most people

As a layman in the space of knives, why did that cause you to stop trusting them?

In other areas, I found that up until a point, the price is generally correlated with quality. I had great success in avoiding frustration and waste by following the saw "I'm too poor to buy cheap".

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

orthecreedence wrote: post #126
inoop wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a really, really hard problem to solve. The sheer scale of Amazon combined with razor thin margins and the fact that Amazon isn't even the selling party on most products means that they can't just throw a bunch of manual labor at the problem. It's a similar problem to YouTube still hosting tons of copyrighted material. Fraud is just super hard to fight.

It has to be somewhere between "not enough resources to fix" and "wow, we are making a ton of money off this 'problem!'" There are so many patterns of low-hanging fruit: "I haven't used it yet but it looks great" "Seems ok" "It's useful" "The shipping was slow" On any given product with any measure of popularity, probably 10-20% of reviews consist of those formats. One-word sentences with some kind of bland/useless a…

> But why not crowdsource it?

And now you have two problems :). Reviews themselves are already crowdsourcing. And any kind of crowdsourcing can and will be gamed as soon as someone can make money out of it.

Re: FTC Brings First Case Challenging Fake Paid Reviews on an Indie Retail Website

#160

Post by Razengan »

Ecolog wrote: post #106
function_seven wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution to this has been to find a subreddit that's devoted to the product in question. If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching. Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community. To go along with your umbrella example: Unfortunately /r/umbr…

Reddit is so useful in that regard. So many niches with honest and detailed reviews that I usually don't buy something online without checking a relevant subreddit first.

That statement itself seems like astroturfing.

How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?

When you have a popular post that reaches the Reddit front page, you may receive messages from people asking if you'd like to promote their products.

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