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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

#21

Post by ratsmack »

travoc wrote: post #9
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Personally 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 believe that is what most people would consider as being dishonesty and fraud.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#22

Post by justinsaccount »

purplepatrick wrote: post #18

I 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…

I often search reviews for "linux" to see if anyone mentioned anything like "works out of the box with linux kernel 5.0".

It works the other way too, I don't care if someone gave something 1 star because it failed to work on their windows xp machine.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#23

Post by jacob019 »

travoc wrote: post #9
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Personally 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.

Don't be an asshole.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#24

Post by loeg »

purplepatrick wrote: post #18

I 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…

A vendor with bad ratings in that system could just keep creating new product pages to clean their reputation. There's no incentive to have long-lived product pages.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#25

Post by torbTurret »

civilized wrote: post #3

I 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.

Amazon retail, maybe, which is not their money maker anyway.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#26

Post by paulpauper »

civilized wrote: post #3

I 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.

Same for YouTube. they allow blatant crypto scam videos to run (such as videos impersonating famous people like Michael Saylor) yet none of their hundreds of highly paid engineers are able to do anything even though it is such a blatant fraud and people are losing a lot of money. It's like "who cares if users are being ripped off. sucks for them. not our responsibility." Unless a law is passed holding these companies accountable, little will change.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#27

Post by spamizbad »

civilized wrote: post #3

I 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.

Those hundreds of fake reviews are a feature, not a bug for Amazon. They drive sales. And when the chickens come home to roost, as you say, Amazon will probably figure out a completely different trick to juice sales.

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#28

Post by moneywoes »

civilized wrote: post #3

I 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.

Bait and switch reviews likely lead to more sales and hence revenue

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#29

Post by moneywoes »

travoc wrote: post #9
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Personally 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.

Wrong, they look at your life time value before accepting blind returns

Re: Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews

#30

Post by wolverine876 »

civilized wrote: post #3

I 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.

> Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.

Is that true of Yelp? People I know still use it (I don't).

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