Amazon Dark Patterns • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#201

Post by dingaling » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

fouc wrote: post #63

mrtksn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your maybes are valid it simply means that these Amazon guys are new in the business and will figure out how to design user interface once they have the resources.Lets give them a slack, aye? Seriously though, I canceled my prime after I got a fake SD Card that was sold by Amazon. There was no straightforward way of returning it, had to contact customer support. Later I looked closely and I noticed the reviews war…

What? They make returns very easy to do. There's a form that pops up and many choices for reasons.

Returns through Amazon have become increasingly difficult and spiteful in the past two or three of 20 years I've been using them.

Last week I returned a rotary airer that was damaged upon delivery. Amazon online 'help' told me I had to find a courier that could take the outsized parcel AND I had to pay out of pocket for it. They insisted that it be returned. They didn't refund the full postage cost or the cost of packaging.

Amazon are throwing away their hard-won reputation by penny-pinching and treating customers as badly as other retailers. I'm out.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#202

Post by 48snickers » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #111

seren wrote: post #60

Prompted by this post, I wanted to check what happened to the 1-star review I have left 6 months ago. (Product worked for 3 days and then stopped, and after a replacement, the same thing happened). Sure enough, I have 0 comment in my profile, and I just checked, it has also disappeared from the product page. This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com a…

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

Deleting older reviews isn't the only mechanism for handling stale reviews. They could add a decay function to the weighting in average review rating and leave the contents of the original review in place, for example. New versions of products could be treated as unique products, and thus reviews could be forked.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#203

Post by culot » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

mk89 wrote: post #138

SamuelAdams wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the other side of this argument: should reviews be timeless? Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans". So if you leave a rev…

I think they could do like ebay does: reviews in the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, ...etc. Or a similar mechanism. Sometimes I am not interested to old reviews, esp. technical books, as they become very quickly outdated. Deleting them implies deleted forever, though. Such information will be always lost, while it might still apply. I would simply give it a different weight.

Aren't those time limits on reviews only for reviews of sellers, though? Does Ebay also time-limit products reviews, reviews that are divorced from a seller? Do they even host those kind of reviews?

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#204

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

closetohome wrote: post #197

mrtksn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no return option on the SD Card, it was marked as "not eligible for return" so I had to deal with the customer support. I actually went ahead and dug out the conversation for you. This is my refund request: https://imgur.com/bthMMoN This is the response from Amazon: https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH Yeah, they refunded me without a fuss but I prefer an experience where the items arrive in expected quality and I kee…

So all it took was an email, they didn't even require you to return the product before refunding you, and you're unhappy with that for some reason?

Absofuckinglutely. Anytime you end up with a fraudulent counterfeit it's a hugely unhappy situation for a number of reasons. The biggest for me would be: What if I hadn't caught it? Maybe I'm using some inferior counterfeits right now that I don't know about that Amazon ripped me off on, that might fail catastrophically. And also, there's plenty of times where you need a product by a specific time, and not having it at that time because you wasted a whole shipping cycle on a counterfeit is painful.

When you end up with a counterfeit, you are being defrauded. How could anyone be happy in that situation just because your money was refunded? I just wanted what I was trying to buy. I didn't want free junk that wastes my time.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#205

Post by mattbreeden » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

lurn wrote: post #180

paulie_a wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people write crappy reviews. I remember seeing a 1 start review for a video card that was basically "I ordered the wrong one and it didnt fit my system" reviews should be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes the reviews also don't match the rating. I see this happen all the time, not only on Amazon: "Great service, great product. No complaints." 1 star

I used to see this very commonly on a site with a dropdown rating system. I believe people were selecting 5 stars and then trying to scroll down the page. Since they'd be focused on the dropdown it'd change their rating to 1 star. That was my hypothesis anyway.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#206

Post by coryfklein » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

ashelmire wrote: post #34

TorKlingberg wrote: post #24

This rant is not well written. The first issue looks like a bug on Amazon's side. I'm not going to assume malice without something pointing in that direction. The author writes "What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?" Well, would it? I see no indication it would. Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts. The…

I can actually verify and tell you why. Amazon will not allow you to criticize Amazon or their platform in a review (they said as much). Only the product. They probably do automatic sentiment detection for negative phrases containing Amazon and don’t allow them to be posted. The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.

> The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.

Totally disagree! The product should be the same every time, but each customer is going to have a completely different shipping experience based on stock levels, warehouse proximity, carrier selection, and even based on whether the warehouse employee packing your order had enough sleep last night.

You saying the shipping was good, bad, fast, or slow, tells me virtually nothing about what my shipping experience will be.

It would be cool if there was a meta-item in Amazon inventory to represent Prime or the "Amazon experience" where you could leave reviews like this, but they don't belong on individual item listings.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#207

Post by mthoms » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #40

Sharlin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you at least anonymously reported that behavior to appropriate authorities. And started searching for a new job.

What "appropriate authorities"? Shouting into the void at some google user forum?

Hacker News.

I'm only half kidding. I once had an issue with a Google product that they only fixed after ranting about it here.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#208

Post by coryfklein » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

sbjs wrote: post #199

At first I thought the only way to genuinely avoid these kind of bots is to have reviewers posting videos, maybe hosted on YouTube to save costs. Videos are the only thing that can't be faked as easily (but they can with 'deep fakes'). But this won't actually solve the problem. These reviews may be fake but they're probably real people being paid to write them, and those real people can just as easily make real revie…

Or only allow paying Prime members to leave reviews. That would cut out the fraud pretty darn quickly.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#209

Post by Lasher » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #49

The dumbbells being damaged during delivery reminds me of an other annoyance with amazon reviews: they won't let you distinguish between actual issues with the products and issues with the delivery/Amazon after-sale services etc... I can't count the number of low-star reviews where it says something like "the guy tried to deliver at the wrong time" or "I bought the wrong product by mistake and Amazon wouldn't take it…

I bought Quickbooks from Amazon a couple of years ago and what actually showed up was a very clearly burned DVD with "Quickbooks" hand-written on it. Best case was I'd received a pirated version of the software. Worst case is who knows what kind of malware might have been on that DVD. Had no choice but to leave a 1 star review to warn others but that really doesn't help anyone who wants to know if Quickbooks is good software to run a small business on or not.

Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me.

The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#210

Post by coryfklein » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

ritinkar wrote: post #56

rkachowski wrote: post #7

An interesting dark pattern (albeit unrelated to the review flow) is during the standard checkout process. on the last screen before the purchase, the Amazon logo image / header no longer links back to the Amazon homepage like the rest of the site. I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales

Recently I wanted to purchase something from prime now, I added the product and during checkout where I put in the OTP ( 2FA is mandatory in India ), I changed my mind about purchasing and quit the app, knowing the purchase would fail. Amazon then quietly changed the order from prepaid to cash on delivery without asking me and went through with the order. I thought that was a shady way of closing a sale.

> changed the order from prepaid to cash on delivery without asking me and went through with the order

Hah, joke's on them. When the item arrived I'd honestly say, "I didn't order that," and shut the door without paying.