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Amazon Dark Patterns

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Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#211

Post by mk89 »

culot wrote: post #203
mk89 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technical books, as they become very quickly outdated.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?

Uh maybe you are right. It's been a long time since I've stopped using ebay.

However, I am quite sure I have seen elsewhere this feature. It's not bad. It allows to have more recent opinions about the item.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#212

Post by padraigf »

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 think they're correct to dismiss this type of review. I know when I'm looking at reviews and someone writes 'the product arrived faulty - one star', this tells me nothing about the product when it's intact, which presumably most of them are.

Whoever receives a faulty example, they'll obviously get their money back, and I find this type of review misleading when trying to evaluate a working version of the product.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#213

Post by jackewiehose »

closetohome wrote: post #195
simias wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait amazon edits your reviews? That's shaddy as hell, I can understand removing a review for "strong language" but changing its content without asking the author is borderline scammy. I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?

Obviously a retailer like Amazon wouldn't outright edit user reviews because it would be incredibly easy to catch, and would be a massive scandal if true. The guy you're replying to probably just forgot what he wrote.

> The guy you're replying to probably just forgot what he wrote.

No, definitely not. But this was almost 10 years ago and I never saved my original writing so I can't tell the exact differences. I guess for the censor at work they where just minor changes but I remember how upset I was because some things I wrote became out of context.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#214

Post by ahakki »

ritinkar wrote: post #69
ahakki wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2FA is mandatory in India Well you did just show that it's not :)

mandatory for card transactions. Unless you were joking, in which case, whoosh me.

I must have misunderstood your comment. I was under the impression that 2FA was mandatory for all purchases, not just card transactions.

So I thought you had figured out a way around that.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#215

Post by sbjs »

coryfklein wrote: post #208
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.

No, a scammer can say to 10 people "here's $10 to buy get an account, now leave 100 reviews and I'll pay you $1 for each" and that guy himself gets paid $10 per review directly from the seller. The people each made $100, and he spent $110 on each of them, losing $1,100 total, but he made $1,000 of each, so $10,000 total. At the end of the day he made $8,900 by acting as a middle man.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#216

Post by chaostheory »

Splines wrote: post #122
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 don't know if Amazon has this feature, but I've seen sites that let the seller answer back to reviews - for cases where the seller has addressed a reviewer's feedback, they could reply and say that this has been fixed. Or make a new listing, and in the description mention what has been fixed.

Amazon has that feature.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#217

Post by mrtksn »

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?

I spent all day thinking that my raspberry pi zero was faulty, trying to figure out why it’s not booting(FYI, very hard to obtain).

Yes, I’m unhappy. A happy purchase is not one where you get a refund for low quality product, a happy purchase is a purchase that you end up spending your money on a product that satisfies you.

I don’t care about 7gbp, that’s not the issue.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#218

Post by awhitby »

padraigf wrote: post #212
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 think they're correct to dismiss this type of review. I know when I'm looking at reviews and someone writes 'the product arrived faulty - one star', this tells me nothing about the product when it's intact, which presumably most of them are. Whoever receives a faulty example, they'll obviously get their money back, and I find this type of review misleading when trying to evaluate a working version of the product.

Damage during delivery can be part of the product. I recently bought a window A/C unit, for which about 30% of the reviews claimed damage during delivery due to poor packaging (it is delivered in the manufacturer's packaging, not repackaged).

Since it was otherwise well-reviewed and cheap, I took my chances. Sure enough it was minorly-damaged when I received it, but worked out ok.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#219

Post by joemi »

jackewiehose wrote: post #33

I once wrote a 1-star review on amazon for a top-selling product that had almost only positive reviews. The review was published but they quietly changed its contents. They replaced some words (I guess it was too strong language like "crap" or something) but even worse they removed at least one whole sentence and after that the review didn't make much sense anymore and it looked like I wrote it like that. Then I watc…

I'm really surprised by this. When it comes to Customer Feedback (as opposed to Product Reviews), Amazon institutes an all-or-nothing policy. If any part of a Customer Feedback is out of policy, the entire feedback will be removed (if a seller reports it, that is). So it's quite surprising to me that they'd treat Product Reviews differently and actually edit the reviews.

Re: Amazon Dark Patterns

#220

Post by acheron »

dingo_bat wrote: post #89
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…

You can't blame the users though. If I have a bad delivery experience, I'm going to leave a bad review. It's Amazon's problem that they don't let you differentiate between product issues and delivery issues.

And I'm going to mark it 'unhelpful', because I don't care about your bad delivery experience. The only people who need to hear about your bad delivery experience work for Amazon customer support.
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