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Amazon imposes limit on reviews

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Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#41
post #27
post #2

Great, but doesn't come close to solving the actual problem: Amazon's retail catalog is flooded with fakes, drop shippers, bots and low quality products with fake reviews. I almost entirely avoid using them for purchasing home goods at this point, the risk is too great and the customer service is too poor. For things that Amazon itself sells, the cost is often not competitive. For everything else, I can get it cheape…

I can't stand the "incentivized" reviews, and found this chrome plugin to be really helpful, it basically goes through and tries to remove the fake reviews for you and give you a new, more correct score without them - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...

Aren't incentivized reviews banned now? https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#43
post #30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I bought a book direct from the author, and I liked it enough that I wanted to leave a review. The only place I could think of was Amazon. That was an "unverified purchase", but it was still legit.

Because letting you post your one legitimate review opens the door to spam reviewers who each post five fake reviews a day. If Amazon can get a sufficient number of verified purchase reviewers, why do we need your review, especially if it opens the doors to abuse?

I'm not saying you should be able to post unlimited numbers of them, but saying zero is very limiting to consumers and creators.

Even 5/mo is probably enough for most legit use cases

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#44
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had this experience at all. Prime ships in two days almost always. Same day prime does was it says. I've had refunds without having to ship back products, and when I did have to ship back a product (shoes) I got the refund right away and free return shipping like they advertised. I'm also in a major US metro area. Prices don't seem too bad. My latest purchase was head and shoulders. Looked up the price at W…

In the UK Prime was supposed to be 'next day' but this seems to have slipped back over the past year or so? My pet gripe is the 'preparing for dispatch' black hole that generally (in my experience) means 'you're going to be waiting a long, long time'. Recently ordered a keyboard in UK to be delivered to Spain. Despite being in stock it stayed in 'preparing to dispatch' for a week and I couldn't cancel. In frustration…

The service you experience with Prime definitely depends on where in the UK you live, or rather where the item is going.

I live in a city centre, within 50 miles of an Amazon distribution centre, and it often offers me same day delivery. Like, order at 3am, items arrive at 8pm.

But if I change it to my parents' address (more remote but still in civilisation), it takes them 1-2 days to deliver.

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#45
I have no complaints about prime's two day shipping but having worked at one of these Amazon Fulfilment centers, I'd personally not buy clothing or furry toys, even non perishable food.

The experience up to opening your package is great but it's seeing boxes crumpled up or package nearly destroyed with item inside it intact that really pisses me off but having been a picker before it's really hard to give a shit when you are paid a capped hourly wage walking for 10 hours in steel toe shoe and actively timed against your peers where failing to keep up means termination

I never want to work for Amazon ever again. Not even their software or tech or HQ, it totally ruined it for me. I don't give a shit, it's built on human misery and our escapism through materialism. We are voting with our "things" everytime we shop on Amazon to structurally oppress low-income bracket folks.

But I feel hopeless. I'm chained by their consistent 2-day free shipping and overall an okay experience in helping me procure "things", "stuff".

In fact as I'm writing this I get PTSD thinking about Amazon Fulfilment and the only remedy as pathetic as it is, is indulging in Amazon's Cyber Monday sales extravaganza palooza, contradicting my own gripes about Amazon but unable to overcome the general comfort of buying things on it. It's almost as if buying on Amazon on my Kindle Fire is now an entertainment of some sort :/ which shocks me to write it.

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#46
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest gripe is that they merge the reviews of different vendors of the same product, so for heavily-scammed items like laptop batteries, the reviews are almost useless.

I've experienced this problem as well. I really wish a customer review of an Amazon purchase were tied to a particular seller. For example, I was recently looking at a Hario Buono kettle [1] to make coffee. There are two versions of it, one made in Japan and one made in China. Unfortunately they share the same model number. The Japanese version is considered better quality. Of course Amazon has the lowest price compa…

If you go down to the right and click on the "Used & New (161) from $xx.yy" link, you can see the individual sellers including notes from them about origin and where it ships from.

The bigger problem for some of these is actually going to be with anything "Fulfilled by Amazon" because there's some chance that the products with identical numbers will be mingled in Amazon's warehouses. Never having sold through them, does supposedly-identical stock get mingled like that? I think that was one of the problems people were having with counterfeiting.

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced this problem as well. I really wish a customer review of an Amazon purchase were tied to a particular seller. For example, I was recently looking at a Hario Buono kettle [1] to make coffee. There are two versions of it, one made in Japan and one made in China. Unfortunately they share the same model number. The Japanese version is considered better quality. Of course Amazon has the lowest price compa…

If you go down to the right and click on the "Used & New (161) from $xx.yy" link, you can see the individual sellers including notes from them about origin and where it ships from. The bigger problem for some of these is actually going to be with anything "Fulfilled by Amazon" because there's some chance that the products with identical numbers will be mingled in Amazon's warehouses. Never having sold through them, d…

Some specify "shipping from Japan", but most don't seem to say "Made in China" or "Made in Japan" (it would be really convenient if they did). I don't think the shipping country necessarily implies the origin of the product, at least, I'd rather not gamble based on that.

It would be nice if every seller specified where their version was made, or really more correctly that the two units would be listed with different SKUs.

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#48
If someone started faking Amazon Basics products I find it hard to believe Amazon would allow themselves to suffer the same fate others manufacturers have.

You know a platform has reached sufficient lock-in status when its "killer app" (reviews) can go to shit without hurting the business

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#49
post #12

It does not address my latest issue with reviews -- the reviews don't apply to the actual item in question. Looking for a copy of "Don Quixote," the first 5-star review discussed two different translators -- neither of which was the translator for the edition in question. Most of he reviews were for other translations of the book. This is not limited to books, either, as every now and then I see a review for a differ…

Books are a huge dumpster fire in general. Amazon is full of mass spam from extremely low quality editions of books printed by print-on-demand companies. There are literally hundreds of editions of some public domain books which are all "republished" POD works or sometimes even just Wikipedia articles on the book. And Amazon will show all the reviews together, so you buy based on the reviews of a reputably published version of the book, and instead get an awful quality POD book or even just two pieces of laminated paper with a printout of a wikipedia article.

Re: Amazon imposes limit on reviews

#50
post #41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand the "incentivized" reviews, and found this chrome plugin to be really helpful, it basically goes through and tries to remove the fake reviews for you and give you a new, more correct score without them - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...

Aren't incentivized reviews banned now? https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc

I didn't realize they had added that to their policy. While that's awesome, I still see a ton of them on there.

From some quick googling - https://www.amazon.com/Sentey-LS-4232-Headphones-Microphone-...

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