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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

#91

Post by bostik »

ilamont wrote: post #66

Internet companies and their defenders sometimes insist that this kind of problem is impossible to solve—that the scale of the web makes a certain amount of bad behavior impossible to stop. Impossible? Which Internet companies have made such a claim? And who is their “defenders” that feels so compelled to step for the likes of Amazon?

All of them? Not in those words, because "impossible" is a term a corporate PR machine will not want to throw around, but you will see the phrase "a very hard problem" quite often. And for a good reason.

Please read: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

Add the facts that norms vary across cultures, and that laws vary across jurisdictions. But this only relates to user-generated content. Amazon is allowing bait-and-switch across the board, with physical products and their categories. That's not a problem with content moderation, Amazon has a problem with accountability.

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

#92

Post by noduerme »

andreareina wrote: post #77
jstummbillig wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams. That sounds very much like they'd have an interest in fixing the problem. Short-sightedness does not appear to be one of Amazons issues.

By their actions, not so much: - commingling of inventory means you're not necessarily getting the stuff from the merchant you're ostensibly buying from - which doesn't really matter anyway because merchant reviews are hard to find (couldn't find them at all on mobile) - being able to change the product being sold while keeping the rating and review history. WAT

In the olden days, the seller was prominently listed in every Amazon listing, and you could click on a seller and browse their entire inventory along with reviews. AFAIK you can't do that anymore. They make it intentionally opaque who is actually selling or shipping.

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

#93

Post by speedgoose »

managerclass wrote: post #38
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.

What do you use as an alternative to Yelp for finding restaurants?

Le guide Michelin.

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

#94

Post by floatingatoll »

jjav wrote: post #89
noduerme wrote: post #56

I wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off. This was a slow creep for awhile, but now the problem has grown exponentially. Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that mig…

Last summer I bought a new Nikon DSLR from Amazon. Not the type of item where I thought they'd substitute scam items! But when the box arrived, it was an opened box with an old used and abused Nikon DSLR, parts even missing! Wow. At least the return was painless so I guess there's that. I try hard to avoid Amazon now. I prioritize a locally owned store if possible, second option is a reputable specialty web store tha…

Biblio.com is what Amazon originally was — a database of books for sale by marketplace sellers — but specializes in human support of booksellers in exchange for a sales commission on proceeds from buyers, rather than in "become the Walmart of flea markets" like Amazon retail.

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

#95

Post by frabcus »

managerclass wrote: post #38
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.

What do you use as an alternative to Yelp for finding restaurants?

Foursquare still exists amazingly and is pretty good.

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

#96

Post by paxys »

noduerme wrote: post #56

I wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off. This was a slow creep for awhile, but now the problem has grown exponentially. Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that mig…

I had predicted a while ago that the end goal for Amazon's retail division will be to sell only Amazon's own goods and services, and I still stand by it. We may not see it for a long time, but let's face it Amazon isn't what it is today because it sells cheap Chinese knockoffs. The real money is in grocery delivery, pharmacy, Prime Video, Kindle, Audible, Fire Tablets, the Echo ecosystem, Ring. They could even start a courier service on the back of their global logistics empire and compete with FedEx/UPS.

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

#97

Post by robert_tweed »

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…

Adversarial reviews. The problem isn't just fake positive reviews. The other problem is fake negative reviews left by competitors, which is already a problem on Amazon. Most 1-star reviews are either stupid & irrelevant (it arrived a day late, ONE STAR! and so forth), or fake.

I've seen some categories of products with lots of obviously fake reviews claiming safety issues. These were on every single product I could find, so clearly all the manufacturers were targeting each other.

The 2-4 star range has historically been the most reliable, but fake review factories got wise to that a few years ago and will now often intentionally leave a minor gripe in their fake positive reviews to make them seem more authentic.

A better solution is to publish the % return rates for products and forget about reviews. You can even normalise that into a 5-star rating by product category, e.g., "Here are the top 5 products similar to this one, with average return rate of 1%. The product you are viewing has a return rate of 15%".

With low-friction return reason categories you could even classify high return rates for things like "doesn't look like the photos", "poor quality", "smaller than expected", etc. Unfortunately Amazon's return reasons are variable-friction, so their data on this will be biased, although it might be consistently biased across product groups.

I do like the word cloud idea - but pulled from optional free-text return reasons instead of reviews.

This doesn't solve the "it broke after 2 years" problem, but neither does the current review system.

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

#98

Post by robert_tweed »

loeg wrote: post #24
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.

This is a separate problem Amazon needs to sort out. Far too many duplicate products with a different ASIN. They could easily fix that with manual inventory checking, but they don't. The same process would fix the bait-and-switch problem.

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

#99

Post by Mashimo »

managerclass wrote: post #38
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.

What do you use as an alternative to Yelp for finding restaurants?

Ask Friends. Or just try them out.

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

#100

Post by alpaca128 »

noduerme wrote: post #92
andreareina wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By their actions, not so much: - commingling of inventory means you're not necessarily getting the stuff from the merchant you're ostensibly buying from - which doesn't really matter anyway because merchant reviews are hard to find (couldn't find them at all on mobile) - being able to change the product being sold while keeping the rating and review history. WAT

In the olden days, the seller was prominently listed in every Amazon listing, and you could click on a seller and browse their entire inventory along with reviews. AFAIK you can't do that anymore. They make it intentionally opaque who is actually selling or shipping.

> AFAIK you can't do that anymore

You can. But the correct link is somewhere on the right below the "add to cart" button and not the one in the "sold by [xyz]" info.

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