fake/dangerous products are the bigger issue with Amazon. I have seen prenatal fish oil supplements that are supposed to retail for $50, on Amazon fulfillment for $40 and on Alibaba for $18. Who's to say 3rd party merchants aren't reselling the fake Alibaba ones on Amazon for tidy profits? Odds are the fake ones are just repackaged low quality supplements, chock full of mercury.<p>With the breakneck pace of scams can anyone really trust Amazon fulfilled Merchants for items with very specific safety tolerances? (medication/supplements, hepa air filters, electrical components, just to name a few things) I have just started ordering more things direct from manufacturers web-stores rather than deal with the stress.
The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading are the ones that are from verified purchasers.
If you poke around, you can easily find newly launched listing with hundreds of reviews ranking on the first page of popular keywords. E.g. search "earbuds". There will be a handful of results on the first page from no name brands, with all reviews within the last month, many unverified. That first page placement gets them thousands of sales before it falls off and they go launch a new product.<p>I don't know the methods but it's more than just reviews.
reddit found that some Adidas Ultra Boost sneakers sold on Amazon were replicas (fake). The authentic and replica sneakers are co-mingled. It's crap shoot what you get; even some "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" sneakers were fakes.<p>Amazon's response is to issue a refund if you receive reps. However replicas are often quite convincing, and most customers won't know how to tell the difference. The carelessness here is just astounding: it seems like they're begging for a lawsuit.<p>1: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/ultra_boosts_on_amazon_for_126/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/u...</a>
As the topic has been discussed on HN over the years, I've often thought it might be cool to create a browser extension that only shows reviews from HN users with the option of specifying a minimal karma threshold. Perhaps the HN community is too small, so substitute reddit where appropriate. Anyone have thoughts on such a thing?
"I'm a bit reluctant to buy this because from what I've heard, Levi makes these specifically for amazon and they are of much lesser quality. They had a similar deal a few months ago (where a certain pair was available for pre-order) and I can tell you first hand that those were much lesser quality than the other 511's I have."<p>Recently gleaned from a user of /r/frugalmalefashion on reddit. I think it adds to this discussion quite a bit. Ironically I'm still perusing amazon hard today as part of Black Friday sales.
It's a systemic problem with Amazon's marketplace, but their stock has been performing well, so until they start taking multi-quarter financial hits, their executives don't have a huge incentive to care about these marketplace problems.<p>The FBA aspect of Amazon has created many of the problems, such as fake reviews, merchant scamming, and counterfeit products, but FBA sellers are also a huge money maker for Amazon, so they are in a very precarious situation of managing expectations across their customers, sellers, and themselves.
I use <a href="https://www.fakespot.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.fakespot.com</a> to filter out fake product reviews and I found to match my gut feelings most of the time.
One time, I was contacted by someone who wanted to open up a community forum for Amazon sellers. I told him that's about the worst idea I've ever heard.<p>The online selling community is so cut throat and fractured that it goes well beyond healing at this point. It's a game of win at costs.<p>This absolutely nothing new. Sellers will leave bad reviews, flag legitimate listings for fraud, sue each other, and myriad other things.<p>To give an idea of how old this is, look at the origin story of Nast Gal clothing.
Maybe they could form a partnership with Consumer Reports? Like, if you're a prime member, you could see related Consumer Reports reviews? Maybe Consumer Reports could review Amazon's practices?
In some categories, Amazon is putting more weight onto editorial reviews. It'd be a good thing for Amazon and a good thing for product oriented media companies for those reviewers and reviews to regain some of the clout and influence that they have lost to easily manipulated user reviews.<p>On the flip side I think media companies have to do more to deserve the trust of shoppers. More Consumer Reports style product evaluations and less clickbait trolling, more investment into respectable writers/video reviewers who have integrity and earn a real salary to make them resistant to PR bribery.<p>I don't think most shoppers fully understand how extreme the review manipulation is on the brand and merchant side of things. One issue is that the Federal government does not enforce the laws on the books against many of the worst types of manipulation. I'm not a particularly pro-regulation type of guy, but this is one of the consequences of zero law enforcement in a particular area of business: you become a sucker if you abide by the law when none of your competitors are.<p>The Yelps and Amazons of the world are kind of split on this because they both want to restore/retain the trust that users have in these reviews without drawing attention to how absurd the level of manipulation is.<p>Another issue is the entirely legitimate manipulation of reviews that nonetheless confers a competitive advantage. One local car dealership that did some service on my car has earned thousands of positive five star reviews by being extremely aggressive with e-mail followup to people who show up for even minor service interactions. I gave them five stars out of bemusement and because we legitimately received good service on a free interaction paid for by the car manufacturer with a rebate. But I would have been much less generous with my five star review had I had to pay for the service, as everyone is. That's why Amazon as of last year bans that practice.<p>I have myself counseled clients in ecommerce and written email sequence scripts to do just this kind of manipulation. But in the case of this dealership and of most people, is the dealership that is the most efficient at running an email marketing program really the best car dealership in the area by an order of magnitude? While it may be an indicator of the overall professionalism of the company and a signal of business health, it's pretty unrelated to the business of selling cars and servicing them. As a rather clueless car owner, I'm not even really qualified to give an intelligent opinion about the quality of a dealership apart from how I feel about it and whether or not I (rather clueless) think that I was ripped off or not.<p>Why is my unqualified opinion based on that minor interaction worth more than that of someone who really knows a lot about cars, bought a car from that dealership, and has had dozens of service appointments with the mechanic? Why is my dumb 5 star rating worth the same amount as that guy's? It makes no sense.