Are Amazon Seller Ratings Trustworthy?

I don't know if this person's complaints about the way Amazon treated his negative seller review are representative. If true, it's very shortsighted because it will hurt Amazon if their customers find that highly rated sellers consistently give them bad service.<p>However, he should also ask for a refund directly from Amazon (under their A-to-z Guarantee). Amazon is very good about giving refunds, even from third party sellers, and doing so would probably put more pressure on the seller as well. The guarantee specifically says:<p>"If a seller has clearly misrepresented the condition or details of an item in a way that affects its value or utility, it is "materially different." In such cases, that seller should be willing to offer a refund or exchange when contacted within 14 days of receiving the item."

I think that this is probably a fluke. Amazon is not in the habit of sacrificing long-term values such as their reputation for a short-sighted gain.<p>Jeff Bezos has explicitly claimed this in similar situations in the past:<p>"Indeed, some of the most important things Amazon has done have seemed like tactical losers to established companies who were looking at the short term. But Amazon has always been fixated on improving the consumer experience regardless of conventional wisdom, according to Bezos’s comments in HBR: 'In the very earliest days (I’m taking you back to 1995), when we started posting customer reviews, a customer might trash a book and the publisher wouldn’t like it. I would get letters from publishers saying, ‘Why do you allow negative reviews on your website? Why don’t you just show the positive reviews?’ One letter in particular said, ‘Maybe you don’t understand your business. You make money when you sell things.’ But I thought to myself, We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.'"<p><a href="http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-innovates-lessons-in-strategy-for-microsoft-and-others/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-innovat...</a>

I do hate that Amazon seems to remove negative reviews so easily (I think the same goes for book reviews as well) but I also wish that people would only leave a negative review after they unsuccesfully tried everything with the seller. It seems like this person order the wrong product (though the description was accurate, so this was not the seller's fault), waited a few weeks for a refund, but never communicated the not-arrival of the refund and his frustrations with the seller.<p>The seller sounds really unprofessional, but many of us here have businesses that sometimes screw things up and I am glad when people let me know when I do, instead of shouting on the internet that I suck.

That pretty much means that most Amazon ratings are bullshit.

There's now a followup blog post at <a href="http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-seller-ratings.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-selle...</a>. Amazon contacted her and offered the usual story (it was an inexperienced employee, various people screwed up, the issues involved have been escalated), and she's giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I'd just like to point out that this:<p>&#62;they are far more concerned with keeping their (sic) Sellers happy (sic) then their customers.<p>is based on a mistaken premise. The customers of Amazon <i>are</i> the sellers. It's the <i>buyers</i> who the author wants to claim are being screwed by Amazon. Sellers are where Amazon makes its money (unless you happen to buy directly from Amazon).

I'd like to see more than one data point before coming to any conclusions.