Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives.
Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.
Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.
Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.
I'm sure Amazon has some smart people looking at the numbers on this, but as just one anecdata, my family has been buying a ton of stuff from Amazon since they were just books. Now we buy things that are repeat purchases or a couple of trusted brands (e.g. Amazon Basics or Anker). For bigger purchases (like a medium-basic coffee machine) we're either looking at Costco and Target, or researching a lot on Consumer Reports. Wirecutter used to be good, but hard to trust these days too.
We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...
When it comes to Amazon reviews you never go by the average you go to scroll down to the actual reviews and read what the one and two star reviews are complaining about and decide if that is acceptable assuming it will happen with your purchase, IMHO.
Sort reviews by new. It’s amazing how many “5 star” items have an average of 2-3 stars when you look at the latest reviews.
I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.
I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.
I change the sort URL parameter from &s=review-rank to &s=review-count-rank and tend to put more weight against products with thousands of decent reviews; if nothing in the category has hundreds of reviews, that's a sign to look elsewhere. Perhaps false optimism or a flawed heuristic, but seems to work out for certain categories of stuff.
A lot of reviews raise a red flag in my mind. Particularly, for products which are new. I’ve been burnt with counterfeit and low quality products with a large number of reviews.
Also just anecdata, but I’m the same way. I don’t mind buying commodity goods off of Amazon, but if I need to know that I’m truly getting product X of brand Y, I now typically go elsewhere, because I just cannot trust that I’m not going to get a counterfeit product. Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon. That may not seem overwhelming, but it’s enough to break my confidence.
Same. I thought if you bought directly from Amazon instead of a third party seller, then you'd be safe from counterfeits. But it turns out they just mix all the third party stock in with the first party
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...
So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now
Get SD cards from B&H or Adorama. They serve the pro photographer community, who are ferocious about storage quality largely thanks to war stories from 20 years ago when flash memory really was a crapshoot - also why any new camera body released with only one card slot provokes a million old dudes to fuss about that one wedding shoot they lost in 2003 or whatever. But in this case it's to your benefit, since the media you get from those sellers will be what they say it is.
(I get mine from Micro Center. Kinda feel bad about not going to my local camera store, but the guy who owns the place doesn't really seem at home with technology. I don't even know if they carry UHS-II cards, but I get all my used gear there, and with the margin on that stuff it's not like I'm hurting them by getting a $80 SD card elsewhere...)
the question really is whether buying brand name goods vs consumables is a bigger market.
amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.
> Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon.
What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:
Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?
Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.
> Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself
Does it matter ? I go to amazon.com, I give my money to Amazon, I receive a package from Amazon, so for me (and the average user) the one selling me a counterfeit is Amazon.
Yeah, this whole "marketplace" thing needs to die. I'm watching the exact same thing taking place in real time with a local shopping website that has started including external sellers and "facilitating" or "fulfilling" the order for them through their marketplace. One of the main things I'm noticing is that this "marketplace", as with Amazon, is being flooded with Chinese, unbranded knockoffs with fake pictures. Each actual product * every conceivable variation/renaming of product * every seller willing to sell it = huge explosion in products. (Okay, exaggerating a bit for effect there, but true to some extent).
The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".
I see it and treat more like a platform now, a marketplace. Like ebay. It just so happens that one of the biggest sellers there is Amazon itself. My usual process of buying - search for the product I need (generic term for simple items, or exact model), click on "prime only", this filters out a lot of shipments from China. Then either filter out, or carefully look at the seller of each product. Takes some time and getting used to, especially that UI isn't favouring this workflow.
Stock commingling means that you may buy a product that's sold and shipped by Amazon and still get some other seller's counterfeit. That seller simply claims to sell the same product as Amazon, with the same product code, and places it into an Amazon warehouse. Amazon will ship from the place closest to you so they might just ship what they think is the correct item from another seller's stock even if it's actually a counterfeit, and do the clearing later. They later assign one genuine item from the Amazon stock in another warehouse to the seller's stock.
As a buyer you have no control over this and Amazon does their best to be opaque and not allow buyers to publicly flag issues beyond a return and refund because it would reflect poorly on Amazon's image and make them look like peddlers of cheap knockoffs.
If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying then yes, it matters, it is your fault to be that careless.
> If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying
I'm buying from Amazon. From my point of view the other company is not more than a supplier.
If I am the one at fault is not really the point. I will learn my lesson and shop elsewhere, in the end it is Amazon that suffers: if I shop from a big brand's website I expect them to be the ones to do the job of filtering out the crap, not me.
(And this is not even taking into account the issues of amazon commingling the inventory and not fighting properly the fake reviews)
What I hear you saying is that Amazon can't be trusted to police their own marketplace, their brand is worse than worthless in that it is an active signal of distrust, and I might as well go to eBay - actually I might better go to eBay, who have much more experience with this same problem and are much more likely to address it effectively. Duly noted.
Maybe if Amazon made it easier for buyers to filter out marketplace vendors, or didn't automatically co-mingle inventory between themselves and Fulled by Amazon vendors, it would be a lot easier to cut them some slack?
If I use "marketplace", the company that appears on the credit card bill is Amazon. So they're the one with the contractual relationship and who should be held responsible.
Definitely, if it's food or health/medical, I'll skip Amazon & buy it from Target or Walmart directly (not a 3rd party seller on their platforms). Other categories like memory cards, kids products, I'll also avoid Amazon (especially since Amazon reviews of those products often claim they received a fake).
The online version of Walmart now sources from a range of suppliers like Amazon does. I was tracking down the supplier of a used laptop and discovered an eBay posting with exactly the same text and photos.
This might also be helping their Amazon brands. Easy to stand above the crowd in terms of quality this way. Also, they have all the data they need to target the most profitable / fragmented segments.
I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, some of it I know is a cheap knockoff, but at least I’m paying cheap knockoff prices.
But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.
Amazon is basically my last resort these days. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic means there are times where I can’t justifying going out to buy something. But I wonder if they’ll be taking a bigger than expected hit once things clear up.
Maybe there is a big difference between the US and Europe, but here the only things I can't find anywhere but amazon are typically the cheap Chinese knockoff things (e.g. new cushions for my bose headphones), for everything else there always is a cheaper solution by going with one of the smaller online retailer.
That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.
Even here in Europe, Amazon still has the monster competitive advantage of Prime. If not for that, I would probably be buying all my gear from Saturn, Mediamarkt, etc.
It's also worth nothing that European Amazon has waaaay less stuff available in general than US Amazon.
Sorry, what? The situation we're complaining about is more like this:
> Steve can't normally afford nice things, but he saves up to buy a nice coffee maker on Amazon, paying close to $100 and expecting to receive a product that will last decades. However, Steve receives a counterfeit product in the mail that breaks just a few days after the return window.
With most of these products, you're paying full price but getting an inferior product in return.
My mother-in-law no longer buys anything of significance from Amazon after being burned with counterfeit materials.
I carefully check reviews, use fakespot, etc.
There is a point where the eroding of trust will be significant enough to affect the bottom line. Eventually most people know to not trust Amazon reviews, soon it will be.
Likewise. If I see that there are ten sellers for what is (often very obviously) the exact same thing, I know it's crap and the reviews are fake. This would be so easy for Amazon to detect and filter themselves, but they don't. As it is, I end up having to click through to the second or third page of results before I even find anything unique enough to be worth running through fakespot/reviewmeta.
Here’s an example from real life just last week. Clorox ToiletWand Refill. Go look on Amazon, I’ll wait here. You’ll find many different sellers, some obviously “third party”, and some that look original but when you delve into the reviews you find stuff like this: https://imgur.com/9vyE8kq
I didn’t want to buy a toilet cleaner that would fall apart and make me fish it out of the toilet, so we went and got them from Target instead.
Amazon needs to separate out the ebay-style new/used peer-to-peer marketplace from the more trusted "Sold by Amazon" stuff.
Both marketplace types are useful (especially for books), but consumer goods need some kind of notice when you're buying from anyone other than Amazon.
I don't understand why counterfeiting isn't just an immediate ban for the vendor. Isn't this a huge liability risk? Or do the get some protection because they're just the "marketplace", like a common carrier?
Amazon comingles inventory. I doubt Amazon knows which vendor supplied the product that was reported as a counterfeit. Even if they did what would stop someone from opening BarCo after Amazon closes FooCo's account?
A lot of the time it's stupid things like advertising a product is glass or crystal when it's actually clear plastic. I got burned by that once. I've also seen manufacturers get burned when they put their branded merchandise up on Amazon only to have a clone/ copy sell under the same SKU. The manufacturer ends up fielding the returns, getting the 1 star reviews, and has little ability to prevent the copycat products.
It's not always "Nike" or some big brand, often it's smaller brands who have built up a reputation but don't have the legal team to fight with Amazon and protect their product from pirates.
Certain things it's impossible to avoid - I'm trying to buy 18650 batteries for a flashlight and it's overwhelming trying to find legit sellers. There are some classes of products where it's really hard to tell what's real (reviews not matching product description, obviously fake 5-star and 1-star reviews etc.)
This is where independent resellers via Shopify, their own cart system, etc. have a chance. There's no way to be sure you're getting a real battery from Amazon so I always buy this type of thing from a community-trusted independent vendor that has a real account with authorized suppliers.
It might cost more in shipping and delivery time, but it's strongly preferable to having my desk catch fire due to missing or defective safety components, which are very common among knockoffs. At least there's someone to sue if that happens with an authentic battery.
Shopify is a clusterfu*k of scripted random generated pop-up stores that have no intention of delivering what they promise, most shopify stores are worse than wish.com in my experience
Yup, I've completely abandoned Amazon for ANY kind of battery, and other categories of products (and I've been buying from Amazon for two decades).
I last (foolishly) tried again a few weeks ago for some SR44 cells. Should be easy, right? Nope, after digging into scores of bogus products and reviews, Fakespot, etc., it was just obvious that there are zero trustworthy products in that category. I found another battery specialist supplier, even tho they had a bit longer lead time and no free shipping.
(and don't even get me started on Amazon's lame search and sorting functions)
Totally agree about the searching. I've considered seeing if Amazon has anything resembling an API, or if using some kind of screen-scraping was possible to create an overlay app that would do actually usable searching, but figure they'd just shut it down legally or technically, since good searching is obviously not what they want. It is so obvious that they don't want good searching that the structure their databases in such a way as to ensure that the result is what I call Data-Mush. E.g., the size and weight of the item needs to be two separate sets of fields, clearly identified for the dims/weight of the item itself, and the dims/weight of the packaged item. Yet there is zero consistency or clarity on even that most basic data. Yuk
On the batteries, even the common 18650 is a hopeless cause, at least if we want to get a battery that is what it claims.
A long time ago, it was useful to sort by average review, but now, I need to look at summing the percentage of 1+2-star reviews, and eliminating the high scores, then among the least-bad, check those for bad reviews (e.g., shipping failure, not the vendor's fault, etc.).
It has become a massive chore to use Amazon and hope to get something that is not crap, so evidently, the management there is optimizing for quantities of crap over quality.
Not sure how much this will help for batteries but I've found it helpful for other products, go to the manufacturer's site and try to find a list of authorized distributors. Most of the time you'll find that an authorized distributor also has an amazon store front. Not sure if it still avoids the stock co-mingling problem though if it is stocked through an amazon warehouse.
As a little experiment for other HN readers out there, try this:
Pick out a few random words here: https://www.randomlists.com/random-words . Put those few random words into Amazon's search bar and then order the list from most to least expensive. Then scroll down a bit. This should give you a pretty good selection of a random set of 'real' items. Do this, say, 3-4 times to get ~10 random items not influenced by your search history (presumably). Open them up in new tabs for easier organization. Now, go into a few of those items and try to say that they are 100% not 'fraudulent'.
How many could you get through before you gave up in frustration? Personally I got to about 5 before I gave up trying to determine if they were junk or not.
A big one. I used to spend a lot of money on textbook-grade books from Amazon, but I've mostly stopped now. There's a veritable deluge of people reporting getting copies that are obviously Xeroxed, or photo scanned and printed on cheap paper. It's just not worth the risk.
Considering that after almost 25 years there is still no functionality for reporting listings as being fraudulent or counterfeit, that tells you exactly where amazon's priorities lie.
As soon as they implement that feature they'll be swamped with reports on every product regardless of whether it's fake or not. Rival sellers will use it to try to monopolise a product, annoyed customers will use it to take revenge on genuine sellers, and occasionally people will report an actual fake. Unless it's much better than a simple report function it won't work.
I'm sure some do, happens in the restaurants and hotel ratings systems, too (yelp, Google, trip advisor).
It would be interesting to know how often this happens compared to buying the 5 star reviews. My guess would be that the fake negative reviews for competitors are less than 10% of the total fake reviews.
If you look at the review average, Amazon skews the numbers anyway. It’s a weighted average.
If they sorted this out and the average reviews started to drop, they could very easily adjust this algorithm and never tell anyone and they’d be fine. I don’t think this is the problem
> Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star.
Do they? It's not immediately clear that an Amazon where the average item has 4.7 stars would sell more stuff than an Amazon where the average is 4.2 stars. Consumers mostly compare items against others on the same site and it's possible that all grade inflation does is make the top performing items harder to separate out and makes buying harder.
As a counterpoint, Uber suffers from ridiculous grade inflation and it doesn't appear to have made riders love them any more. It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
> It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't use Uber, is this an exaggeration or meant pretty much literally? (Not with regard to running away screaming... but is 4.8 genuinely a terrible score?)
"If your average rating falls below a 4.3 after your first 25 trips, your profile will be deactivated and you will need to take a quality improvement course in order to be considered for reactivation."
I had a driver once in Poland who told me she was avoiding Asian riders because they didn't give 5* scores, while other customers did, and it was affecting her rating. For some reason in western countries it's assumed no problems == 5*. Would be good if there was a baseline to be able to separate what is "alright, nothing to complain but nothing special either" and "exceptional".
My local Toyota dealer has contacted me after I've used them for a service to ask that I give 5/5 on the feedback form that I get sent. They say that if they get lower than 5 from a few customers, they get a visit from head office. But 5 is "excellent" while 4 is "good", and being British, I tend to go with "good" when they did just what I asked.
Yeah. "All went well" should be a totally acceptable base line, with room above and below. (especially since the "above range" can be quite subjective and/or down to luck)
Jesus Christ. What's even the point of a 5-star system then? It should be a very simple two option system. Was the ride safe? Did you get where you were going? Then hit the thumbs up button. Otherwise hit the thumbs down button. Or even better, no rating system at all and just provide the option to file reports in bad cases, with that report information being made public in some sense. This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive. When people took cabs, nothing like this happened. A cab pulled up, you got in, they drove, if they tried to take a long route you complained, then you paid your money and got out. End of transaction. Most were good, some were bad. The fact that the cabbie was able to hold and maintain their job was the source of trust you needed to have confidence you would arrive intact.
> This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive.
I find that especially annoying because I don't want to be entertained. I want to get from point A to point B while minding my own business (looking through the window if I'm in a new city or reading something on my phone if not). I don't want to hear about the driver's cryptocurrency adventures, and I don't want them to apologise to me if some other driver cuts them off or something.
Of course I'm gonna give them five stars regardless because I know how ride shares work.
Amazon has become exceedingly dishonest over the last few years.
They deleted my negative review of the Kindle with no explanation or recourse.
Since maybe November, a couple of things I've ordered (shipped and sold by Amazon) were listed as new but were very clearly used. One of these items was a piece of safety-critical equipment that was dangerously damaged and could very likely have caused death or dismemberment if someone with less experience had received the item and tried to use it. I assume some clueless Amazon warehouse worker eyeballs returns and tries to figure out if they can plausibly trick the customer into thinking it's a new item, and if so they put it back up for sale as "new".
I don't know about elsewhere, but Amazon India has been slowly phasing out returns for replacements. It used to be fairly easy to get a return on Amazon, but now almost every product I've bought in the past year or so (and that's a lot of stuff in a variety of categories, thanks to the pandemic) has been replacement-only. If someone gets a fake product, I doubt they'll look for a "replacement", so I'm not sure switching to a return% will be good enough either.
This is, of course, in addition to other issues with removing reviews, such as lacking nuance on why something was returned, etc. I've seen some stellar reviews on Amazon that went out of their way to list the minutiae of a product and the experience of using it, and that's helped me out a lot in the past.
In a way, before Amazon you effectively did have 'quality, curated reviews' - in the form of what products brick and mortar stores chose to stock. Most decent stores aren't going to stock complete garbage, so if you found an item with the attributes you're looking for, it would probably work.
This comment isn't entirely without merit. If Amazon could guarantee the genuineness of every product and description, and delivery times, is there any need for star ratings? Reviews are better because it's easier to differentiate between fake and real reviews for now ( as fake reviews usually contain grammatically incorrect sentences, multiple copies with different names etc )
That's what we have done at the marketplace I'm running in the UK. There are no seller ratings and users are encouraged to share feedback.
No please don’t Netflix the Amazon reviews. There is a huge advantage in granularity. Everything in life isn’t so binary, where you either loved or hated it. There is so much gray area in between that makes ratings useful. Netflix neutered their whole rating system when they introduced the thumbs up and down system.
There are lots of weird things that happen in reviews (from real people). I've often come across three-star reviews which say:
"Product was awesome, but shipping took three days, not one".
There are other reviews I've found useful, for example ones that point out minor flaws. That ability would be lost if you had a simple "good/bad" reaction only.
Because the truth is that the reviews are probably almost all fake. Who the f**k IRL takes the time to log back in and leave a product review when the product arrives? I've never done it, and I used to buy from Amazon quite a lot.
This is somewhat true. I review only when am highly impressed or thoroughly disgusted with a product. So-so products where I got more or less what I hoped for, and which is not too highly differentiated from alternatives, I don't bother with reviewing them.
This was what most people did when they bought things online even 15 years ago. I used to leave reviews for almost everything in the 90s and early 2000s. Amazon was a community. At some point of scale that changed.
Disruption often means to offer an alternative, better solution to a poorly solved problem. You seem to be suggesting we don't try and solve the product validation problem at all!
Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.
Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.
Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.