Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Businesses

Amazon Still Hasn't Fixed Its Problem With Bait-and-Switch Reviews (arstechnica.com) 86

Some sellers on Amazon are tricking the ecommerce platform into displaying thousands of reviews for unrelated products to boost their ranking and mislead customers, ArsTechnica writer Timothy Lee reports. Lee discovered the issue, which has been documented by the media in recent years, after he went to check the review of a drone he had purchased for his children. The product page of drone had glowing reviews for honey. Lee reached out to Amazon, which confirmed that this practice is in violation of its terms and conditions and quickly took down thousands of bogus reviews. He writes: Whatever action Amazon ultimately takes against these particular vendors Amazon's broader efforts leave a lot to be desired. A company shouldn't be able to secure a top slot in search results with such obvious subterfuge.

The top-reviewed drones in Amazon's search results came from brands with names that seemed to be chosen at random. My drone was made by "HONGXUNJIE." Other highly-rated drones on Amazon are made by "SHWD," "Taktoppy," "SimileLine," "Hffeeque," "Mafix," "MINOSNEO," and so forth. Clicking on the names of these "brands" takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products. Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings -- disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they've been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Amazon Still Hasn't Fixed Its Problem With Bait-and-Switch Reviews

Comments Filter:
  • by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:44PM (#60879634)

    so here's the trick. you have to scroll to the end of the reviews (no other way that I've found) and then click on the text link for 'more reviews' (to that effect). then you get to a filter widget where you can select one of the far-right-hand optionmenus and select something along the lines of 'show only reviews for THIS item'.

    on bullshit companies, you'll find that the hundreds of reviews were for dollar bullshit - and the real thing you want has no reviews or actually bad reviews.

    amazon fully knows this. they have more people than almost anyone - they have more money than god - and yet, simple things like this go unfixed.

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      on bullshit companies, you'll find that the hundreds of reviews were for dollar bullshit - and the real thing you want has no reviews or actually bad reviews.

      Fake Amazon reviews seem like an even bigger problem to me.
      Amazon could start from manually reviewing every product that has more than, say 1000 reviews with an average star rating that is higher than 4.95 stars. No real product can hit that score. Only when dozens of 5-star reviews appear on each day.

      • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @04:09PM (#60880074)

        What's really telling is when phone cases have thousands of 4 and 5 star reviews the very same day that the actual phone that it fits came out, some of the reviews with anecdotes of them having and using it for days or even months. You'd think that would be something easily spottable by very basic automation.

        Interestingly, in one such case I left a one star review calling out the rest of the reviews as being fake, and would you guess what Amazon did next? They deleted my review, and all of the fake ones remained, and are probably still there years later. That means an actual person at Amazon looked at my review, and presumably noticed how exactly I called out just how suspect the other reviews were, and did nothing about it. Amazon also took the further step of blocking my account from leaving any more reviews.

        Moral of the story: The star ratings on Amazon are completely useless, and if anything will just lead you in the wrong direction. The only use for the reviews is if you want to find anything potentially wrong with the product before you order it, or if you need confirmation that it operates in a certain way or has any features that aren't advertised.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's important to exercise your consumer rights when this sort of thing happens.

      Here we have Distance Selling regulations which allow us to return stuff free of charge if it is defective, not fit for purpose (wrong type, doesn't do what it says on the box etc.) or not of reasonable quality. Amazon pays return postage and you don't need to return the original packaging either, so don't. That way they can't resell it as new.

      The more this kind of thing costs Amazon the more motivated they will be to do somethi

      • It's important to exercise your consumer rights when this sort of thing happens.

        Even better, stop buying from Amazon. They have shown they are unwilling to remove these reviews, have shown they will promote their own products over others, will steal other people's ideas then prohibit the real product from being sold, and the list goes on.

        People like to complain about all the ills at Amazon, yet few, if any, are willing to do anything about it. If people stopped buying from Amazon, the issues woul
        • by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @04:19PM (#60880090)

          Even better, stop buying from Amazon.

          amazon is interesting: I would never work for them; but being a CUSTOMER is amazing. yes, they stick you for the 'prime' fee every year, but I see it as a tax that gets you stellar cust svc.

          things are lost in the mail or delivered badly - does not matter, amazon credits you, the customer.

          the vendors are horrible, so they HAVE to balance it with great CS. their chat (india) is horrible and useless; but phoning them and getting a person on the phone (trivially easy) - makes things work.

          I've had products come to me in used condition (circuit boards that had user's solder work done to them, stuff like that) and they never question you.

          I got shipped some heavy metal shelves and the quality was poor. they didn't require me to return it (covid lockdown times) and just credited me.

          NO OTHER COMPANY - ever - in my living history (60 years) has come close to this.

          they have to - because many of their vendors are liars and cheaters - but it balances in your favor and you are never stuck. just do your checking in the 30 days, that's all.

          its the only reason I keep going to amazon. and if this changes, then there's zero reason. but for now, there's no one even close.

          oh, and they have their own shipping dept and so dejoy's merry men won't fuck you up.

          dejoy to the world.
          your package didn't come.
          you wont receive a thing!

          (lol)

          • Not to pick nits or anything but this is slashdot, so I'm going to pick nits.

            It sounds like you're saying that Amazon's second tier customer service is very good to make up for really shoddy first tier customer service (actually shipping and selling reliable quality products in the first place). There's certainly some stuff it's hard to find anywhere else, but only some. I almost completely avoid Amazon and i don't generally have to deal with returns in the first place.

            Also in the UK (thanks to the EU so wh

            • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
              Anything up to 5 or 6 years (differs in Scotland) for things you might expect to last that long if it's an inherent flaw and can't be repaired. You can't leave something on the shelf for 4 1/2 years, unopened, and expect to return it, though, if it's defective.
          • but I see it as a tax that gets you stellar cust svc.

            WTF are you talking about. Amazon has no customer service. They have a customer policy which they have automated. The hilarity of it all is that this policy is pretty much no better than legal minimum requirements in many other countries.

            Customer service is having a very specific problem solved for you, and if you've ever hit some strange edge case, such as an account or address problem leading to a shipping error, you'd realise Amazon has *NO* customer service.

          • I've gotten perfect customer service from lots of companies selling on eBay, mostly Chinese, when stuff got lost or arrived in less than pristine conditions. AliExpress is similar. I don't buy anything that's available from local/Western manufacturing, but for stuff that's made in China anyway, why not cut out the middle man.
    • A couple weeks ago Amazon disabled commenting on reviews. They don't want people to be informed. I wouldn't be surprised if they just removed reviews altogether at some point.
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:44PM (#60879638)
    If yes, then why fix it?
    • If yes, then why fix it?

      It can be interpreted as false advertising, to which there are laws against it.

      If Amazon would then take the position of "we don't care" then one could interpret it as assisting in false advertisement. However, Amazon has shown that they do care. It may only not be as much as every individual customer may wish for.

      The problem is about as annoying as chewing gum on the street.

  • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:45PM (#60879642)
    This is a never ending problem until we get some kind of machine intelligence on par with humans. Existing algorithms no matter how good are capable of being gamed by humans that will eventually stumble upon some flaw or weakness and it will take time for a clever human to build a new algorithm that isn't susceptible to this problem.

    I'm sure someone will scream about hiring an actual human to do it, but the labor costs probably don't make it viable given the sheer size of Amazon and the fact that the attack can be automatically done by bots which means humans can't keep up.

    So here we are in an endless game of cat and mouse. Faster mice require more nimble cats which in turn pushes for a quicker mouse and so on down the line.
    • by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya.gmail@com> on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:58PM (#60879696)

      Existing algorithms no matter how good are capable of being gamed by humans

      There is no effort on Amazon's side to try to fix it. I spent a few chats complaining about obviously fake reviews. They fix the ones I complain about, but that is it.
      Things like: 1) dozen+ 5 star reviews appearing on the same day for several days, 2) a product that hits 4.99+ star rating with thousands of reviews.

      • Since they don't have an algorithm that can currently detect these and automatically delete them what are you proposing that they do? Either they respond to complaints from customers or they pay a massive amount of people to constantly and continually read all of the reviews and delete these by hand just to have them crop back up again. It's a game of whack-a-mole against the bot armies that spam them across the site. If there were an easy solution to this problem do you think that a company like Amazon wou
        • Since they don't have an algorithm that can currently detect these and automatically delete them what are you proposing that they do? ...

          Amazon can already identify if a review was made by someone who actually bought the product or if not. So how is this possible, but then it's impossible to identify the rightful product to a review?

          At best does the problem sound like really bad programming by Amazon.

          • Amazon can already identify if a review was made by someone who actually bought the product or if not.

            The review bot can place a fake order for one that's not fulfilled by Amazon, have it "fulfilled" by the manufacturer, and repeat infinitely. Amazon gets a percentage of every fake sale, but no shipping needs to take place.

            • What you've described so far is basically lying or false advertisement by "costumers" who are actually bots.

              But how does it end up being a review for the wrong product? And when they're already faking it then why not fake it for the right product?

              • There's actually a cascade of dozens of issues. I was describing the review for hire scenario where they may not have actually bought it. Sometimes a new "variation" is created that's an entirely different product and the old one taken away - the reviews for both stay. Sometimes all the details on the original variation is changed and you can't tell at all that the review is for a different product.

                • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                  This happens constantly. Amazon needs to be a LOT more proactive about locking down the descriptions of products. Basically, any significant change to more than a certain percentage of the descriptive content should trigger a human at Amazon reviewing the change.

                  If you're making big changes that materially affect the product (as opposed to just improving the description of the same product), you should be required to create a new ASIN.

                  For new versions of the same product, your reviews should start over b

                  • by Xenx ( 2211586 )

                    Basically, any significant change to more than a certain percentage of the descriptive content should trigger a human at Amazon reviewing the change.

                    Are you talking change from initial, change from previous? Plus, small(in size) changes in descriptive text of the product can have large(in scope) changes in what is being sold. For example, a simple change from metal to plastic would make all the difference for a spatula or a case or something.

                    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                      Basically, any significant change to more than a certain percentage of the descriptive content should trigger a human at Amazon reviewing the change.

                      Are you talking change from initial, change from previous? Plus, small(in size) changes in descriptive text of the product can have large(in scope) changes in what is being sold. For example, a simple change from metal to plastic would make all the difference for a spatula or a case or something.

                      I honestly don't know. Either approach potentially flags a lot of legitimate changes and misses a lot of details. You'd probably have to use some sort of machine learning model to try to recognize when changes are semantically meaningful and then flag changes that involve too many semantically meaningful changes. I have no idea what that would look like, though.

                    • by Xenx ( 2211586 )
                      It's definitely not an easy problem to answer, but it doesn't mean they should ignore the problem. But yeah, short of AI advancements the only solution for it right now would be to have a human vet literally every listing and change. I don't think Amazon should just get a pass, but I think requiring every change to be vetted would be a bit much.

                      I don't know the details here, so just me rambling. I would think the best course would be to properly vet the sellers. It'll still let things through, but a strict
                  • you actually get a real product link when you click 'buy it again' ?

                    I just get dogs..

                    all kinds of dogs.

          • My mother gets a bunch of smal tracked packages each mont containing anything from 2 paper facemasks to a tiny roll of garbage bags. On package info it can say anything from waffle iron to drone. And as they are tracked, amazon is happy she got a delivery of said item when she did not. Then the one that orderd in her name puts a 5* review on said waffle iron or what ever product it was and Amazon is happy with that.
        • When it is a person we say that they need to pull themselves up by there boot straps. Fix their own problems, work harder, etc.

          A company does it and we say wow it is just to hard for them. We should let them pass until one day they might fix it. They won't it makes them money. As long as it makes them money and at our expense then all is good with the group that says " it's too hard"

        • Part of the problem is that Amazon doesn't appear to want to do anything about it.

          One thing they could do is make it much, much harder to gain automated/API access to their marketplace. Force new sellers to do things manually until they achieve a certain sales level or make them jump through a bunch of hoops to validate their authenticity, This would at least cripple the intentional, automated fraud.

          They could also require a lot more verification for sellers. Like they would have to go through some kind

          • by Zxern ( 766543 )

            How about a seller rating system along with item reviews the way ebay works. At this point I trust ebay more than I do amazon.

      • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        One of the issues with how much to trust reviews is that Amazon nagging people to leave them results in people leaving 25 reviews for some pretty random stuff, most of which are "5* was good". If you were farming out fake reviews you might get the same. It's why I buy stuff mostly if it has a lot of good reviews, some of which are reasonably wrong. But when ReviewBot5000+ is released, all bets are off.
      • I can assure you they spend millions and millions of dollars a year on these kinds of problems trying very very hard to solve them in a scalable and good way for both the customers and the sellers. The sellers are Amazon customers too; they are trying to use the marketplace to get their goods sold, and it's a delicate balance of trusting buyers and trusting sellers versus forcing them to "prove" things that are very hard to prove sometimes in a system with millions of listed products and dozens of services

    • So here we are in an endless game of cat and mouse. Faster mice require more nimble cats which in turn pushes for a quicker mouse and so on down the line.

      Google's search algorithm is the same. They don't treat it as insurmountable and they make constant tweaks. They don't get it perfect, but generally search results are still very good decades later.

    • This is a never ending problem until we get some kind of machine intelligence on par with humans. Existing algorithms no matter how good are capable of being gamed by humans that will eventually stumble upon some flaw or weakness and it will take time for a clever human to build a new algorithm that isn't susceptible to this problem.

      You're viewing this as if each vendor is a stranger into the system. Yes, that problem is very difficult to solve, but if you add reputation as a dynamic, it becomes much to fix.

      The problem is Amazon doesn't factor in reputation of a vendor. The first easy fix is bot management. We have good bot management from major companies, like Akamai and their competitors. All you have to do is configure the review section to disallow bots and you'll at least make it inconvenient and expensive to scam customer

  • by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:50PM (#60879666)
    I know it's a huge marketplace and generalizations are often inaccurate, but in the past year it seems like Amazon has been overrun by junk products. Almost any product category is dominated by low-cost products that are barely functional. There's a place for cheap stuff in the market, but it seems like that describes the majority of products on Amazon now.
    • Yep, between the BS reviews, the junky products, and the outright counterfeit stuff, Amazon's utility has seriously declined. But people must obviously be buying this stuff. I think I bought more stuff from Best Buy this year than I have in any of the ten previous years. Sure, I might pay a little more (sometimes). But if I want to be sure that I'm getting a genuine product, I simply cannot trust Amazon. There are some products I will simply never buy through Amazon due to the counterfeit problems (memo

      • Yes, similar here. I've bought a lot of stuff from Target. (But I use Paypal to pay, so Target doesn't get my credit card number.)

        Regarding Best Buy, I've noticed a tendency of them to list something as "in stock", but then to give a nine-day wait to pick it up. I think the items in question are not really in stock at the store, but they can get them trucked-in within nine days. Due to that ploy, I'm tending to avoid Best Buy lately.
    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Amazon has slowly started to become AliExpress / Banggood but with faster shipping (sometimes). It's been happening over the past 5 years or so as Amazon expanded to sellers in China. Chinese sellers now outnumber US sellers on Amazon's marketplace. Which is fine for some things, but it makes other categories virtually a no-go on Amazon due to counterfeits or just the sheer volume of the crap products rebranded over and over swamping out other, higher quality products in the category. I tried looking for s
    • I know it's a huge marketplace and generalizations are often inaccurate, but in the past year it seems like Amazon has been overrun by junk products. Almost any product category is dominated by low-cost products that are barely functional. There's a place for cheap stuff in the market, but it seems like that describes the majority of products on Amazon now.

      Perhaps it is partly due to the fact that a sizable portion of the employed world had their livelihood ripped away from them when a viral pandemic took hold of the planet forcing entire industries to close, with the end result being product desperation in one of the worlds largest flea markets.

      Amazon used to be a bookstore. Today, you can buy a prefabricated house on their site. With feature creep like that, they practically asked for this problem.

      • Amazon turned to crap long before Covid hit.

        • Amazon turned to crap long before Covid hit.

          And yet their stock price has never been higher, reflecting what we value.

          It's almost as if we love to wallow around in our own shit.

    • Most of those junk products are the same thing under a different name. Amazon is like walking down a traders market on the cheap end of town.
    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      not just the products, but price.

      Even single thing I've checked for the last month or so that both amazon and Walmart both carried was either the identical price or lower at Walmart.

      And free delivery from Walmart is usually faster than amazon as well, although you have to wait until you have $35 to get it.

      And the Walmart card has the same 5% kickback as amazon (and from the same bank, too).

      I'm going to take a hard look before renewing prime--you only need it for free shopping on small orders (or wait for $3

  • You must be very naive to believe Amazon wants to fix it, and it will eventually fix it.

    Bait-and-switch or the straight-dope, no matter what Amazon gets its cut on the sale. All the bait and switch is accepted by Amazon with a wink and a nod.

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:27PM (#60879774)

    I bought a security camera system earlier this year. I left a good review as I thought it deserved a good review.

    About a week later, I got an email from that seller. They thanked me for the review and sent me a $25 Amazon gift card.

    About a week after that, I got another email. This time it asked if I'd be interested in trying a product. If I purchased the product, they would pay for the entire thing, including tax, PLUS give me an extra $10 if I gave them a five star review. This product was a $70.00 product. They would forward the money straight to my PayPal account. They also went on to add that I would get another $10 for every person I could find that would be into "helping" them get started.

    It became obvious to me how broken Amazon's system was once I saw this. With these types of "Good Feedback" companies, there is no way that Amazon is ever going to get in front of this.

    --
    If you're not cheating, you're not trying. - Eddie Guerrero

    • It became obvious to me how broken Amazon's system was once I saw this. With these types of "Good Feedback" companies, there is no way that Amazon is ever going to get in front of this.

      That's just plain old marketing. It may seem like cheating, but you can always take the money, buy the product and make an honest review. The choice is yours to make.

      This goes for any product from any reseller. If that's the sales guy in the aisle telling you about a product on the shelf, a web review by a blogger, or a costumer on Amazon. It applies to all of them. They can all skew their review. In the end is practically every review biased.

      Some resellers then run promotions for select costumers who get t

  • Stop doing business with Amazon. Bait-and-switch reviews, commingling inventory of OEM with fakes, sleazy business practices and the fact they're the biggest retailer in the world and would like nothing better than to become a monopoly are all good reasons to avoid them.

    • by jonwil ( 467024 )

      The only things I have bought on Amazon have been things I can't find anywhere else (mostly specialized computer books but also a few DVDs that haven't been released officially in Australia)
      I highly doubt someone is going to bother to fake something like "Click Here To Kill Everybody" by Bruce Schneier :)

  • ... ignore Amazon reviews on products.

    If you are going to buy something from Amazon (and you really should look around at other stores first - but good luck with that) - do yourself a favour, don't rely on the Amazon reviews.

    It's not easy though, you can turn to a search engine in an attempt to find more rounded reviews, maybe end up on a YouTube video - and then find the same bullshit is happening there. The reviewer has been sent a free item or is being paid for a good review.

    So, the only decision you can

    • At what point do Amazon actually *have* to do anything about this?

      If I were to arrive at an analogy for Amazon as a market place, I'd pick Marrakesh.
      Let's say the entire Souk is "Amazon" - you pass by multiple stores selling exactly the same merch, at least, on the surface.
      All those store holders have to pay a price to sell their wares - just like they would on Amazon.
      All of them have to rely on marketing and "word of mouth" and ... pretty dodgy stuff to get trade.

      Two different stores are selling spices. On

      • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        At what point do Amazon actually *have* to do anything about this?

        If I were to arrive at an analogy for Amazon as a market place, I'd pick Marrakesh.
        Let's say the entire Souk is "Amazon" - you pass by multiple stores selling exactly the same merch, at least, on the surface.
        All those store holders have to pay a price to sell their wares - just like they would on Amazon.
        All of them have to rely on marketing and "word of mouth" and ... pretty dodgy stuff to get trade.

        Two different stores are selling spices. One is selling the real deal, the other is selling crap (some sell coloured dirt, FFS)
        Guess which the cheaper will be - and the one with the most aggressive hard sell.

        Sure, this is a badly described analogy, but it makes sense - if you view Amazon as a massive global Souk.
        Arguably, they don't really care who sells so long as various terms and conditions are met - it is up to the consumer to do due diligence.

        Is this a good state of affairs? Hell no, it sucks - but it is what it is.

        I don't see Amazon fixing this anytime soon, anymore than those in charge of a Souk in Morocco.

        Buyer, Beware!

        It's even worse than that, though. To expand your analogy, both of those stalls (the one with the real spices and the one with the fake spices) are dumping their spices in a back room and just grabbing a scoop whenever someone buys something. So even if you buy from the real, expensive stall you might still end up with the colored dirt.

  • I would like Amazon to just show country of origin or manufacture as basic item information. It's required on the packaging and item, and if you were to buy it at a brick and motor store you can easily find that information. For some reason on amazon, they don't list that basic required information. Why?

  • Why is the writer oblivious that there are other languages in the world? Has he never heard of "Romanization" or pinyin? Hong xun jie would be a Chinese word. Spelled in pinyin. Obviously the writer is an ignoramus. As is the writer of the excerpt, "Lee discovered the issue, which has been documented by the media in recent years ..." You cannot discover something that has already been discovered. It is like "discovering" the Pacific Ocean when you happened to see it for the first time. Maybe "encounter"? I
  • It's really a shame, because I turn to Amazon reviews of products (even products I don't buy through Amazon) because of the massive amount of data. Basically you have to peruse through the reviews manually to get the realistic overall opinion. However, false positive reviews are not the only issue with their review system - there also unfair and inaccurate negative reviews as well.

    For Christmas I purchased a sewing machine locally as a gift. I checked Amazon's reviews of that machine before purchasing, an

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @03:34PM (#60879942)

    How could you *ever* judge their reliability?
    Did anyone review that review and that reviewer?
    How about *that* reviewer of reviewers? And so on.

    You demanding to only see reviews that vaguely feel real, will only mean manipulating you becoming more sneaky. You are training the neural net, essentially. It is almost completely unrelated to their actual trustworthiness. And since you do not personally know the reviewers, you will never be able to tell. (But feel good because they all look believable ... while being ripped off.)

    If you are grown-up, and still believe "reviews", you need to take your meds, man!
    That's worse than still believing in Santa!

    • You can get a sense of trustworthiness in reviews. If they say "great product!" it's worthless. If it says "this one has a fragile plastic bit on it, sucks compared to $other_brand which is made of solid metal", you can look at it and make a better decision.

      Review scores, especially in aggregate, are pretty worthless as it is. Trying to filter based on the above hints of credibility will just train the neural net, as you say, and it'll get harder to spot them. But for the time being, you as an individua

    • If you are grown-up, and still believe "reviews", you need to take your meds, man!
      That's worse than still believing in Santa!

      Just because you as an adult can't tell the red man at the mall apart from the mythical being that visited everyone 6 days ago doesn't mean that normal functioning adults aren't easily able to tell the difference between legit reviews and farmed ones.

      I mean ... maybe you should take less meds, they seem to be clouding your judgement.

      Actually heavy medication may explain a lot of the posts you make.

  • I ran into this before, the reviews were for something completely different than what was being sold, and there is no clear way to report it. I was resorting to reviewmeta and fakespot for a while, but they're getting muddled up (actually, fakespot became useless all on it's own, due to changes that were made to hide all meaningful insight). Anyway, Amazon reviews have really become completely worthless, because of -
    1. Sellers gaming the system.
    a. Switching the product associated with

  • Its a single product being sold by 10s of individuals each with their own product name. One manufacturer makes the product (in China), then 100s of 'entrepreneurs' buy a handful or hundred - maybe with their unique name stamped on it - maybe not - and has them drop shipped to Amazon Fulfillment in the US. Hope you didn't want a warranty. When your search result is diluted by the same product under a bunch of different named results, it is hard to find the quality items.

    Example, I recently got into basic
  • For instance, the performance of SSDs often increases with capacity, yet the reviews are grouped. Amazon's reviews will be false bullshit until they stop people from giving a product zero stars.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'd like to have Amazon display, and be able to filter on, country of origin. It isn't always possible, but I'd like a way to NOT see products made in the "People's" "Republic" of China.

  • Amazon could cure about 90 per-cent of the problems by instituting an Amazon guaranteed trusted supplier program. Suppliers woulde have to register and pass a screening process gain the endorsement, and would maintain it by maintainnig a set level of customer satisfaction, based on feedback from known product purchasers only.

    In turn, Amazon would stand behind anyone they designate as trusted. Include a new quick and fair Amazon-run arbritration process for customer disputes with "trusted suppliers".

    Of cour

  • Probably they originally sold one cheap product (honey), amassed a ton of 5-star reviews for that product, and then updated their listing for a completely different product (drone).
  • Any positive review, no matter how real, may still be from someone uncritical or to whom something isn't important which I care about a lot. The negative reviews are more telling, possibly about aspects that I don't care about, but where I can say, if that's negative about this product but nothing else, it will do okay for me. Or even the opposite, I once went to a hotel because a young couple rated it "1* catastrophic, loud kids running around and no one seemed to mind"... Yeah, our kids were young, and th

Do you suffer painful hallucination? -- Don Juan, cited by Carlos Casteneda

Working...