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Amazon Bans Incentivized Reviews Tied To Free Or Discounted Products (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon -- not the seller or vendor -- to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process. Amazon has historically prohibited compensation for reviews -- even going so far as to sue those businesses who pay for fake reviews, as well as the individuals who write them, in an effort to make its review and rating system fairer and more helpful to online shoppers. However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their "honest" review. The only condition was that those reviewers would have to disclose their affiliation with the business in question in the text of their review. Reviewers were generally offered the product for free or at a discounted price, in exchange for their review. Although, in theory, these reviewers could write their true opinion on the product -- positive or negative -- these incentivized reviews have tended to be overwhelmingly biased in favor of the product being rated. Amazon says that, going forward, the only incentivized reviews will be those from Amazon Vine. These don't work the same way, however. For starters, Amazon selects who will be allowed to review products, and it does so mainly to boost the review count on new or pre-release products that haven't yet generated enough sales to have a large number of organic reviews. Vine reviewers are invited to join the program only after having written a number of reviews voted as "helpful" by other customers, and tend to have expertise in a specific product category. In addition, vendors don't have any contact with Vine reviewers, nor do they get to influence which reviewers will receive their products, which are submitted directly to Amazon for distribution. These changes will apply to all product categories other than books, as Amazon has always allowed advance copies of books to be distributed, the retailer notes.
UPS didn't ring doorbell.
It's becoming almost impossible to trust the reviews, so maybe this will help a little bit.
This is unfair. My daugher writes fake Amazon reviews to put herself through college. Now she will have no choice but to work as a stripper instead.
The write-up equates "incentivized" with "fake" and that's just not true. A conflict of interest is a challenge, but does not automatically invalidate the result — otherwise any politician promising things like "ending poverty" should be run out of town as a faker, for he obviously has a conflict of interest between his promise today and his next election.
That said, I too tend to discount those — reviews and politicians — and vote them down.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Banning the vendors would have been the prudent thing to do for people paying for reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
While the disclaimers were always quite clear, as noted in the summary, the reviews I read were all very positive. Want free stuff? Keep the review positive like the seller intended. You just can't avoid it. Better to allow it all.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Amazon has not in any way, shape or form "banned incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products". Amazon has banned such reviews being conducted by third-parties, because it wants a larger slice of the pie for itself.
Incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products are not just allowed, but remain actively encouraged by Amazon -- it just requires the vendor to use its Vine program, giving it more control over who gets chosen, and likely some program-related fees from the vendor too.
I was getting worried until that last sentence. I read an advance copy of a book about a month back, and literally just an hour ago the author sent an email saying the book had been published and letting us advance readers know we could now post. I was starting to think it was pretty odd timing, if I got shot down before I had a chance to get over there and post a review.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
If you believe that, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you. Amazon is in the business of selling products. The more positive a review is, the more products it will sell. More than anyone, Amazon has a conflict of interest in choosing which products get reviews, and who writes those reviews.
for a free or discounted product. I think about half of my reviews are negative or neutral, and I avoid doing reviews on things like vitamins that will produce nothing but expensive urine.
Speaking of Amazon and Yelp in the same post -- both have removed the unhelpful mod (Amazon doing this only a few months ago). So now one can't down-mod a comment. Some end up with a suspicious lack of up-mods, but that is all the information we get.
This all sounds a lot like FaceBooge. Down-mods hurt sales, apparently.
Oh, look, rose-colored glasses are on sale!
I come here for the love
Amazon is in the business of selling products that don't leave a bad taste in the mouths of Amazon customers. They have a vested interest in removing shitty products from their site, as the shitty products reflect poorly upon the Amazon brand. Honest and objective reviews, insulated from retribution by the seller, are a good thing.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Amazon was the first retailer to invite accurate reviews of its products and it clearly carries very poorly reviewed products. I doubt they are without bias, of course. They stated it was in their long term interests to allow accurate reviews. They implemented it in the face of serious complaints on the parts of their sellers. Given their track record, it seems cheap to call bullshit so quickly.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
Reviews for low cost objects were getting pointless. If you search for something, the most "relevant" search would show an item with 350 reviews. 340 of those reviews were "incentivized." It was getting ridiculous. I would search through pages of reviews for any that were real customers. I started looking elsewhere for my online reviews and shopping.
Well, that's a great big ole lie and rates pretty low. By far the most common and frequent review is from pissed off customers. I have been to many a review site and pretty much the majority of reviews are pissed off customers. The other really popular review is the one off direct from advertising review, there are a huge number of them (interestingly enough many of those one off review will occur on the same day within minutes of each other). There are the paid pennies to review slime but there really aren't all that many of them, they lie for others and so they should not be surprised when they get lied to and do not get paid, super high churn. There are also paid negative views to attack competing products, they come off due to particular style a being actual employees of competing companies.
The pissed off reviewers often go back to write further reviews, so a greater number of genuine reviews are floating around in the cess pool of fake reviews. Reviewing slowly but surely seem to becoming more popular, a hobby for consumers to indulge in for a few minutes at a time, brickbats and bouquets time, unhappy with a supplier and it's product let them know in the most painful way possible, happy instead, then reward them.
Keep in mind genuine product reviews destroy billions of dollars worth of bullshit advertising and that alone is fun and worthwhile. Want to clean up reviews, easy allow people to block reviewers they do not like and eliminate them for personalised ratings.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I go to amazon largely because it has reviews that are not curated by the OEM. The free products were breaking that. This brings it back.
Amazon doesn't want to sell you crap, they want to sell you something in the product category that you are looking for. They are best off if you know what you are in for when you buy (so you won't return) and get the best one so you are happy with amazon.
Since Amazon has clearly clobbered the bogeyman of honest reviews in exchange for a discount, maybe now they can DO something about the fraud that is co-mingling.
For those not up to speed, co-mingling takes place when various suppliers all certify they have x number of identical products and they ship these items to Amazon who then holds them for fulfillment. As far as Amazon is concerned, the items supplied by Larry are the same as those supplied by Sara so the items get pooled together and orders are filled by whichever one makes sense to Amazon.
The problem is, a LOT of vendors are faking it, certifying other products are the same or supplying counterfeit versions. Suppose you order a bottle of Coke. Larry and Sara both sell Coke on Amazon and both of them ship the bottles to Amazon and Amazon then fills the orders. But Sara hasn't supplied a REAL Coke, no she's sent in some store brand drink.
You order a Coke on Amazon from Larry's store. Amazon says well, we have 15 Cokes in stock, and Larry's are the same as Sara's so we'll send you one from Sara's supply since it's closer to you. Your Coke arrives and you spew it all over the place when it turns out to be store brand and not the real Coke. So you leave a bad review! Larry has shipped you fake coke and he's cheating! His reputation takes a pounding and he doesn't even know why.
Larry is then put in the spot of trying to make things right with you even though HIS Cokes were fine and it was Amazon who shipped you the fake one. Amazon does zero policing to validate products are what they say, so Sara gets away with it.
This sort of fraud is happening all the time now. Legit vendors are faced with bad reviews for fake products they didn't supply, but they have to turn around and make the customer happy or else Amazon penalizes them for negative reviews and bad feedback.
The fake suppliers don't care because they don't get caught very often and even if they do, they just toss the account and make a new one, and of course they never had legit merchandise to sell anyway so any sales that DO take place stand odds to be fulfilled with the real merchandise.
Amazon is doing nothing to fix this and thousands of honest vendors are being slammed with bad reviews about fake or counterfeit or dangerous products that got co-mingled into the system.
Sig for hire.
Amazon's naive to think that banning incentive-driven reviews will make them go away. Of course they'd like to think that all vendors will transition to Vine, but more likely they'll just go underground - when they're not marked, readers can't adjust their interpretation based upon the information, nor can they be studied statistically. Vendors will also get suckered into participating in underground paid reviewing, increasing their real sales costs, and run the risk of losing the invested money when they get caught.
There's been several comments about "co-mingling" of products. I'd agree that we, and Amazon, should be concerned about that, too. Amazon could address the co-mingling issue for reviews that are connected to a purchase by identifying the vendor associated with that purchase, just as when products are lumped together, the reviews have a notation as to which of the several products are reviewed. Amazon needs to go even further, and separate the star rating average by product and vendor as appropriate. Probably, it would help identify poor vendors more quickly.
Anyone who frequents Amazon has been aware of this issue for some time.
I run in to it all the time since I started working on rebuilding a 50cc Chinese moped using nothing but parts from Amazon. If the reviews on a product look too good to be true, then you need to take a look at the individual reviews and look only at "Amazon Verified Reviews". Those are the people that actually either paid for the product or were selected directly by Amazon to review the product.
It's not really that difficult. In fact, Amazon has a better review system than most other sites do, at least they tell you when the review is verified.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
As for your problem -- The worst offenders are batteries and razor blades. Expensive items that can be faked by experienced Chinese manufacturers and added to Amazons cache. I will never buy those on Amazon!
I have also run into similar issues where one third party seller whose items are "fullfilled by Amazon" gets good reviews for a product like branded vacuum cleaner bags. Then a shady other seller sees the good reviews and lists their product on the same page. But they substitute inferior crappy generic vacuum bags. Then you have a situation where some of the reviews are 5 star and the rest are 1 star and it all comes down to the seller. I end up having to ask the 5 star people over and over again in the comments, who their seller is. This is ridiculous! And I am aware of the problem. Most people just get ripped off for a product they thought had 5 star reviews. Amazon should fix this.
I have been seeing hundred of reviews where the title is "X stars" and the text is something less than 7 words, like "I like it".
Is Amazon somehow forcing this?
People will far more likely bitch about a product or service they're not happy with than recommend one which they like. I can't remember the exact proportion, but its about 1 to 5. So if you're unhappy you'll go tell 5 people, if you are you tell 1.
With this in mind, if you see any product with review averages in the 4 and 5 stars you *know* it has to be fake. The very fact that vendors pay for positive reviews only confirms this. They're - naturally - getting many more negative reviews than positive ones so they go pay someone to write something nice about their stuff so people will want to buy it.
This is in Amazon's interest, too, but only if it doesn't get out of hand, which apparently it has. People are skeptical about reviews and loudly complaining that false endorsement led them to buy things that turn out to be crap. Its happened to me.
So if you leave things go their 'natural' course you get too much negativity which is not representative and yet harms sales, and if you do paid reviews you get too much enthusiasm which ultimately harms sales, too, the logical thing to do is to just get rid of consumer reviews altogether and rely on traditional advertising which we consumers have learned to interpret so as to form a relatively accurate picture of what to expect.
I bought a tripod and wasn't impressed with it. So I left my thoughts in a review. The manufacturer contacted me and told me they were aware of the problems and working on a new version. They offered to send me the next model up and asked if I'd "update my review." I agreed and updated it to reflect them standing behind their product (didn't change my thoughts on the tripod itself), which I think is important in the buying process. I've left negative reviews for companies doing the exact opposite.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Actually I've been complaining a lot to Amazon about external addresses contacting me asking for Amazon reviews in exchange for a discount. There was a vendor selling a type of metal thermos with a handle held on by two rings for $30, giving me a $15 discount; I found another manufacturer making an identical thing and selling it for $16. I started pointing out to Amazon that they were giving me a "discount" on a product with an inflated price, which seems to suggest they'd make a profit anyway--JC Penny strategy, plus free review under favorable terms.
Vine requires you to provide a free product, and marks the review as a Vine review. Amazon gets to see the review was a Vine review; and they mediate everything, so if you post a negative review and the seller tries to retaliate, Amazon is well-aware of what went on with the review business. They don't get to contest or remove bad reviews, and they don't get to ply for profits by offering discounts on overpriced products.
I've been waiting for Amazon to come down on these people for over a year. I am, in fact, signed up for Vine; just nobody actually uses it, because they have to send a free product instead of giving you a $10 discount on a $20 product that cost them $8 to sell.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The situation has gotten to the point where there are websites like fakespot.com that analyze the reviews for a product and generate a report based on how many reviews look to be "incentivized" or outright fake. It does seem to do a good job on most products.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Actually, no. That is not true. You obviously haven't been part of the review process much. There are many types. Reviews happen, first an foremost because:
1. Amazon (or the company) requests them. With every purchase about two later, I get an email asking me to review. A certain % of people, most who are not basement dwellers, will take time to respond.
2. The product caused an extreme emotion: This usually isn't a large percentage. The customer either really liked the product, or really hated the product. The reason so many reviews are high, is because it is actually an extremely small percentage of customers that are so angry they want to throw the product a 1 star.
3. Bloggers/Reviewers as a business.
4. A small percentage of people that just get pleasure from being a top reviewer and do it as a hobby. (Kind of like the same people who post here or on Stack Overflow, who get nothing out of it but virtual prestige).
I would say basement dwellers aren't even on the list of measurable percentages.