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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.
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.