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Amazon Makes Good On Its Promise To Delete 'Incentivized' Reviews (techcrunch.com)
Amazon is making good on its promise to ban "incentivized" reviews from its website, according to a new analysis of over 32,000 products and around 65 million reviews. From a TechCrunch article: The ban was meant to address the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews that had been plaguing the retailer's site, leading to products with higher ratings than they would otherwise deserve. Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their "honest opinion" of the item in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of five, compared with an average rating of 4.36 for non-incentivized reviews. Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers' trust in the review system as a whole. And that can impact consumers' purchase decisions.
Incentivized reviews are supposed to say somewhere in the review something like: "I received this product free or at a deep discount in exchange for this review."
Fake reviews generally all sound the same, using the same language with the same grammatical mistakes, sometimes in broken English. They're easily spotted.
You can always copy the url of the product and run it through fakespot.com to see if the reviews are real or not.
Because, presumably, they expect everyone to preview their submission before hitting submit, and verify that what they are writing doesnâ(TM)t contain any such characters.
There are only a few grievances I have with this site, and its lack of friendliness to utf8 is one of them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
IMO, this is a bad policy, plain and simple.
The reality of the matter is that incentivized reviews aren't really a problem, and actually prevent much worse problems. Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industry—allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product. (Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.) By banning them, Amazon is basically saying that new publishers, new authors, new manufacturers, etc. need not bother to sell there.
Worse, a ban on incentivized reviews significantly increases the pressure on small businesses to use truly unethical means of getting reviews, such as hiring companies that pay people to buy the product and write fake reviews. Lots of seriously bad products invariably have dozens of obviously fake five-star reviews, and that abuse of the system makes it even harder for legitimate businesses to get their foot in the door.
The only way this decision doesn't represent an absolute abandonment of Amazon's duty to protect consumers from outright fraud is if they also make participation in the Vine program free and available to anyone who asks, whether they are Amazon vendors or not. Otherwise, this ban just encourages outright fraud by eliminating the one legitimate means that most small businesses have for getting reviews.
And the policy isn't just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer. The notion that the difference between 4.74 stars and 4.36 is meaningful is laughable. Star ratings are completely meaningless in aggregate (at least without a standard deviation), because a product could have three five-star ratings that says "This product is great" and a one-star rating that says "This product burned down my house", and in aggregate, that product would have a 4.5-star rating. Everybody who actually buys products understands the fallacy of comparing star ratings, and instead reads the highest-rated high, low, and average reviews to see what they actually say about the product.
Moreover, anybody serious about buying the right product also does keyword searches looking for aspects of the product that interest or concern them. For this reason, consumers are served best by having as many reviews as possible, paid or otherwise, because (with the exception of very bad products) each review is likely to provide information about some aspect of the product that no other review provides. So deleting incentivized reviews is not just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer, because it reduces the amount of information available to consumers about products that they are considering buying.
I'm absolutely blown away at the absolute cluelessness of this decision. It is as though their management never actually bought a product on their own website, never sold any product anywhere, and couldn't be bothered to ask consumers or sellers what they thought. The resulting decision is utterly naïve.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They should also do something about "angry reviews" from people that have requested to be removed from marketing email, but are receiving it anyway through "marketplace.amazon.com", mostly badgering for reviews. Amazon refuses to stop those emails, so every time I receive one, I leave a one-star review for the product. I used to say that it was because they spammed me, and it didn't really reflect on the quality of the review, but then Amazon started deleting any review that mentioned spamming, so now I make up something about the quality of the product instead. This pollutes the review process and diminishes its usefulness, but at least I get my revenge. The obvious way for Amazon to fix this problem would be to stop spamming people that have requested to be removed from their marketing email list.
They're easily spotted.
The easily spotted ones are easily spotted. Many others are not. My daughter makes money on Fiverr writing fake reviews. She is an A-student, and writes impeccable English. Many of her reviews are flagged as "most useful" by Amazon customers, and she uses that fact to promote her services. There is no indication that her reviews are fake or incentivized, so I don't see how Amazon is going to remove them.
There are only a few grievances I have with this site, and its lack of friendliness to utf8 is one of them.
If I just slap together a webpage, UTF-8 will "just work" by default. So Slashdot must be going through some extra effort to make sure it does NOT work. Is there a reason for this? Maybe the backend database is MySQL 1.0 from 1995.
Amazon could solve this issue by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the product on Amazon.
Sure, this would remove the ability to review products that you bought elsewhere, but I'm sure that's not a large percentage of reviews. If you bought the product from Amazon there's a good chance you're not a shill for the company. This also limits the reviews to one per customer per purchased product.
The only downside to this is we'll lose the hilarious "reviews" that some products get.. but that's a small price to pay for more legitimate reviews from real customers.
"The obvious way for Amazon to fix this problem would be to stop spamming people that have requested to be removed from their marketing email list."
There are many other areas in which Amazon needs improvement:
When visiting an Amazon web page to try to understand a product better, Amazon tries to distract readers by displaying other products. To me, that is amazingly abusive and socially ignorant.
There are other scams besides some of the reviews. Some used books say the price is $0.01, one cent, but the shipping cost is $3.99. The total price should be listed.
There appears to be no protection by Amazon from dishonest sellers. I have, for example, seen complaints from buyers that say they ordered new hard drives but received used ones.
They ought to provide a way to filter reviews so that one can choose to see only reviews/ratings from verified purchasers.
They do - if you click See All Reviews, you can choose to filter by Verified Purchase Only.
They know when they've actually processed a sale of the item to the person writing the review, i.e. a "verified purchaser", and what that person paid. They ought to provide a way to filter reviews so that one can choose to see only reviews/ratings from verified purchasers.
From what I've heard, fake reviewers often ARE verified purchasers. They work out deals to buy the products, then return them to the seller for a refund.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I know people personally who have engaged in industrial scale review Shenanigans on Amazon for profit and can only imagine the cesspool of asshats involved. Screwing with Amazon has become an industry on to itself.
No point in using Amazon IMO. They spend too much time making excuses for their sellers. Seller reviews and good/bad ratio's are NOT front and center like they are on eBay. You have to go digging.
From my experience many sellers on Amazon have ratio's that would get them laughed at by any eBay buyer. (Low 90's or even 80's)
Then we have issues of Amazon actively leveraging their market position. Refusing to sell certain goods unless you join their little "Prime" club. Refusing to sell low cost items without buying something else. Playing games with intentional shipping delays while not offering much of anything in the way of savings.
Amazon refuses to keep their marketing goons on a leash and their community governance is teetering on the brink of Twitter level fail.
Amazon knows about all the cash-for-review services, and they monitor those sites. It wouldn't take long to show a trend that one reviewer is predominantly buying and reviewing products that are being promoted by one of those services.
In addition, failing to mention you were paid for your review, violates not just Amazon's terms, but FTC rules as well. Such bad-behaving reviewers could face a lawsuit with stiff penalties, along with the companies involved.
Plus, good reviews for bad products may get promoted at the start, but once real people start buying and are quite unhappy, some honest reviews will push through the noise, and those older reviews get down-voted and flagged by quite a few customers. Then some of those accounts start getting deleted en mass. I've seen it happen several times.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
From what I've heard, fake reviewers often ARE verified purchasers.
Correct.
They work out deals to buy the products, then return them to the seller for a refund.
It is even easier than that. When my daughter writes fake reviews, she pre-sells the product on eBay or Craigslist, then buys it from Amazon and has Amazon drop ship it directly to the secondary customer. Then the seller reimburses her for the price difference. So the review is from a "verified" customer, when if fact she has never actually seen the product. Since she is a Prime member, the shipping is free, and that cost advantage means she sometimes directly makes money on the eBay transaction.
My daughter makes money on Fiverr writing fake reviews
...and what have you done to correct this? Your daughter is learning fraud.
Of course, at this point it's likely already too late. She'll always use her intelligence to swindle people.
Congrats on making the world that much shittier.
Does anything about her doing this bother you, from a moral or ethical standpoint?
On one hand it seems harmless, but if you, yes you were to spend your hard-earned money on a crappy product and then found that you'd based your buying decision on secretly-incentivized reviews, would you not feel that you'd been mislead, lied to, or deceived?
If my son were to do this, I couldn't help but feel that he wasn't the person I'd hoped he be.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Obviously "ShanghaiBill" doesn't care that his children are money grubbing whores.
Actually, I haven't gotten around to it yet. :-) I'd like to be able to do so, as giving away books is pretty much the only way for new authors to get reviews, period. And literally every non-bestselling author eventually resorts to it; whether in the form of Goodreads giveaways, making the Kindle edition free for a day/week/month, or whatever, the net effect is the same—you're giving away copies of your book in the hopes that some of those people will review it.
There's no meaningful difference between making your books available electronically for free for a week and mailing out copies to willing reviewers except that the people who get a physical copy of the book feel more obliged to actually read the book and comment on it honestly, rather than just storing it on their hard drives and never getting around to reading it. The value of those incentivized reviews to the author (and, I suppose, to people looking at reviews) obviously decreases as you get more reviews, but that's really true for the early reviews of any product. After all, even things like computers get silent revisions that render early reviews incorrect. That's triply true for indie books. But there's definite value to having some reviews rather than none, even if you know that the first few reviews are going to be biased.
So you'd rather have no reviews? I'd rather have organic reviews if possible, but I'd much rather have a paid review than no reviews at all. I'd rather buy a product knowing that at least one person out there has obtained the product, used it, and given an opinion of it (even if that opinion is biased by having gotten it for free) than buy something completely blindly.
Besides, the SNR is going to be terrible no matter what. By eliminating reviews by people who are given the product for free (except through Amazon's Vine program, which gets an explicit exception):
The reality of the matter is that no matter what you do, the first few reviews are going to be biased. The first few reviews of a new author's books will invariably be written by family and friends, just as the first reviews of products are usually written by employees, their family members, or members of the press in exchange for product loans or donated copies or whatever. And this is true for all but the largest companies.
The irony is that the incentivized reviewers don't have a strong incentive to give all positive reviews or to accept every book/product for review, whereas all the other folks on that list do. So the SNR for early reviews will be worse under this system, not better, because either products won't have reviews (less signal) or the reviews will be lesser quality reviews by shills or family members instead of by people who merely got free products (higher noise). There's no plausible scenario in which this improves the SNR. At all.
Worse, the pay-to-play nature of this scheme borders on payola, because Amazon is re
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Does anything about her doing this bother you, from a moral or ethical standpoint?
Yes, but she is a 19 year old adult, so she makes her own decisions. I can think of about a zillion other things she could be doing that would bother me more.
Obviously "ShanghaiBill" doesn't care that his children are money grubbing whores.
When you criticize someone for behavior that has nothing to do with their gender, you should avoid loaded terms like "whore" and "bitch". How would you describe her behavior if she was male?
No, "whore" implies receiving payment, while "slut" (or "manslut" if you want to make it explicit you're talking about a dude) doesn't. Calling someone a "whore" means you think they're compromising their morals in exchange for payment while calling them a "slut" just means you believe they're being immoral/promiscuous without necessarily receiving payment for it. "Prostitute" is a bit different, it isn't really as much of an insult, and it's rarely used when the services in question aren't sexual.
Here's your bottom line up front: Amazon doesn't care about the quality of reviews. Period. Amazon cares about control of the process.
Here's how I know this:
I have been an amazon Vine member since 2009. At the time I was invited to start receiving "free" (no longer are they free: for the last two years, every item is assigned a "fair market value" (FMV) for tax purposes that results in an an annual 1099 for the IRS; generally the FMV is about 1/3 of the sticker price) items, I had written less than 20 reviews of things bought from amazon since 1997.
From 2012 until early last month, I also accepted and reviewed items provided directly to me through amazon vendors. Some where shipped directly to me, and some where provided through amazon via a vendor-supplied claim code that would result in an "amazon verified purchase badge. At the "high water mark" of my reviewing activity, I was ranked in the low two digits of amazon's "Top Reviewer Ranking" list.
The above represents three categories of reviews:
(1) Amazon supplied through Vine (which carries a giant green "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" banner)
(2) Vendor-supplied direct (and therefore, no "verified purchase" label)
(3) Vendor-supplied via claim code (and therefore labeled as "verified purchase"
(4) Things I bought from amazon with my own money (the "true" amazon verified purchases)
(5) Things I bought someplace else and reviewed on amazon.
For (1): Amazon generates the disclaimer. .I simply stated that fact of receiving the item for reviewing, in order to comply with both Amazon and an FTC requirement.
For (2) and (3): I provided the disclaimer at the end of the review. I didn't make a rhetorical attempt to convince you that I had provided an "honest evaluation...blah blah blah.."
I had no incentive to inflate the ratings on any of these products categories.
The stream of Vine items was not dependent on me offering a high rating, and I have 1-starred many big ticket items. Since 2009, the Vine program has sent me over 300 items..from Post-It notes and advance reviewer copies of books to high-end A/V equipment carrying 4-figure price tags; overall average value is about $65 for ALL products...but there is nearly a $1600 range between the most and least expensive items). I'll tell you more about why the scoring or strength of content was irrelevant to amazon in a second.
For vendor-provided items, the majority of these were Chinese-manufactured smalls (Bluetooth speakers, LED flashlights, Lightning cables, USB cables, kitchen items, RC vehicles, dashcams, GoPro knockoffs... although a few others popped into the "shiny" zone, and came from brand names you would recognize immediately), but I also had no incentive to inflate the scoring of these products either. Typically, the vendors had not read any of my reviews, they simply had my email address (and there is clearly an active network of vendors exchanging big lists of such email addresses). Before accepting an item I told each vendor that I would be disclosing the receipt of the item, and that the rating and review would be based directly on my user experience. The email associated with my amazon account received an average of about 35 such offers every day. Since amazon ended "incentived" reviews. I still get 15-20 offers daily, even though they are deleted without reading.
And for stuff I bought myself (on Amazon or elsewhere: just as with Vine and vendor-provided products: I reported my user experience. My overall average product rating was slightly above 4 for over 1600 reviews written since 2009..
In order, here's what amazon has done since October:
-Told ALL reviewers that they could no longer review items received for free from vendors.
-Deleted the entire contents of reviewers that amazon's magical systems decided were engaging in manipulative behavior. Sometimes this removed the reviews of obvious shill or dishonest reviewers...and sometimes this threw out the baby with the bathwater as honest