Amazon Puts New Limit On Customer Reviews: No More Than 5 a Week Except For Verified Purchases (geekwire.com)

Amazon says it will start capping the number of product reviews any customer can submit in a given week, limiting each person to five/week except for products that have been verified by the company as purchased by the reviewer. From a GeekWire report: Books, music and video are exempt from the limit, but the new cap applies to the rest of Amazon's vast online selection of products. It's the latest move by the e-commerce giant to police its online reviews, a critical resource used by many online shoppers to assess products before buying. The news comes during the peak holiday shopping season, the most important time of year for Amazon, as the company tries to get more people comfortable with doing more of their shopping online. An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the changes in a message to GeekWire, and they're spelled out in Amazon's updated Community Guidelines.

Comments

A pity, but not a surprise

[CohibaVancouver]

It only makes sense that you should only be allowed to review something you've actually bought through the site, but man will I miss the comedy reviews. The reviews for the Trump Christmas tree ornament hat are GOLD, as were the reviews for uranium in a can and all the others.

Re:A pity, but not a surprise

[dmomo]

You can still make up to five comedy reviews a week. Not all is lost.

Re:A pity, but not a surprise

[Penguinisto]

TBH, I would much prefer that *only* verified buyers review an item.

Yeah, I admit that the joke reviews are often seriously great comedy, but honestly - verified buyers only means that potential buyers will know one way or the other if the thing is worthwhile. This is especially true when it comes to anything political, or anything sold by Twitter's Target Of The Week - hordes of frothing people with a keyboard and a bad case of butthurt (or worse, SJW fever) flood the item with bad reviews, even though they've never paid money for the thing.

Re:A pity, but not a surprise

[unixisc]

I don't get why Amazon or any shopping site would allow non-buyers to review stuff, or even conversely (aside from sociopathic trolls) why people would review products they didn't get from there. If I bought something from Bed, Bath & Beyond and didn't like it, I'd sort it out w/ them, and maybe post something on the product's website, but I wouldn't post that on Amazon. Unless I bought the product in question from there.

If it's a real scam, take them to court or the BBB, but other than that, it's not my job to put companies out of business and even more people out of work

Re:A pity, but not a surprise

[pr0fessor]

Haven't you ever heard the saying "A happy customer will tell no one but an unhappy customer will tell everyone." ?

Overall Result

[alvinrod]

The overall result is that instead of 20 fake reviews from a single account, there are now 20 fake reviews spread over four different accounts. This just makes it more inconvenient for the people posting fake reviews, but doesn't really do anything to stop them. Maybe that makes it economically infeasible for a few of them and they go on to something more economically viable for them like pimping their grandmother, but this isn't going to be that big of a shakeup.

I had never realized that

[lwmv]

I can review something not bought throught amazon, until I read this on slashdot...

Re:Not good enough...

[bigwheel]

It should be that the user HAS to have purchased the item. Why would you do it any other way?

I would be happy if I could just filter reviews based on a "verified purchaser" tag. They already mark the verified purchaser reviews with that exact text, so make it a sub-option on the review display options...

You can already do that. From "see all customer reviews", select the sort/filter for "Verified Purchase Only" (rather than all reviewers).

What is missing is the ability to sort my searches by "average customer review", but only consider the reviews from verified purchases.

Re:Sort out their own behaviour first

[Dutch Gun]

Strange. Maybe Amazon's UK service quality differs from the US? Amazon service just recently gave me a credit for a purchase through a third-party seller. I was only reporting a seller that seemed to be charging an excessive amount of shipping (about $20), nearly as much as the product, which I hadn't notice at the time I purchased it (yeah, it was more or less my fault, but still). They said they'd look into the matter and then offered me a credit without me even asking for it.

Anytime I've contacted Amazon support, my issue has *always* been quickly resolved and completely, with outstanding service. Maybe it helps that I've been a customer for a very long time, probably over fifteen years or so. That's one of the reason I continue to buy from them almost exclusively - the other is they've got a good security track record.

I've also had support from 3rd party sellers... hrm, maybe two times? One time a replacement unit was sent, and another time, I shipped the product back because it was defective, and I got a refund because they couldn't get a replacement.

Maybe I've just been lucky?