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More Than Half the Reviews For Certain Popular Products on Amazon Are Questionable, Outside Auditors Say. Amazon Disputes Those Estimates. (npr.org)
NPR has an interesting story, full of anecdotes, that looks into several growing marketplaces where reviews for Amazon products are bought and paid for. From the story: "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." [...] Chiarella says the lawsuits give the company the opportunity to subpoena bad actors to get data from them. "That allows us to identify more bad actors and spider out from there and train our algorithms," she says. But this has led to a sort of digital cat-and-mouse game. As Amazon and its algorithms get better at hunting them down, paid reviewers employ their own evasive maneuvers. Travis, the teenage paid reviewer, explained his process.
He's a member of several online channels where Amazon sellers congregate, hawking Ethernet cables, flashlights, protein powder, fanny packs -- any number of small items for which they want favorable reviews. If something catches Travis' attention, he approaches the seller and they negotiate terms. Once he buys the product and leaves a five-star review, the seller will refund his purchase, often adding a few dollars "commission" for his trouble. He says he earns around $200 a month this way. The sellers provide detailed instructions, to avoid being detected by Amazon's algorithms, Travis says. For example, he says, "Order here at the Amazon link. Don't clip any coupons or promo codes. [Wait 4 to 5 days] after receiving [the item]." This last instruction is especially important, Travis adds. "If you review too soon after receiving it'll look pretty suspicious."
He's a member of several online channels where Amazon sellers congregate, hawking Ethernet cables, flashlights, protein powder, fanny packs -- any number of small items for which they want favorable reviews. If something catches Travis' attention, he approaches the seller and they negotiate terms. Once he buys the product and leaves a five-star review, the seller will refund his purchase, often adding a few dollars "commission" for his trouble. He says he earns around $200 a month this way. The sellers provide detailed instructions, to avoid being detected by Amazon's algorithms, Travis says. For example, he says, "Order here at the Amazon link. Don't clip any coupons or promo codes. [Wait 4 to 5 days] after receiving [the item]." This last instruction is especially important, Travis adds. "If you review too soon after receiving it'll look pretty suspicious."
Please tell me those aren't coming back in style.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Amazon has some serious cross-linking and fake review issues. I was searching for some batteries recently at least half of the bad reviews were for another battery from a different manufacturer but it's marked "verified purchase".
This is accurate. There are way too many five star reviews. If you want to look at real reviews, look at the 3 star ones that have comments. They are usually balanced reviews. No product is five star perfect. Even a 4 star review is suspect. What amazon should have is a scale from 1 to 10. The spammers will always choose 9 or 10.
For example, he says, "Order here at the Amazon link. Don't clip any coupons or promo codes.
Not sure how that evades detection. Wouldn't normal shoppers clip coupons?
Yup, totally legitimate.
...when companies are allowed to bribe you for good reviews. Just make this practice illegal and the problem fixes itself.
This is why you read the negative reviews first. See what the complaints are, then look for counter arguments specifically in the positive reviews.
I go straight for the lowest negative comments. They will almost always completely disagree with the glowing 4 and 5 comments. It is a quick way to exclude bad merchants.
like bait & switch
or you buy something, but what they DONT tell you is the product you purchased is located half way around the world in china, but you dont know that until they send you the product shipped notification and you see it just left the facility in china somewhere, and you dont get the product for 3 months,
i quit buying from amazon because of their dirty shenanigans, to hell with bezos the bozo i dont need his clown tactics when i want to buy something
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
About half of the reviews are for different products or different models all lumped together.
Other half are an amalgam of obvious cut and paste jobs from marketing materials, paid shills and idiots who bitch about purchasing the wrong thing and otherwise failing to RTFM
Amazon's interface for reading reviews is painful to use .. like filling up a swimming pool with an eyedropper painful.
The only thing more painful to use than product reviews is Amazon seller reviews which sports the most worthless intentionally borked interface ever devised.
What about comments and moderation on Slashdot? Asking for a friend . . .
Travis the teen paid reviewer has grown up with a serious lack of parental moral guidance. He got ripped off on a product based on fake good reviews so now he does the same to others?
...seems like it should be higher...
nothing to see here - move along
I'll go out on a limb here..... items actually sold by Amazon have low rate of fake reviews any items not sold by Amazon proper are probably a dumpster.
...According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable....
And Amazon supposedly disputes that by saying,
...Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic...
Notice that Amazon is not disputing the original statement, but they are disputing a statement that was not made.
Why would Amazon do that? Maybe they cannot dispute the original statement?
In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet. Thanks captain obvious.
I saw a cable that had 2100 (recent) reviews - ALL 5-star! A DIFFERENT post of (what appeared to be) the identical product indicated MANY more problems - and eluded to "other posts" of the same product having false 5-star ratings!
I actually have a fair amount of respect for the NPR news department, but how is it that this old, busted well-known fact is has eluded them this long? Paid shills have been a Thing for a long time now, and if you read online reviews at all you learn to look for the negative reviews from people, not just the positive ones, and apply some critical thinking to all the above.
"Product exactly as listed in perfect condition, actually exceeded expectations."
What should that be? 5 stars does not mean this is the best product known to mankind. It means it is a good product that meets the description and specs of that product.
I do agree a 3 star or less review is a lot more informative because you can find out more about what /why/how things go wrong, but a lot of 5 star reviews are very helpful in showing what is good/great about the product.
"I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same." -Angus Young
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Only "more than half"? That number seems low to me. There's a reason I don't bother leaving or reading reviews.
The WSJ has a related story about how sellers attempt to game the system to get their products a higher ranking in searchers.
Some of the tricks include:
1. Taking old listings with high ratings and change the product
2. Posting SPAM-my comments on opponent products to get their rivals listings flagged as abusive
3. Filing bogus safety claims against rivals to get their products delisted pending a safety investigation
4. Paying people to receive empty shipments so that they can post verified buyer reviews
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sellers-trick-amazon-to-boost-sales-1532750493?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4
I thought that the article was interesting. I hope others do too!
Will
remove nospam. to email!
FTFA :-
Travis adds. "If you review too soon after receiving it'll look pretty suspicious."
As slow as that? Some idiots write reviews before they've even received or opened the stuff, and admit it. They repeat what they saw in the advert and they say something like "It came today and I can't wait to try it out!" or "It's a present for my grandson and he is going to be delighted!". They sound genuine though.
Amazon's biggest use to me these days is as a source for price-matching at local stores.
For expensive equipment I'm just as likely to order elsewhere (e.g. B&H or industry-specific sites), for cheap or commodity stuff it may already be cheaper locally or elsewhere online - and if it's not, there's a fair chance someplace local will price match to either Amazon or their own website if it has different pricing (e.g. Target, office supply places).
Basically if I need a thousand-dollar scanner or laptop I can be fairly sure what I'd get from Amazon won't be counterfeit, but I can also be pretty sure of getting competitive prices elsewhere. If I need a $10 (commodity something) then I have no faith in the authenticity of almost anything on Amazon.
fencepost
just a little off
I use Fakespot and it is well worth $1.99/month for the extension to have the ratings shown within the Amazon pages. I am also frequently disappointed about how often sites like Kinja, TechBargains, and Slickdeals post about products that are majority puffed up. It make shopping more like work...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The "Sound" StackExchange recently has had a lot of questions of people regarding a microphone and phantom power supply that are advertised as "studio quality" and are sold under half a dozen names.
Now there are things like "budget brands" on the low end of the recording spectrum and with limited durability. But that's not what we are talking about here. This is basically crap in a nice-looking plastic housing (basically worse quality than the little minidisc electret microphones once used for bootlegging, but in a housing looking like a large diaphragm condenser mic). And the typical StackExchange questions are about intolerable noise and buzzing and whatever since people have a hard time believing that a "professional studio quality" mic (priced lower than a good quality microphone cable) could be at fault. Basically, usually one can tell from the headline that the question will be about one of those abominations.
Now on Amazon they are rated somewhat above 4 with a lot of enthused reviews and occasional abysmal ones in between. Even discounting a fair share of confirmation bias idiots who want to believe they did not just threw money out of the window, that just doesn't match the product.
Especially for cheaper electronic accessories, (batteries, chargers, cables) I've found that you can safely ignore all the raving five star reviews. I start with the four and three star reviews, and look for ones with meat in them -- specific details about the products, plusses and minuses, and whether they're better or worse than competing products. But now that I've said that, the fake reviewers will probably take that into account.
I wonder exactly how many small purchases from Amazon arrive and look like those prizes that used to come in breakfast cereal. I suspect, the percentage is higher than anyone realizes. There's a lot of junk out there.
One example, learned through sad experience: There are a plethora of aftermarket chargers and replacement batteries for Dell laptops. But Dell laptops (at least, ones made in the last 10 years or so) will not work with non-Dell chargers or batteries, by design. (Thanks, Dell....) So the aftermarket products are useless junk by definition. But there will be three five-star reviews (because three is a magical number, I guess) for each item and if you post a negative review you'll get an immediate rebuttal from the manufacturer that there must have been something wrong with your laptop. Stuff that's made to sell, not actually use.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It load fast, very! The colors are eye pleasure and informing my day always the site. 5 stars, wish more I had!
Some settling may occur during posting.
I am a top-500 reviewer on Amazon.co.uk, so my reviews generally show up high quickly (ok, maybe not because of ranking just by upvotes - haven't looked into how it works). I try to review things I know a lot about, so I wrote some (very accurate, technical and detailed, but bad) reviews on some binoculars (also put them in a blog post here, helpful for people buying binoculars on Amazon) that were highly rated and/or top sellers, but were of unknown branding or had ridiculous specs (30x60 pocket binoculars). :)
So, on some listings my bad reviews which came on top, started getting bursts of downvotes. Like 10 a day. A person actually contacted me to tell me he belonged to a FB group of the seller where they would get free stuff to review. The seller told the group I am a lying competitor and gave them links to my reviews for downvoting (hence the bursts). The person who contacted me looked into my reviews instead and figured out I was just a knowledgeable reviewer and even sent me screenshots of the FB threads. I forwarded the info to Amazon and they didn't do anything. Well, in fact, I can no longer find the review that had offended that seller the most, so maybe they did something in the end
Additionally, a seller (the same if I remember correctly) wrote me and told me they had reported me to Amazon for malicious reviews. They left comments under my reviews saying that I am a competitor who owns Agena Astro (hilarious, that's a huge US astro retailer!). I also brought that crap to Amazon's attention, they didn't seem to mind.
In all, I love Amazon, I've been a Prime subscriber for over a decade mainly because their customer service is second to none...
But that customer service is only stellar when it comes to you buying/returning etc stuff, they don't really seem to care about marketplace sellers going rogue. Which is a shame, back a decade ago most of the stuff was sold by Amazon and the reviews were a surefire way to find what is good and what is not. Nowadays, you can't trust them. And it's not just the shady reviewers, even some that Amazon itself picks (Vine) are obviously clueless about most of the stuff they review and how legit are your reviews anyway when you do several per day?
So, you still get easy returns/refunds etc, but you can no longer rely on the reviews - probably with the exception of something sold only by Amazon.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
5 stars is what I expect products to get when I order them. 5 stars means that it does exactly what it says it's going to do, or maybe better. If I order a bathroom scale and it takes my weight correctly and doesn't break right away, it gets 5 stars. The score goes down depending on how much it deviates from it's advertised purpose.
The real reviews to look at are the 1-star reviews, to give you an idea of how often a product catastrophically fails or is DOA. Maybe the 2-star reviews if you want to know what people consider real downsides of the product that might not have been in the listing, or how it might not cover all use cases, particularly if you're tentative about the product really doing the thing you need.
Anything you order should have a majority of 4-5 star reviews, but also virtually NO 1-star reviews. It doesn't matter if the average review score is high, if hundreds of people say it doesn't work when it gets to their door, find something else.
Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic
I'd wager less than 1% are authentic.
In a different thread, someone commented that he doesn't buy online anymore because most of it is fake or otherwise worthless crap.
That might be overstating the case, but at its root is pretty insightful.
We've been sold on the idea that brick-'n'-mortar are going the way of the dinosaur, and that eventually everything will be online only, with physical product only existing in huge distribution centers.
What wasn't foreseen, maybe, is a time when a high percentage of what's available online is garbage, made to sell rather than use, supported by fake reviews, and that the percentage is increasing. Maybe there will come a time when brick-'n'-mortar comes back in style, for the simple reason that you can verify for yourself that it's an actual, useful product and not a cracker-jacks prize.
Maybe Amazon will realize this at some point, and somehow arrange for you to go somewhere and actually see and touch the product before purchase?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I frequently see reviews for completely different products, so they'll stuffing a (possibly) good product with great reviews and then they switch it to a completely different product, like from a pair of binoculars to a powerbank. I see this alllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the fucking time.
And then you'll see something loads of 5-star reviews that consist of nothing more than "Great product!", "I love it!!!!!", "Works great!", "Wife loves it!!"...and so on. It's obvious they don't even know what the fuck the review is for since they *never* mention the actual item, just "It's great!" and shit like that.
Sometimes they fuck up and you'll see a wall charger with lots of reviews saying stuff like, "Easy to focus, great clarity!"
Yeah, Amazon needs to get their shit together.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If anyone has read the Star Wars: Aftermath Trilogy, you'd know this shill of a writer has probably contributed to his own "fake reviews" though his Twitter-verse.
Taking old listings with high ratings and change the product
This is a popular ploy for purveyors of cheap Chinese junk knock-off products. They will sell the real product for a time at a good price to garner good reviews and then switch the product to their craptastic Chinese version while keeping the same listing with all the positive reviews.
From TFA: (italics mine) ...
"
According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable. [i]Amazon disputes those estimates.[/i]
"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." ..."
"individual products" is equivalent to "certain popular products".
Amazon does not dispute those estimates, at least based on the evidence proposed in the article, which is non-existant. And they confirm that certain products have a higher incidence of fake reviews than the overall marketplace does.
Amazon was provided these estimates at a discounted or free price in exchange for their fair and honest dispute(s).
Perusing virtually any Amazon item will yield a majority of bogus or irrelevant reviews.
I am always finding reviews for products other than the one I am viewing, and they are even marked as "verified purchase"!
WTF?!?!?! These "reviews" should be classified as false and misleading advertising tricks, and ANY seller
engaging in these practices, especially Amazon and Newegg, should be summarily fined AND punished appropriately.
This is an abuse of Capitalism that gives Capitalism a very bad reputation.
Buyer beware: make sure you can return the item for a full refund; as this item is likely not what we say it is!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.