Scammers Are Buying Thousands Of Fake 5-Star Amazon Reviews -- on Facebook (thehustle.co) 156
Why are there so many five-star reviews for an iPhone charger on Amazon with a voltage irregularity that can cause permanent damage? "It's sad to imagine how many shoppers spotted this $13.99 charger pack on Amazon's first-page results and fell for the thousands of positive reviews and the algorithmically-generated endorsement from a platform that people trust more than religion," reports The Hustle.
A spot-check confirmed that "10 of the 22 first-page results on Amazon for 'iPhone charger' were products with thousands of 5-star reviews, all unverified and posted within a few days of each other," and they've now investigated "the underbelly of Amazon's fake-review economy" and "how such a product, peddled by a ragtag troupe of e-commerce scammers, managed to game one of the world's premier technology companies." The fake Amazon review economy is a thriving market, ripe with underground forums, "How To Game The Rankings!" tutorials, and websites with names like (now-defunct) "amazonverifiedreviews.com." But the favored hunting grounds for sellers on the prowl is Amazon's fellow tech behemoth, Facebook. In a recent two-week period, I identified more than 150 private Facebook groups where sellers openly exchange free products (and, in many cases, commissions) for 5-star reviews, sans disclosures. A sampling of 20 groups I analyzed collectively have more than 200,000 members. These groups seem to be in the midst of an online Gold Rush: Most are less than a year old, and in the past 30 days have attracted more than 50,000 new users... One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables...
Fake reviews have been an issue for Amazon since its inception, but the problem appears to have intensified in 2015, when Amazon.com began to court Chinese sellers. The decision has led to a flood of new products -- a 33% increase, by some accounts -- sold by hundreds of thousands of new sellers. Rooted in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they use Amazon's fulfillment program, FBA, to send large shipments of electronic goods directly to Amazon warehouses in the US. This rapid influx has spawned thousands of indistinguishable goods (chargers, cables, batteries, etc.). And it has prompted sellers to game the system. "It's a lot harder to sell on Amazon than it was 2 or 3 years ago," says Fahim Naim, an ex-Amazon manager who now runs an e-commerce consulting firm. "So a lot of sellers are trying to find shortcuts." Steve Lee, a Los Angeles-based vendor, is among them: "You have to play the game to sell now," he says. "And that game is cheating and breaking the law...."
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful," Mary Engel, Associate Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Advertising Practices, tells the site. "If a reviewer has received something of value in exchange for their opinion, they need to clearly disclose that in the review." But instead, the review-watching site "ReviewMeta" analyzed 203 million Amazon reviews and found 11.3% (22.8 million) were untrustworthy -- while another site estimates the fake-review percentage is 30%. (Amazon's own estimate? "Less than 1%") ReviewMeta also spotted more than 2 million "unverified" reviews just in March of 2019 -- 99.6% of which were five-star. "They're almost all for these off-brand, cheap electronic products: Phone chargers, headphones, cables. Generic things that are super cheap to manufacture, have good margins, and get a ton of searches."
Though Amazon has sued over 1,000 fake-review sites to date, "Their way of handling it is reactive, not proactive," says the founder of ReviewMeta. "Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
A spot-check confirmed that "10 of the 22 first-page results on Amazon for 'iPhone charger' were products with thousands of 5-star reviews, all unverified and posted within a few days of each other," and they've now investigated "the underbelly of Amazon's fake-review economy" and "how such a product, peddled by a ragtag troupe of e-commerce scammers, managed to game one of the world's premier technology companies." The fake Amazon review economy is a thriving market, ripe with underground forums, "How To Game The Rankings!" tutorials, and websites with names like (now-defunct) "amazonverifiedreviews.com." But the favored hunting grounds for sellers on the prowl is Amazon's fellow tech behemoth, Facebook. In a recent two-week period, I identified more than 150 private Facebook groups where sellers openly exchange free products (and, in many cases, commissions) for 5-star reviews, sans disclosures. A sampling of 20 groups I analyzed collectively have more than 200,000 members. These groups seem to be in the midst of an online Gold Rush: Most are less than a year old, and in the past 30 days have attracted more than 50,000 new users... One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables...
Fake reviews have been an issue for Amazon since its inception, but the problem appears to have intensified in 2015, when Amazon.com began to court Chinese sellers. The decision has led to a flood of new products -- a 33% increase, by some accounts -- sold by hundreds of thousands of new sellers. Rooted in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they use Amazon's fulfillment program, FBA, to send large shipments of electronic goods directly to Amazon warehouses in the US. This rapid influx has spawned thousands of indistinguishable goods (chargers, cables, batteries, etc.). And it has prompted sellers to game the system. "It's a lot harder to sell on Amazon than it was 2 or 3 years ago," says Fahim Naim, an ex-Amazon manager who now runs an e-commerce consulting firm. "So a lot of sellers are trying to find shortcuts." Steve Lee, a Los Angeles-based vendor, is among them: "You have to play the game to sell now," he says. "And that game is cheating and breaking the law...."
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful," Mary Engel, Associate Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Advertising Practices, tells the site. "If a reviewer has received something of value in exchange for their opinion, they need to clearly disclose that in the review." But instead, the review-watching site "ReviewMeta" analyzed 203 million Amazon reviews and found 11.3% (22.8 million) were untrustworthy -- while another site estimates the fake-review percentage is 30%. (Amazon's own estimate? "Less than 1%") ReviewMeta also spotted more than 2 million "unverified" reviews just in March of 2019 -- 99.6% of which were five-star. "They're almost all for these off-brand, cheap electronic products: Phone chargers, headphones, cables. Generic things that are super cheap to manufacture, have good margins, and get a ton of searches."
Though Amazon has sued over 1,000 fake-review sites to date, "Their way of handling it is reactive, not proactive," says the founder of ReviewMeta. "Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
One Purchase, One Review (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is this so hard?
Re: One Purchase, One Review (Score:1)
The problem is stupid customers. Burning their house down is nothing if they can save 2 bucks.
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Plenty of the blame is on Amazon. I have had reviews rejected because they pointed out that other reviews were obviously fake (a dozen 5-star reviews all one sentence long, and all with the the same grammatical mistake). So the real review is deleted and the dozen fakes stay up.
If Gmail can detect 99% of spam, why can't Amazon detect obviously fake reviews?
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Re: One Purchase, One Review (Score:5, Insightful)
why can't Amazon detect obviously fake reviews?
Because fake reviews are usually positive, five stars. It tends to make people purchase more (because most people don't know or care much about fake reviews).
And I'd like to remind you that Amazon first objective is to sell, not to ensure reviews and comments are safely true.
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Because fake reviews are usually positive, five stars. It tends to make people purchase more (because most people don't know or care much about fake reviews). And I'd like to remind you that Amazon first objective is to sell, not to ensure reviews and comments are safely true.
That's the reason why I always read 3-star reviews before I buy all the time. I sometimes read 4-star and 2-star reviews but always ignore both 5-star and 1-star. I'm looking for the "cons" of a product when I want to buy one, not "pros" because I already expect certain satisfactions from the product. Why do I need others to confirm my satisfaction? I want others to tell me what they don't like that might be aligned with what I also don't like as well.
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They just buy it from themselves, eat Amazon's cut, and nothing ships.
Currently, fake reviews cost the processing fee of one order, plus writing costs.
privacy (Score:2)
On Amazon, it is useful to give real name as it helps in delivery and warranty / RMA. Amazon does not make it easy to give another name to publish your reviews under. There is not much reason for Amazon to make it easy, either. For not publicizing to the world what you bought, reviews need to come as AC on Amazon, or using another Amazon account.
There is a fundamental disconnect between one purchase one review, and privacy. Amazon might see it as increasing the number of reviews by even allowing privacy min
Re: One Purchase, One Review (Score:1)
A lot of them are purchases, at least from Amazon's point of view.
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Re: One Purchase, One Review (Score:2)
You fail to appreciate that in many cases this is exactly what happens.
A vendor will give you a cash credit ( outside of Amazon ) for the review, sometimes above the purchase price, so you not only get the product free but sometimes even make money.
From Amazonâ(TM)s POV your actually reviewing a product you purchased and so the review is considered fully legit. There is no way for Amazon to discover, algirithmically, that this is a purchased review.
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They only take reviews from purchases into account when sorting by rating. At this point people started randomly receiving packages because the seller was buying items and having them shipped to valid addresses in order to game the system.
Apparently the difference between the #1 spot and the #2 spot is pretty drastic when it comes to sales. They can spend a few thousand dollars on items and push themselves into the number 1 spot and easily cover the cost. All of this can be done with your "one purchase o
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You never have to ship them if you're the one buying them. Boom 1000 fake reviews.
An obvious fix for this is to require the seller to upload a legitimate tracking number for every order.
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I usually buy the item and try out the features that matter knowing its guaranteed. Why should I read what some random fool who probably didn't really care at all or didn't even buy says on the Internet?
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Exactly this.
https://www.gimletmedia.com/re... [gimletmedia.com]
You need to understand the reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
Books or goods, you need to actually read some reviews, ideally some good ones and some bad ones. Just looking at the rating gives you almost nothing.
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But usually it gives a fair impression of what is wrong with the product.
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Books or goods, you need to actually read some reviews, ideally some good ones and some bad ones. Just looking at the rating gives you almost nothing.
How often do you bother to read the reviews on a one-star product?
Do you sort by worst reviews, or best?
There aren't many 1-star products up there. Most of the stuff on Amazon is 4+ stars. A bad product will have a 3+ star review. To get something lower than that, the maker/seller of the product has to work at it.
Why?
People are too nice. I can't tell you how many times I've seen reviews that are this: "Just got it today! It came so fast! 5 stars!!" Or some people's standards are just low.
I read the three star and lower reviews. Why? Because you'll find the people who used it. They'll pick apart all the
Re: You need to understand the reviews (Score:2)
Totally agree about reading the 3 star reviews. The 5 star reviews generally don't tell me anything I couldn't get from the description. The lower star reviews tell me what the downsides are, which doesn't necessarily mean the item won't work for me.
In fact I dont trust items that are all 5 star reviews unless I can see a reason they'd all be genuine (like maybe a really good boardgame or top of the line musical instrument, just to pick random examples).
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The lower star reviews tell me what the downsides are, which doesn't necessarily mean the item won't work for me.
This is definitely the way to go. I read a lot of reviews before I purchase something, and I only care about the bad or moderate reviews. Good reviews are almost always useless even if legit.
What upsets people who buy it? If a bunch of humans, from planet Earth, actually bought the item, some of them didn't like it. Or thought it would be different than it was. By the words they choose in their complaints I can usually tell if the problem is something that is going to bother me too, or not.
When buying a new
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Re: You need to understand the reviews (Score:3)
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That's why eBay got rid of user feedback. Now only sellers get feedback.
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Do you sort by worst reviews, or best?
The best reviews to read are those giving two and three stars. They are usually written by reasonable people unhappy about the product for legitimate reasons.
Ignore the five-stars. Those are often fake.
Ignore the one-stars. Those are usually idiots in a rage because the package was lost or damaged.
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Pretty much matches my experience. However even the one-star ones can be interesting, for example, they can tell you that you need a specific skill or really read the manual in order to use the product right. Same for the 5 star ones. So what you do is you browse reviews until you have a picture of what the product actually is. If there is a lot of fake glowing reviews, that can tell you something all by itself.
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If something is completely useless I give it a one star review.
As a recent example I bought a module for a dev board I and, it turns out it doesn't fit the dev board and the description is completely wrong. It's useless for the intended purpose.
The other classic one is a good item that some other seller takes over supplying but substitutes with an inferior version. Suddenly you get lots of one star reviews from upset customers expecting the good version.
That's the kind of thing you read one star reviews for
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I absolutely do this for any high-value product.
I want to know what problems people are having more than I care about how much people love it.
Who cares why people love it? I am already considering this product, I don't need to know that it's great, I NEED to know if it will break after 1 use or has some kind of "gotcha" that isn't made obvious in the FAQ or product description.
I obviously through out any low stars with no explanation or obvious user-error or shipping related issues.
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They are all doing it and it is not an invention of Amazon either. The "Big Lie" technique was probably best described so far by Goebbels, although it doubtlessly us much older. The problem with it is that it works well. For this reason, it does see a lot of use in politics and religion as well. It can even be used in reverse, see, for example, the anti-vaxxers or the flat-earthers. Their "big lie" is that the other side uses a "big lie". Of course, they never notice this little problem with their argumenta
Not unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I ignore most high reviews and carefully read bad reviews; people don't usually pay for those. If any of the bad reviews look like legitimate issues that I care about, I move on to the next choice.
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Also, if you actually read reviews (instead of just glancing at the s
Re: Not unexpected (Score:2)
But a bad reviews doesn't equal no sale, for me anyway. You have to judge the reasons for a bad reviews and whether it's a) a genuine issue and b) something that will affect your usage. You don't use reviews as scores, you use them as sources of information. In that regard lower scores are much more useful.
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Writing a quality bad review is much much harder than writing a quality good review. If you sound unreasonable, it might make people less trusting of other bad reviews nearby. You could accidentally help your competitor that way.
Just based on difficulty though, it is going to cost way more than paying for good reviews of your own product.
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When I write a bad review, often the seller offers to refund my purchase and let me keep the item free, to get me to change the review.
I've even had them unilaterally refund the sale, and then beg for a change to the review.
The practice disgusts me, and I would never engage in it. I leave a review as a courtesy to other consumers, not as a courtesy to the seller. If they give me a refund based on the review, that says nothing about what other consumers should expect the product to be like when it arrives.
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Awhile back looking for a new phone I really cared about battery life. And I'd see reviews that say "has great battery life too!" and the next would say "battery life is horrible, watch out". It's absurd. The users aren't actually comparing products, except from an old product to the upgrade. A professional reviewer on the other hand typically is looking at several competing models, knows what the trends are, knows where to kick the tires, and so forth.
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Fake reviewers are not stupid and naive as you assume.
It is not all 4/5-stars: they also write "false negative" reviews that have minor meaningless nits but are gushing nonetheless.
It's pretty obvious when you see 1-star reviews that are still positive.
There is a podcast I heard about this, where fake reviewers have to write a variety of N-star reviews, but they all are "positive" content. It's interesting the words they choose.
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Beware of review for the wrong product too.
For example if they are selling an external HDD they will combine reviews for the 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 6TB versions. Maybe the 6TB version is total crap, high failure rate, used a cheaper type of drive, but because the other versions are good you mostly see 5 star reviews.
Another problem is products change over time. A 5 star review from 6 months ago may not apply to the current version where they downgraded the materials or switched to a different part.
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Sure they do (Score:2)
Re:Not unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
I am surprised at how many reviews there are for "just got the product, it looks great!" They've taken no time to try out the product, see if it works, see how durable it is, they're just in a big hurry to post a review and boost their ego, social media score, etc.
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Seller told me to take review down (Score:5, Interesting)
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Does a defective item deserve a bad review though? If the product is inherently defective then maybe yes. But often things break in shipping and are no fault of the manufacturer. I'd say service is a more important factor here. But if people are in a rush to waste time giving a review (because they're angry?) the review won't be good. I'd rather know how long the product was used before the person gave a review.
I try to avoid buying stuff online anyway, and the pointlessness of the reviews is part of t
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often things break in shipping and are no fault of the manufacturer.
Packing things to survive shipping is the responsibility of the seller. If they can't manage that, they deserve a negative review for wasting your time.
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You have grossly misrepresented the handling capabilities of the worlds leading shippers. I've seen packages so bad that they'd make a hammer defective upon arrival.
It's not a secret that the shippers abuse packages. If you don't take that into account when designing/selecting packaging, you fail. You can't get packages to their destination undamaged through pretense or imagination.
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And yet, there doesn't seem to be any strong correlation between the defective items I've received and the crumpled boxes.
I blame the person who knew n% of the devices were defective, and instead of testing them and selling me one that works they just sold them all and made people demand refunds.
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There's no chance to accumulate knowledge of defects unless as many as possible report the defects. If 75% are dying in shipment, then there's a reason not to buy it.
A big game going on is to take returns, and having not tested an item at all, resell it as new. A HUGE secondary market for returns games the system because no one audits this. The vendors don't want to see products ever again, so out-they-go, UNMARKED as to their returned status. Only a few of them have the integrity to test returns, then eith
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Yes, of course it does .. you sold me a product, it was defective .. it isn't my fucking job to establish this was a fluke, or got damaged in shipping, or anything else. I'm not Consumer Reports, I'm a consumer, and if I'm reporting that is my experience with your product.
I have one data point, and it's negative .. I've had a 100% bad experience with your product. It isn't my responsibility to see if out of 10 samples I had a dud .. you get one shot, becau
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Many Chinese sellers work on the understanding that negative reviews are punishment for not making the customer happy. They think that if they give you a refund and apologise you should not punish them, and get annoyed if you do.
There is also a tendency to look at complaints as haggling. If you say the product is crap they will often offer you a partial refund, i.e. they take it to mean that you don't think it was worth what you paid but you might accept a lower price.
Both cultures are slowly adapting to ea
Engineering a better idiot. (Score:2)
"Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."
You know what happens when brilliant engineers get together and work hard to make something so great it's idiot-proof?
Society simply responds by building a better idiot.
The problem is never that easy when you're up against that shit all day, every day.
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The bigger problem is management. Fake reviews makes Amazon money, because a bunch of people will be fooled into buying things they think will be great. Who's going to staff a project that, in the short term, harms the bottom line?
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The bigger problem is management. Fake reviews makes Amazon money, because a bunch of people will be fooled into buying things they think will be great. Who's going to staff a project that, in the short term, harms the bottom line?
How far should corporate support of blatant consumer deception be allowed to go? I don't even know why anyone mandates ethics training in business anymore when we blatantly turn a blind eye to the most immoral and unethical shit, all in the name of profits.
Amazon, either give a shit about rating integrity, or don't. Just stop fucking pretending you do.
Users reviews are useless. (Score:2)
The whole thing of amateur reviews was falling apart from the beginning I think. Few people give a review unless they feel strongly one way or the other, and the ones who do tend to review everything as if it were a hobby. Too many also seem to think that they need to be snarky, witty, mean, or whatever. It's like they're just trying to earn points. In areas where emotions can be high, the user reviews are absolutely useless (games, movies, food). Yelp is a useless site, except that it gives map direction
ONE STAR. (Score:1)
UPS driver didn't ring bell.
Re: ONE STAR. (Score:1)
USB cable damaged my HDMI port when I plugged it in, 1 star.
1 Star Reviews (Score:2)
When I'm looking for something, I'm generally reading the 1 and 2 star reviews. I want to know if the item will have a problem for my own use-case. A goodly number of 5-star reviews are pretty much "it's great!" which doesn't really help me determine if it's something I want to buy.
[John]
If it sounds to be good to be true (Score:2, Interesting)
it usually is!
a 14 USD charger from a no-name Chinese company being better than the original Apple charger?
Sounds totally plausible, sign me up!
Not.
I'm always surprised at the number of people who buy an Apple product and are then too cheap to buy the "supplies" (mainly chargers and cables and adapters).
Almost like people who buy cars with horrible MPG ratings who then turn around and complain about the thing consuming too much gas.
I have no time and no stomach to deal with a Chinese seller out of Shenzen!
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a 14 USD charger from a no-name Chinese company being better than the original Apple charger? Sounds totally plausible, sign me up! Not.
Maybe people look at the ratio quality / price, not only quality?
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In this specific instance, you are wrong. The fake Apple chargers in question are not made in the same factory. The internals are not even close to the same design. Only the outside plastic is the same. Hence the tendency to damage the laptop; most of the power-regulation circuitry was left out. Only way to hit the $14 price point.
Significant differences between chargers (Score:2)
Electronics ARE cheap. In quanity, you can build a quality phone charger for maybe $2. You can build a crappy phone charger for 75 cents. Neither costs much to manufacture, crappy ones cost half as much to make.
You can pretty easily find sites and videos where people disassemble phone chargers and also test them. There definitely IS a difference between a high quality charger and a low quality charger. Ifixit and others have disassembled Apple chargers and found they are even better than "good" chargers fro
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Exactly. That's the problem I have. Even if the reviews were actually true (big if), it would only be a single data point in time. The Chinese shop could even produce a batch of good ones, have good reviews for those and then change the design to actually make a profit by leaving out most of the stuff that makes it good (Chinese shops are notorious for this).
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I used many Apple chargers and they are crap. Every once in a while they'd just stop charging for no reason. I've not had that happen to any other charger that came from the manufacturer of the device.
Are online reviews actually useful (Score:2)
For anything past amusement? Personally, I don't pay tons of attention to reviews on amazon. I may find something on amazon that I'm interested in, but usually look elsewhere for info on it. Pretty much anything with tons of positive reviews is likely to be crap anyway, real people generally don't go out of their way to leave good reviews if there's no incentive to do so.
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The negative reviews are useful. Most of the positive reviews aren't.
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God you fat fuck. You have been posting every day of your life for 20 years!!! Get a life!
Who needs a life more, the fat fuck who's been posting for twenty years, or the dumb fuck who trolls him?
Watch out for Product Switching (Score:2)
I am seeing a few cases where, for example there's a five-star wood burning tool but actually most of the reviews are about a spice rack from a few years ago.
Apparently if you've discontinued a quality product there's a market for the old product listing page and its associated star count. For those of us who narrow product results by star ratings it's something to beware.
I don't shop online (Score:2)
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I buy things in stores. I talk to the salespeople. It's much simpler that way.
I can't remember the last time the salesdroid knew what they were selling.
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Then order it from a local store.
Very easy to work around this problem. (Score:2)
Very simple to work around this problem: Don't even look at items with obviously Chinese or made-up non-sensical names like QUONGWHY or FEEMII or WTFOMGBBQ. Another dead giveaway that it's a direct-from-China vendor is the laughably bad grammar on the descriptions and other writeups. Very simple. Avoid them, don't give them a red penny.
While you're at it, if you're looking for common stuff like belts or towels or wallets, you know, that kinda thing - tack "made in usa" to the end of your search string.
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Very simple to work around this problem: Don't even look at items with obviously Chinese or made-up non-sensical names like QUONGWHY or FEEMII or WTFOMGBBQ.
Here's the problem with that. Some of the stupid-name stuff is actually a good value, like Sunnysky or Epever for example in solar equipment. And you find out which are good by reading the reviews in detail. Most positive reviews are worthless. So are most negative reviews, to be fair, but a larger percentage of them are useful. Some of those reviews actually include teardown images, either from failures, or from dissections to see if they are built well enough to risk someplace where a bad one might cause
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Agreed. In many cases, items with well-known brand names are just re-branded versions of a stupid-name company's OEM offerings.
It brings to mind a consumer news report that I saw about a decade ago that showed jackets being made in a Chinese sweatshop. The assembly line diverged into three separate areas where three different labels were sewn on: Ralph Lauren, Nautica, and George (Walmart). The reporter followed the shipments to their destinations an
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To be fair, some people are just paying for the RL label. Or more accurately, bragging rights for having paid $400 for an $80 jacket.
How many times does this need explaining: (Score:1)
You read the critical reviews. You ignore the "slow shipping" ones, the "user too stupid for product" ones, and the rest you READ. Look for flaws, not dislikes. Positive reviews only matter if they explain details that aren't in the brochure.
into it (Score:2)
I had sellers gang up on me in the past (Score:5, Interesting)
How I miss the good ol' days when most products were from Amazon so reviews were genuine and you could just trust them... :) (or have any relation to).
Anyway, I was a top-500 reviewer on the UK site, mainly focusing on products I know a lot about, e.g. telescopes, as reviews on technical items by people who are clueless are dangerous (the worse telescope can get a 5* review if the user manages to sort of get a glimpse of the moon with it). At some point (a couple of years ago) I noticed there were some really suspicious looking binoculars as top sellers, including multiple listings of the same tiny "30x60 night vision" binoculars that were obviously neither 30x60 nor night vision, so I took it upon myself to get and review the 3 top ones - for one of them I even signed up to a "review club" that gave them to you for free in exchange of a review. They were actually worse than I expected (e.g. one 10x50 had the body of a 50mm binocular, but just 19mm effective aperture prisms!) - you can see a blog writeup here if you are curious [ecuadors.net] - so I had to leave very detailed, technical, with picture proof, but scathing reviews. Since I was a top-500 user the reviews started from the first page, but then the disappeared. I was getting mass downvoted, so I dropped in reviewer rank and the reviews themselves were not visible in the first pages. A person contacted me through my blog and send me screenshots of facebook discussions with a seller who had a big FB group with people getting stuff for reviews, who was asking for all their groupies to downvote my reviews, calling me various names. A seller (the same or not, I don't remember) also wrote me and told me I was reported to Amazon for malicious slander and they wrote comments under my reviews that I was an unscrupulous competitor, owner of "Agena Astro". That last one is sort of funny, as Agena Astro is a huge and very respected US astronomical retailer which I, sadly, do not own
Anyway, I contacted Amazon, sent them all that stuff including images of the whistleblower, they did jack. Not even restore my reviews or reviewer ranking, never mind punishing those organized sellers & reviewers. I mean Amazon has GREAT support if you are a customer in general (they have helped me even with badly behaving manufacturers - call me Samsung), but I was kind of appalled at how they did not care about this thing going on.
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Bad reviews don't sell stuff. Good review sell stuff.
No wonder Amazon does jack shit about stuff like that.
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Buyers aren't the customer anymore at Amazon, they're the product. The customers are the billion state sanctioned frauds operating out of China.
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I had links to the reviews and the sellers on that blog post, but it's been a while so they since moved on (changed accounts perhaps?), so I removed the obsolete links, but left the rest as these binoculars and others similar are still sold.
My notes here are about the phenomenon and how Amazon doesn't deal with it, not about a specific seller out of the thousands... That's the whole problem, you can't just go after the sellers one by one after you get lots of data on them when they spring up like mushrooms,
I found several obvious examples of fake reviews (Score:1)
I recently came across a product with over 5,500 5-star reviews that were so obviously fake I could not believe Amazon didn't have algorithms to catch this sort of stuff. I let them know and all were removed. I did the same with another product - all reviews posted the same day and hour with many duplicate names. Amazon seems not to be trying very hard
"Endorsements are required to be truthful" lol (Score:2)
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful,"
Oh well then problem solved, right? No one selling things would ever lie.
Not as easy as it sounds (Score:3, Interesting)
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I've done this any number of times. Amazon does flag reviews that they can correlate to a purchase, but I have never been prohibited from entering one.
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shoppers' solution.. (Score:1)
amazon has turned into ebay... with order fulfillment.
shitty and/or fake counterfeit and/or outright scammy & fraudulent products peddled everywhere on that site by shady foreign (chinese or hongkong based mainly) sellers...
so...
buy only from amazon.com.... (i.e. 'ships and sold by amazon.com') unless it's a seller you already trust from an existing relationship (you're just buying from them on azn instead).
consider only verified purchaser reviews.... even stuff sold by amazon themselves can have r
Great (Score:1)
Excellent product. Would buy again. Five stars.
I never read the 5 star reviews (Score:2)
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Now I remember... (Score:1)
Actual top reviewer's views here. (Score:1)
Answers to Questions Are Worse (Score:2)
I don't understand why people bother answering the questions a lot of times. When you have bought something from Amazon and somebody asks a question then Amazon sometimes emails you it to you and asks if you can answer it. Some people must feel compelled to answer because many times you see "I don't know" or "I bought it as a gift."
Of course sometimes the questions are just as bad because the are asking for information that's posted about the item.