Some Amazon Sellers Are Paying $10,000 A Month To Trick Their Way To The Top (buzzfeednews.com) 37
Amazon's marketplace is so competitive that it has led to the emergence of a secretive, lucrative black market where agents peddle "black hat" services, sometimes obtained by bribing Amazon employees, that purportedly give marketplace sellers an advantage over their rivals, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. These consultants charge up to $10,000 to manipulate rankings by rewriting URLs and programming bots to click on products, a report says. From the report: Other tactics to promote sellers' products include removing negative reviews from product pages and exploiting technical loopholes on Amazon's site to lift products' overall sales rankings. These services make it harder for Amazon sellers who abide by the company's terms of service to succeed in the marketplace, and sellers who rely on these tactics mislead customers and undermine trust in Amazon's products.
Never Buy From 3rd Party Sellers (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Never Buy From 3rd Party Sellers (Score:5, Insightful)
depends on which side you are on.
as a customer who has Prime, buying from amazon (not 3rd party) gives me great customer support, easy returns, pkgs that get lost are always credited without an argument and its worth the $100+ each year to get this level of support.
as an employee, I'd hate to work for amazon. I hear horror stories about it. being a vendor for them also must suck a lot (as it would to be a supplier for, say, walmart).
I often buy chinese electronics (maker parts and such) and when they work, great. when they fail to work, its an easy return. if they start to hate all the returns they get, this can be a self-correcting solution; japan used to really suck for quality and now they're at the top. same could happen with china; but we need to RETURN JUNK and not just eat the cost. when they get too many returns due to poor design, manuf or qa, then the'll learn how to properly sell to the international market.
Re: Never Buy From 3rd Party Sellers (Score:1)
Prime is perfect in ways I'm still finding out! I think I'll start shopping on my lunch hour. So much to hunt for.
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Why should I be a beta tester for Chinese shit? Amazon needs to do what eBay does and allow you to filter listings by US, North America, or elsewhere.
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I'd like to see a country flag by each user and rating. Bonus points for flags of TOR exit nodes, known VPN IPs, ambiguous addresses, and a black flag if a user doesn't have a verified purchase of that exact same product.
If there are more than three users from the same IP address, that would be nice to know has well, including if the user has been a member for more time than the product or company has been online.
Sure, there are ways to game the system. Amazon can easily find the origin address info of all
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we need to RETURN JUNK and not just eat the cost. when they get too many returns due to poor design, manuf or qa, then the'll learn how to properly sell to the international market.
This^
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I buy from Amazon, but I hate myself for it.
China Mart (Score:2)
Amazon has become the land of cheap Chinese crap. It's all you see when you search for anything anymore. They need an option to show only trusted brand names.
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America has become the land of cheap Chinese crap. Non-cheap producers have been driven out of the market, leaving only the cheap crap to purchase.
Re:China Mart (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon has become the land of cheap Chinese crap. It's all you see when you search for anything anymore. They need an option to show only trusted brand names.
Trusted by who?
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between name brand and Chinese knock offs because they come from exactly the same manufacturing tooling. For instance, a tire manufacturer had serious issues because their tire molds got scrapped, then obtained, by a manufacturer who threw together a run of tires that looked like a good brand, but where built with substandard materials and where unsafe as a result. These tires found their way on shore, and where sold at retail by folks who didn't know they where knockoffs. How do you keep this from happening?
So, I'm not sure how you enforce your idea. With retailers popping up and dying in folks garages in droves, using Amazon to sell their stuff, how could anybody keep track of all this? Amazon surely has some culpability here, but how can they police a rule like that?
Re:China Mart (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy, the same way you detect counterfeit watches and such - by the serial number. (Did you know tires had serial numbers?). The manufacturer certainly knows which tires it made and what numbers they are. The counterfeiters don't, and generally use the same serial number over and over again (which can be looked up) or a convincing but not real serial number, at which point the manufacturer says they never made tires with those serial numbers.
Yes, there are websites where you can enter in a watch's serial number and it'll tell if it's one used by counterfeiters, or potentially real.
Sure it requires more information to be tracked, but in this era of pervasive human tracking, we can certain dedicate a tiny amount of database space to tracking production serial numbers.
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Except that if you know what serial numbers have been issued, it is exceptionally easy to mimic serial numbers or issue a batch of knock off tires using existing serial numbers and date codes.
Even then, how is it possible for the consumer to know? The retailer may not even be able to tell and calling the "manufacturer" (really importer) to find out if the set of four tires you just bought on sale are knockoffs or not.
The problem got so bad for this tire maker that they had to reword their warranty terms a
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"Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between name brand and Chinese knock offs because they come from exactly the same manufacturing tooling. "
One of the problems the problems that Amazon had (has?) if the 3rd party seller was selling the same item as "Shipped by Amazon" the 3rd party seller's goods would be stocked with the Amazon-acquired goods in the warehouse.
So, there was the possibility that the person buying an allegedly safe item "Sold and shipped by Amazon" could get a counterfeit piece of C
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One of the problems the problems that Amazon had (has?) if the 3rd party seller was selling the same item as "Shipped by Amazon" the 3rd party seller's goods would be stocked with the Amazon-acquired goods in the warehouse.
So, there was the possibility that the person buying an allegedly safe item "Sold and shipped by Amazon" could get a counterfeit piece of Chinese shit, and, conversely the 3rd party could "sell" a quality article.
Speculation is fun. Any other theories?
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They need an option to show only trusted brand names.
What is a trusted brand name? The established brand names that could once be trusted have been sold to Chinese companies for labelling crap with, quite legally. Or the names do remain in the hands of the original western companies but those companies, with a different management attitude, now simply import the crap instead of actually making it. And there are the illegal knock-offs too.
Oblg. With this 1 trick you can be in the top 10K! (Score:2)
Surprised there isn't more clickbait along the lines of gaming the system.
AI Recruiters (Score:5, Insightful)
We just had an article about AI Recruiters, and now this. Any company that relies upon "AI" (artificial incompetence?) for ranking things such as people or products will be gamed. Those that abuse the system will be successful, those that are honest will be lost forever. These companies are creating moral wastelands without any repercussions.
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We could also go with "AI" as After Internet, since companies with a propensity to succeed in the free market are those that are the most morally bankrupt, and have been since Before Internet.
Startover (Score:4, Informative)
The other thing many vendors do it when they collect too many negatives, they just drop the listing, open a new account, relabel their product from "happytool" to "joyjoy" or something, feed it a few fake (self-bought or whatever) reviews, and start again. I can't tell you how many times I have seen this happen. Often they even use the same photos.
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It's either no longer offered, or the price has been increased by 20% since I last ordered. And it's not just them, they are all doing it.
I just went and looked, at this point both have doubled in price since I started using prime a year ago, it's at the point I can just buy it locally for the same price.
Looks like it's time to cancel Prime.
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I can't tell you how many times I have seen this happen.
So you noticed it, and avoided the product. Same here. Now what are we complaining about?
I'd do it (Score:3)
If it wasn't for the serious downside of getting caught, I would totally pay a "consultant" to raise my book rankings. I used ReviewTargeter and endured the rejection of dozens of pleas for reader reviews. It was miserable, thankless work...worse than thankless, apparently seeking a book review is an invitation for abuse. Doing things by the terms and conditions sucks ass.
The worst part was seeing products that were clearly inferior getting hundreds and thousands of reviews. They're not better writers, just better marketers.
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What is getting my attention is the cheap products I look at, check the massive number of reviews, and these reviews are for different products.
I don't care why, I just move on, another fake seller.
Easy Peasy... (Score:2)
Opendata set available in S3 for analysing reviews (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazon have an opendata set of Customer Reviews stored in S3 as referenced at https://registry.opendata.aws/... [opendata.aws]
I've done some analysis of those reviews, ironically using Amazon EC2 to analyse Amazon Customer Review data stored in Amazon S3.
You can read the article at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... [linkedin.com]
This shows how to spot fake reviews and reviewers, as well as which reviewers are most helpful, and how reviews vary by region, product category, time, etc.
Also contains all the information you need to repeat the analysis, and go further, so you can see if e.g. the time between reviews is a potential indicator of a fake reviewer (I suspect it would be).