Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews Amazon is suing over 10,000 administrators of Facebook groups that offer to post fake reviews on the online souk's website in exchange for products and money. Merchants selling items on Amazon are more likely to appear first in search results if their products are highly rated by previous purchases. Some vendors therefore …
Amazon publishes all reviews, but it will only 'count' the reviews from people who purchased that item (which you can see visually tagged with Verified Purchase). However the fake reviews are done in a way where people purchase the item and then get a refund from the fake review organisers.
In general only 1-2% of real buyers leave a review (whether for products on Amazon or games on Steam) - and that is a key reason that fake reviews have such a strong impact, because if you keep buying fake reviews you can keep a low quality item appearing as a high quality one.
In general only 1-2% of real buyers leave a review
Better incentives from Amazon (rather than the seller) for real buyers to leave genuine reviews would help a lot, but right now with lack of competition and any relevant legislation Amazon have no motive to divert a significant slice of their margin to that. They would also point out their reviews are read by consumers who end up purchasing the item elsewhere so perhaps an industry-wide independently-incentivised review database is the answer. Would also require splitting Amazon into separate retailer and marketplace companies, so the marketplace side of them could independently manage reviews about Amazon's own products.
Even if they committed to all that Amazon's quote about achieving the goal of "Permanently ridding fake reviews" is worthy of a good chuckle.
people who had actually bought the item
You'd think that would be a requirement for the reviews to have any weight. seems not.I'm revising the order of sympathry the author told me to think about.
Fake reviewers 4 cash - criminals
Facebook - Fagin-esque aiding and abetting in criminal activity
Amazon - letting their own market place be polluted with that shit because presumably its more profitable to fence cheap shitty products than offer a reliable quality control
.
...really cant work out whose the worst here !
Amazon - letting their own market place be polluted...
Actually, look at the number of reviews that end with the statement "at that price I can't be bothered to return [faulty item]".
It's getting so bad now that I usually look for reviews on other, more credible sites before I spend money with Amazon.
I thought exactly the same. If they were really that bothered about it, that's what they would do. Even if companies are paying for products and then getting refunds - the number of reviews would still go down. They'd also know if a product was returned - 5 star review + product returned = flag review. Pretty sure there is some kind of AI that could help with that.
I've had Prime for years, order a variety of stuff and sometimes return things. I stream Amazon Prime Video content a couple times a week. I have only written a handful of reviews in that time, either because something was really terrible or I was surprised was good (i.e. taking a flyer on buying something cheap/shady where I have low expectations and am assuming there's a better than even chance I'll be returning it)
Someone creating an account for fake reviews is going to have an account that's only been around a short time, only order certain products (i.e. nothing name brand) and write reviews on just about all of them. They will not use that account to watch videos or listen to music.
Limit the reviews to ones they can confidently establish are real and they'd raise the quality of reviews dramatically. Or at least raise the bar significantly for those trying to game the system since they couldn't just create new accounts and start writing reviews on day one.
Whilst the web has enabled this kind of manipulation of reviews to explode in size, it's not new.
Back in the 80s, there were all sorts of allegations that the advertising department would lean on the editor to write favourible articles so they could sell more advertising space to the advertiser.
Some (slightly) ethical rags put up chinese walls between the editorial & commercial sides of their business to try to fend these acusations off.
I bought a shitty phone screen protector on Amazon long ago. As I don't like to be screwed, I wrote a review for this item. A couple of weeks later, I received mails from the vendor asking me to remove my review in exchange of $. I warned three times Amazon about this corruption attempt. The only answers I got were automated generic answers. The vendor is still selling on Amazon
I never give a maximum score on any of these sorts of scales because perfection or "above and beyond service" is incredibly rare and the only time anyone deserves full marks. As far as I'm concerned, a middle ranking is "doing your job as expected". Systems which have scales of only 3 or 5 stars means most vendors should be averaging 2 or 3 stars.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of manipulative scales ranging from "good" to "excellent" with no options for anything less than "good". Rankings only offering 3 scale points are probably the most insidious since the only real options of "poor", "average", "excellent" and they complain if you give anything other than "excellent".
I did one recently which had a scale of 1-9. I gave 5-7 for most of the items and then was informed later that anything below 7 was considered "poor" despite my being honest in my belief that I was giving quite good scores to the questions asked. This was supposed to be an "open, transparent and anonymous" corporate-wide survey, yet they did not make clear how the scoring worked befoirehand.
This malarkey is exactly why I simply don't bother providing reviews anymore. They're mostly so manipulated that there's precisely zero value in actually filling them out and quite often it's actually even detrimental to someone. (Had this a while back where a salesperson selling me my new couch begged me to give at least a 7 or higher on everything as anything below that was considered a bad mark and reason for docked bonuses and even potentially sacking. Too many 7s in itself was already considered a bad thing. This in the Netherlands where giving anyone 7 or higher is usually already high praise in itself. Simply not filling out the forms was apparently not used against them, so that's what I did. )
In general I ignore any 5 star review, they're generally useless and either bought or "the box looks good, will try it tomorrow" (Why are you writing a product review if you haven't even taken it out of the box!!). The 2 to 4 star range is generally where you find the real reviews, where people actually talk about the negatives and share real user experiences in a way that allows me to judge if a product meets expectations.
In particular I also avoid buying anything from Amazon.
Amazon's own algorithms don't help here. You can sort by 'average customer review' to see the highest rated products. However, Amazon seems to sort by a simple mean average, so a product with just a handful of (possibly fake) 5 star reviews is placed higher than one that has gained thousands of genuine positive reviews. They really need some kind of weighted average that takes into account the number of reviews.
Amazon knows that a substantial proportion of its reviews are fake, but makes no attempt to warn unwary customers. The fact (if it is one) that they are doing what they can to catch fake reviews is no excuse for not telling people the actual situation.
Also they concatenate reviews from different products or significantly different versions of the same basic item, to inflate the number of reviews. They must know this but they keep doing it.
I don't like dealing with dishonest people or organisations and I won't buy from them except on the rare occasions when they have something I need but can't get elsewhere. The Amazon cost saving is often an illusion, it takes a few more clicks to check but they are by no means always the cheapest option.
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