

Are Amazon Seller Ratings Trustworthy? - spxdcz
http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/is-amazon-seller-feedback-trustworthy.html

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travisp
I don't know if this person's complaints about the way Amazon treated his
negative seller review are representative. If true, it's very shortsighted
because it will hurt Amazon if their customers find that highly rated sellers
consistently give them bad service.

However, he should also ask for a refund directly from Amazon (under their
A-to-z Guarantee). Amazon is very good about giving refunds, even from third
party sellers, and doing so would probably put more pressure on the seller as
well. The guarantee specifically says:

"If a seller has clearly misrepresented the condition or details of an item in
a way that affects its value or utility, it is "materially different." In such
cases, that seller should be willing to offer a refund or exchange when
contacted within 14 days of receiving the item."

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dwwoelfel
I think that this is probably a fluke. Amazon is not in the habit of
sacrificing long-term values such as their reputation for a short-sighted
gain.

Jeff Bezos has explicitly claimed this in similar situations in the past:

"Indeed, some of the most important things Amazon has done have seemed like
tactical losers to established companies who were looking at the short term.
But Amazon has always been fixated on improving the consumer experience
regardless of conventional wisdom, according to Bezos’s comments in HBR: 'In
the very earliest days (I’m taking you back to 1995), when we started posting
customer reviews, a customer might trash a book and the publisher wouldn’t
like it. I would get letters from publishers saying, ‘Why do you allow
negative reviews on your website? Why don’t you just show the positive
reviews?’ One letter in particular said, ‘Maybe you don’t understand your
business. You make money when you sell things.’ But I thought to myself, We
don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers
make purchase decisions.'"

[http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-
innovat...](http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-innovates-
lessons-in-strategy-for-microsoft-and-others/)

~~~
eru
Let's hope they stay "not evil".

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lena
I do hate that Amazon seems to remove negative reviews so easily (I think the
same goes for book reviews as well) but I also wish that people would only
leave a negative review after they unsuccesfully tried everything with the
seller. It seems like this person order the wrong product (though the
description was accurate, so this was not the seller's fault), waited a few
weeks for a refund, but never communicated the not-arrival of the refund and
his frustrations with the seller.

The seller sounds really unprofessional, but many of us here have businesses
that sometimes screw things up and I am glad when people let me know when I
do, instead of shouting on the internet that I suck.

~~~
eru
> [...] but I also wish that people would only leave a negative review after
> they unsuccesfully tried everything with the seller.

As a consumer I don't want to try everything with a seller. So even less
warrants a negative review. (Though some good-faith effort is OK.)

~~~
lena
You are right, that was put too strongly. "Make some effort to allow the
seller to make it right" is what I should have said.

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olegk
That pretty much means that most Amazon ratings are bullshit.

~~~
Qz
It means that all Amazon ratings are _potentially_ bullshit.

There's no way to generalize from one user/seller experience to all of them,
but the fact that we don't really have evidence to the contrary definitely
does sour the whole experience.

I generally avoid the third party sellers just because I like to use super-
saver shipping to save money, but I'll go for the third party if the item is
hard to find or the deal is amazing.

~~~
spxdcz
Precisely.

I'm sure this isn't wide-spread, but it still very strange behaviour from such
an established company. They take down the negative reviews at the drop of a
hat, but it takes a mountain of effort to get them re-instated (in fact, they
haven't even been yet).

And the worrying bit seems to be that they don't even know their own published
policies on the matter: if you don't follow/know your own policies, what's the
point in having them? Is it all hot air?

~~~
robryan
It's also a bit of a worry from the sellers perspective that they can't afford
to get even one bad review. I guess this has come about because all the
sellers are trying to hard to prevent negative reviews that even one puts you
back compared to others.

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gjm11
There's now a followup blog post at
[http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-
selle...](http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-seller-
ratings.html). Amazon contacted her and offered the usual story (it was an
inexperienced employee, various people screwed up, the issues involved have
been escalated), and she's giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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pmiller2
I'd just like to point out that this:

>they are far more concerned with keeping their (sic) Sellers happy (sic) then
their customers.

is based on a mistaken premise. The customers of Amazon _are_ the sellers.
It's the _buyers_ who the author wants to claim are being screwed by Amazon.
Sellers are where Amazon makes its money (unless you happen to buy directly
from Amazon).

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gabrielroth
I'd like to see more than one data point before coming to any conclusions.

