
Amazon makes good on its promise to delete “incentivized” reviews - TheAntiEgo
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/amazon-made-good-on-its-promise-to-delete-incentivized-reviews/
======
tyingq
Amazon is now at 50% of sales being third party listings.

Aside from the review mess, the quality level of the 3rd party listing
themselves, customer service, shipping speed, and products...is really hurting
them. And, of course, separately, the issue of counterfeit products.

My non-techie friends are taking notice.

Amazon really needs to deep dive into this before they hurt their brand in a
way that's hard to recover.

~~~
nkuttler
I recently ordered a cheap product from a vendor in china. As I found out
later this vendor has 99% negative reviews that all say the same: money taken,
product not delivered, and this has been going on for months. At least I got
my money back after a comlaint. I find it unbelievable that you can scam for
months and still be a vendor on amazon.

~~~
philliphaydon
Not sure why you single China out. It can be any vendor. I bought an
intervalometer for my camera for $30 2 weeks ago. Took 8 days. Works great.
Done the job. Chinese brand and shipped from china.

Bought some clothes from UK. Never arrived. Amazon refunded.

Amazon is great. But any vendor can be as dodgy as any eBay seller.

~~~
setq
This.

RS and Farnell in the UK use parcel force and UPS respectively. The success
rate for me is higher on stuff shipped from China.

I've had some stuff from Leeds to London end up in Belgium for two days.

~~~
leoedin
Farnell seems like a weird vendor to pick out as being slow or unreliable.
I've always been amazed by the delivery of stuff I've ordered from Farnell -
often you can order it at 7.50pm and it'll be there the next morning. In fact
in probably 50+ orders I've never had one go missing or arrive more than a day
late.

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dman
The days when I thought of ordering from amazon as a hassle free experience
are long over. I now largely think of Amazon as a more expensive AliExpress.

a. Their search is broken.

b. Same item is listed by different sellers as different SKUs.

c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore.

d. You cannot filter by merchant and rely on receiving an item that is genuine
since Amazon will comingle inventory from multiple merchants for the same SKU.
Ie buying a product from Amazon has no guarantee that it is actually an item
stocked by Amazon.

e. Their price competetiveness appears to have eroded. Best Buy etc no longer
feel like a complete rip off in comparision.

f. Other retailers (Macys etc) have much more hassle free return policies.

Prime is the single thing that Amazon gets right in the whole selling
experience - which is why I now think of Amazon as more of a logistics company
than I do as a retailer.

~~~
deanCommie
All your problems can be addressed by filtering by items that are sold by
amazon, and not buying from 3rd party sellers.

I can buy the complaints about Search (though really it's a problem of having
too much selection). However, I've had universally positive return
experiences, so I have no idea what you're on about there.

~~~
dman
Please see point d. Specifying Amazon as the seller merchant does not mean
what you think it means. Let me give an example in the form of a question /
answer

a. If Amazon sells a 64 GB Sandisk card

b. Merchants A and B also sell the same card

c. Merchants A and B have opted into the fulfilled by Amazon program.

Question: You purchase the 64 GB Sandisk card and pick Amazon as the seller.
Whose inventory did the card come from?

Answer: Undefined.

For semantic purposes we can think of the following mental model - For a given
SKU Amazon takes the memory cards from its own inventory and inventory from
all other resellers who have opted into the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program (in
our example A and B) and puts it together in a giant heap in its warehouse.
When a order comes in a card is picked at random from the heap and shipped out
to you.

~~~
deanCommie
Answer: Amazon's

If you buy the one that's sold by Amazon it will come from the stock that's
bought by Amazon.

~~~
dman
That is not what this article claims =>

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-
ope...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-opens-door-
to-knockoffs-1399852852)

Do you have any sources which specify that Amazon treats it own inventory
seperately?

~~~
nommm-nommm
They have no reason to. The idea of commingling is they can pick the best
warehouse to ship from when a customer orders instead of (potentially)
shipping across the country. They actually like commingling because it helps
their logistics.

------
ClayFerguson
Amazon needs to also stop disallowing bad reviews. I put up a bad review once,
with no profanity or anything obviously worthy of rejecting other than a bad
review of a product, and they refused to post it citing something "against
their policy". All I can think of is the fact that i accused the product of
being a fake/counterfeit which was most certainly true.

Of course the real moral of that story is never buy anything made of any kind
of fabric from a China seller. You'll get something 2 sizes too small and only
roughly similar to what you saw in the picture, and in my experiences anything
you think you're getting from China which is a "name brand" will indeed be a
knock off (fake) one.

~~~
philliphaydon
I've had bad reviews rejected because they mentioned things unrelated to the
product. If I do a negative 1 star review on the product, never had the review
rejected.

------
Steeeve
This thread has given me a big lack of confidence in Amazon as a retail
outlet.

I see a lot of "you're problem is solved by doing X", and maybe that's fine
for me if I care to remember the advice but I'm not the big spender in my
family, and I certainly don't care to put in the effort to keep up-to-date on
how not to get screwed by shopping at a particular website.

From what I can tell, there's are issues with fake reviews, fake vendors, and
counterfeit products being commingled with genuine products. Why would I put
myself in a situation where I know any of these are potential problems?

Add to that when I have had problems with Amazon, the support channels have
historically been unclear and they have an extraordinarily poor reputation for
how they treat their employees.

What is the logical path that would make me want to spend my money with this
particular vendor?

------
WaltPurvis
Two thoughts:

(1) It's always been standard practice in the publishing industry to provide
free Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to reviewers, and I've noticed that many
independent ebook authors on Amazon have adopted this practice. Am I to
understand that Amazon will now disallow providing ARCs to book reviewers?
Because that would fly in the face of standard industry practice -- a practice
that I think very few people have ever complained about over the years.

(2) Isn't this exactly what the Amazon Vine program does? I.e., provide free
products to people so they can review them? Are they stopping Vine? (Maybe
they already did.) Are they admitting that the Vine program led to inflated
reviews?

~~~
throwawaylalala
Amazon seller here- Amazon Vine costs something like 4k per SKU. That makes it
dead to most sellers.

------
tmptmp
Are there sufficient number of good engineers left with Amazon yet? I wonder.

Look at their search quality. Terrible even at its best. I searched for laptop
and wanted to see the cheapest so selected "sort by Price low to high", lo and
behold, I was flooded with a never ending list of wired and wireless mice,
keyboards, usb cables, and what not. I had to click on multiple pages before I
could get to the first laptop entry.

This is ridiculous or do they prevent their engineers for experiencing this
pain?

They are better off outsourcing their search problem to Google, just as Apple
learnt to outsource the maps problem to Google. No offense intended.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Amazon has lost a lot o appeal lately. Since they moved to Amazon Logistics
from DHL here in Berlin, I had several lost or non delivered items, items were
delivered at 8pm to a business address or on Saturday - this all being a Prime
customer. Working with customer support was a pain.

Several people I know - including me - wish for a real Amazon alternative, and
I've been a customer right from the beginning spending 90% of my online money
at Amazon.

~~~
brobinson
Sounds a lot like the OnTrac carrier in the Bay Area. One time they left a
package for me at the _Subway_ next to my building.

I stopped using Amazon same-day shipping (even when offered for free!) because
it almost always used OnTrac and I would have about a 50/50 shot of actually
getting the item the same day.

~~~
terinjokes
I've stopped getting any expiedated deliveries from Amazon via OnTrac sometime
in the last year in SF proper. I think they've shifted it to in-house
logistics (I think via Prime Now ICs or via Prime Fresh trucks).

------
gshakir
Good move, but the damage has been done. My recent product search have
'incentivized' reviews and it has been very hard to make any decisions, so I
have been double checking the reviews from other sources. Due to this, I also
found that Amazon prices are no longer competitive and my recent purchases
have been via Target with either free shipping or local store pickup with
cheaper prices.

------
brilliantcode
I bought a bunch of crap on Amazon based on these reviews. I feel lied to and
it will definitely make me rethink next I recklessly binge purchase items
based on the star ratings.

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user5994461
IMO. Amazon.com has became a poor ebay.

On Ebay, it's clear that you're only buying from a 3rd party seller and you
can see who it is and what's his reputation.

~~~
tyingq
That's a good point. On amazon, you have to know to click on the seller link
to drill down to reputation. EBay has that information front and center on the
listing.

------
grkvlt
One of my hobbies when bored is to look at (unusually) expensive items on
Amazon (say, a GBP 40K Hasselblad camera) and all their reviews. 99% of the
reviews are jokes, all of the same predictable form: 'I spent my life savings
on this, now I live in the box it came in'; 'Such good value I bought ten'; or
attributing ridiculous properties to the product. [1] I then flag each review
as inappropriate, and mark them as unhelpful.

I know this is not going to fix the problem, unfortunately. I just find these
puerile attempts at humour rather sad and don't understand why they are
tolerated; both by Amazon and even other site users, who mark the reviews as
helpful, and comment approvingly. Amazingly, some of the approving comments
are even voted as helpful. I guess that everyone who can afford to spend GBP
20K on a TV are probab;y not influenced by reviews.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00N8V3RS0)

------
kpozin
In the past couple of weeks, I've searched for several categories of items on
Amazon: umbrellas, paint brushes, and acrylic paint. Almost every product's
page was dominated by five-star incentivized reviews.

------
i-think
In order to make this claim, Amazon, TechCrunch, and the researcher they cite
must be able to accurately identify the population of incentivized reviews.
How is that possible?

Incentivized reviews, if I'm using the term correctly, are designed to be
indistinguishable from 'real' reviews. The reviewers aren't going to reveal
which ones are incentivized.

If you think you can identify them, what you mean is that you can identify the
ones that you identify; it's literally that much of a tautology. You have no
idea of your accuracy, how many true and false positives and how many
true/false negatives.

What Amazon is done is the same; they remove reviews that meet certain
criteria. Amazon claims the criteria are an accurate proxy for incentivized
reviews but I doubt they can confirm that.

At best they are raising the bar so that only better written incentivized
reviews remain, and incentivized reviewers will adjust to the new standard.
Users, no longer seeing incentivized reviews that they can identify, will
assume the situation has improved. Really, they are still being conned but now
don't know it.

------
rampage101
It's funny how whenever the topic of machine learning comes up Amazon is
mentioned as a world class leader. However, their search is quite poor as many
have mentioned. It still seems like "search" is a technically hard problem to
get right.

------
Kunix
Naive question - Does anybody know how the Amazon reviews datasets available
online have been generated? Is it web scraping? (on millions of reviews?!) Or
partnership with academics? Or something else?

Looking at [https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-
Amazon.html](https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html) and
[http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/](http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/),
I can't find any mention on what process they used to generated these
datasets.

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eruditely
For stuff like this, Millesime imperial for men, I cannot be sure I am buying
the real thing or a counterfeit. This is totally the opposite of what I
expected amazon to represent, i'm not quite sure when this decline started to
happen.

[https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-
Spray-4-0/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-
Spray-4-0/dp/B00152S1IK/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1480128263&sr=8-1&keywords=creed+millesime+imperial+for+men)

~~~
hga
There are a bunch of domains where you should just avoid buying anything on
Amazon that's sold by a third party, and this strikes me as one of them.

And if it's sold by Amazon itself, hope it's either in one of the categories
where they don't commingle, like food, or that you luck out. I'd hope anything
you ingest or put on your skin like this would be in a "No Commingling!"
category....

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freyr
If I'm purchasing a physical item where quality matters and I don't want to
end up with a shoddy product or cheap knockoff, I don't buy from Amazon.
Exceptions are books and the occasional AmazonBasics cable.

It's a shame, because they had a great service, and their delivery
infrastructure remains great. But I don't need same day delivery if you're
delivering junk.

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SwellJoe
While I like the sentiment, and have seen my trust of Amazon and reviews at
Amazon plummet in recent years, I suspect this will just push the practice
underground. Unscrupulous vendors will continue to utilize their network of
"reviewers", but will no longer instruct them to include a disclaimer about
the reviewers being given free products in exchange for (almost always
positive) reviews.

~~~
mimimimi
With the effect that it will just screw amazon further. Because of this
problem I've started buying products directly from the brand stores or
walmart/costco/target. I completely stopped buying from ebay years ago because
of similar problems.

~~~
SwellJoe
I guess curation (of products, content, reviews, vendors, everything) remains
one of the big problems of the internet age, where there's a million of
everything and it's hard to know who to trust.

------
KKKKkkkk1
After many years of turning no profit, Amazon has finally found its business
model. Would not be surprised if they moved out of retail altogether.

