
Amazon sues to block fake reviews on its site - nkurz
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-to-block-fake-reviews-on-its-site/
======
notlisted
I wish the person who mapped the Russian twitter bot network [1] would take a
gander at Amazon reviews/reviewers. I used to depend on Amazon overall star
rating, but these days scrutiny of the single-star reviews is required to
detect the many cheaters. Note that this includes a bunch of "invitation only"
Vine program participants. Reported a few, nothing ever came of it.

[1] [http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-
kremlin-t...](http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-
twitter-bots/)

~~~
walterbell
This would require a review API, which seems to be missing,
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4811259/is-there-an-
amazo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4811259/is-there-an-amazon-com-
api-to-retrieve-product-reviews)

Edit: see also [https://www.npmjs.com/package/amazon-
reviews](https://www.npmjs.com/package/amazon-reviews)

~~~
motdiem
Yep - a review API is sorely missing - we've built a tool to enable reviewers
to download their own reviews [1], and had to workaround many weirdness in the
review system. I would say that besides obvious fraud detection, it is an
under-managed part of amazon, with a lot of semi-rational behaviour from
reviewers, because no one is sure what amazon actually does with those.
Reviews routinely disappear, reappear on a whim - how you get to vine is not
clearly understood. We've actually gathered a few interesting data on this
topic, I should probably put a blog post about it sometime....

[1] [https://reviewers.mediapps.com/](https://reviewers.mediapps.com/)

~~~
notlisted
Haha, are you and walterbell tag-teaming? (see above) That would be ironic.

~~~
walterbell
Where's that HN comment API :)

------
pfortuny
I say: would it not be possible to restrict reviews to users having
effectively _paid_ for the reviewed item? I know this may make things
difficult for recently-released items but it would be a better option for
consumers.

What are the drawbacks (apart from much fewer reviews of newer items)?

~~~
dragonwriter
> What are the drawbacks (apart from much fewer reviews of newer items)?

Shill reviewers will then buy, review, and return the items, which will
increase the retailer's cost of dealing with returns or and force them to
either increase prices or institute more restrictive return policies that end
up inconveniencing legitimate purchasers that have to do returns.

EDIT: another problem is that it prevents legitimate reviews from people who,
e.g., receive the item as a gift, which might not seem like a big problem, but
some items may be more frequently purchased as gifts than for use by the
purchaser.

~~~
vmarsy
you could prevent reviews of >3 stars to be posted if you return the item. As
a legitimate purchaser, you would return the item only if you hate it :in that
case your review is sincere, or if you don't need it that much: in that case
don't leave a review.

This wouldn't prevent shill reviewers to negatively review the concurrent
items, but Amazon could easily identify an account that has a abnormally high
return rate + negative reviews and forbid them to review.

(I guess requiring reviewers a minimum spending before reviewing would avoid
shill reviewers to create an account only for the purchase)

~~~
benologist
You can still buy your own stuff and then you're only losing amazon's share of
the transaction.

------
orthecreedence
It would be nice if "Is this review helpful" numbers would weigh into the
overall rating. So if 10 people gave 1 star because "I PLUGGED IT IN AND
NOTHING HAPPENED" or "Seller sent me red instead of blue!! This is trash!" but
they had very low "helpful" ratings, those 1-stars would count significantly
less into the overall rating.

This would allow crowdsourced moderation (kind of an upvote/downvote for
reviews).

~~~
twiceaday
Who moderates the fake "this was helpful" reviews of the fake reviews? Since
those do not contain text they are easier to fake.

------
rebootthesystem
Amazon is missing an opportunity here. Yes, these reviews are a problem but
they are also causing this problem because of the rules surrounding reviews
and the way they use them.

I say this from first hand experience. One of the businesses I own sells on
Amazon. We don't game the system but sometimes feel pretty stupid doing so.
You would not believe the lengths to which competitors will go to cause damage
to other sellers.

Rule: Anyone, regardless of whether they purchased the item or not, can leave
a review.

Consequence: It is easy to buy reviews to either bolster your position or
damage competitors. The fact that non-purchaser reviews are allowed means that
people with no contact with your product are just as visible as those who do.

Rule: Reviews are anonymous.

Consequence: There is no accountability. Anyone can make up a pen name and go
to town.

Rule: The seller is not given access to the reviewer's real identity and order
number and cannot communicate with them except for public comments (which are
always a bad idea as you can be baited into a flame war by a smart
competitor).

Consequence: Again, anonymity means no consequences at all. A reviewer can
call you a "fraudulent scam artist" and your product "fake" and they are
nearly 100% immune from having to respond to their accusations. Again, this is
gamed by nasty actors in the system.

Rule: Amazon will not remove reviews.

Consequence: Nasty or inaccurate reviews remain and there's nothing you can do
about it.

Rule: There is no mechanism through which a seller can engage with an unhappy
buyer to fix a problem before a review goes public.

Consequence: OK, this is more of a "would be nice to have this feature" than a
rule. The point is that in the real world if a customer of yours has a problem
they will usually email of phone you to discuss their grievance and, if you
run a reputable business, you'll do all you can to make them happy. On Amazon
they can come to the site angry, blast away and have no resolution whatsoever
because the seller has virtually no way to identify them and reach out. In a
better world a negative review would be routed to the seller with 48 hours for
resolution before it posts. This would benefit the buyers and give sellers the
opportunity to offer amazing customer service.

When selling on Amazon you are selling within a totalitarian regime with
bipolar disorder. They don't even follow their own rules. On top of this
Seller Support can sometimes be more dangerous then helpful due to lots of
people in there being totally clueless or incompetent. Contacting them is an
absolute last resort.

Example: We had a case where a customer ordered 3 units of one of our products
and only received 1. They left a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW pretty much
stating that. Product review rules state that they are not for fulfillment
reviews. They are for, well, product reviews. Do you think Amazon Seller
Support removed that damaging review? Nope. They kept parroting the line "this
is within published guidelines" and sent us a link to the guidelines. The
third paragraph or so in the guidelines says, to paraphrase, "product reviews
are not for fulfillment problems".

Why didn't we ship this customer the 3 units they ordered? Well, here's where
it gets interesting. We don't ship anything! Amazon does! All of our product
sits at various Amazon warehouses and we pay them for fulfillment! So, Amazon
allowed a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW to stick even though they screwed up
fulfillment.

It doesn't end there. We wanted to contact the customer to ship them the
missing 2 units for free and make good on the order. The problem is that
Amazon does not provide sellers with the identity of reviewers or any order or
contact information. We could not contact this buyer no matter how much we
begged and pleaded with Amazon to let us fix this order. What's worst is that
THEY refused to contact the buyer themselves. Theline was "the customer has to
call our customer service line". Well, how the FUCK do we make that happen?

Usage:

Amazon integrates customer product reviews into their product search ranking
algorithm. This means that negative reviews make your products rank lower in
search results. This alone opens the door to gaming the system because, well,
if you want to rank better just buy a pile of good reviews any way you can.

Why do you have to do this? Aside from the fact that there are various "review
wars" going on within Amazon (where shady sellers will pay review farms to
knock your product down) there's the unbalance in the system.

Who is more motivated to leave reviews? Happy or unhappy people? Well, the
vast majority of buyers don't leave any reviews. I've been using Amazon since
day one and can't remember the last time I left a review. Happy buyers rarely
do leave reviews. This means that the most motivated are those who have a
problem, serious or not, relevant or not, fake or real.

Amazon does not seem to weigh this into their use of product reviews for
ranking. Negative reviews must take into account the average rate of reviews
and review scores given for a given category.

What do I mean by this? If you are selling a weight loss product there's a far
greater probability of negative reviews whether the product is good or not.
Why? Because people would rather sit at home watching TV than go use your bike
or whatever to lose weight. Result? Unhappy buyer who then goes to Amazon to
take it out on you. If, on the other hand, you are selling a screwdriver,
chances are that if the quality is reasonable nobody is going to bother
leaving a review, good or bad. The system does not take into account the
reality of the motivation behind leaving reviews and unfairly ranks and
damages products based on this scale.

Another aspect of this is the time from purchase to review. If you sell a
weight loss product it is likely that someone leaving a review BEFORE THEY GOT
THE PRODUCT (which does happen) or 2 DAYS AFTER THEY GOT IT should not leave a
"Does not work. Actually gained 2 lbs" review. The system is so broken...

Fraudulent reviews would evaporate overnight if reviews where not a control
variable in the ranking algorithm, anonymity was removed and sellers where
given a reasonable opportunity to deal with grievances before reviews go
public. And, yes, of course, you don't get to leave a review unless you
actually bought the product.

I could go on, but that's the basics.

~~~
Vetre
Man. I was just looking at going into the Amazon store for some of the
products a few friends of mine are thinking about selling online. This really
opened my eyes.

After reading your post I decided to get some more insight into this and
you're definitely not the only one. It is somewhat sad, especially the amount
of people that rely on amazon for shipping and deal with shipping reviews.

As for myself, I often skip SF/F or Programming books that are less then 4.
But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no
reason. This puts a ton more time into my background research of a product.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no
> reason.

I've seen studies that seen that (honest) ratings in number/star systems are
_strongly_ culturally correlated, and that American culture strongly favors
giving the _highest_ rating unless there are out-of-ordinary reasons to go
negative, while some Asian cultures strongly favor giving middle to low
ratings unless there is out-of-ordinary reasons to go positive.

So simple cultural correlations in awareness of and use of a particular brand
of a product could result in very different review results with _exactly the
same customer satisfaction profile_.

~~~
Vetre
To be frank, this is something I hadnt really considered. But it does make
sense. I would be interesting seeing more about the subjectivity of reviews
based on cultures.

------
mmuro
It's not illegal, but it's certainly dishonest.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm pretty sure what the companies selling reviews are doing is unlawful in
the EU under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive - the reviews would
need to state they were done for a consideration and by a business in order to
meet with legal requirements from what I understand.

There's a guide to the directive based on UK law at [http://www.out-
law.com/page-9050](http://www.out-law.com/page-9050):

>'A practice is unfair if it fails to meet the standard of "professional
diligence" (the standard of skill and care that would reasonably be expected
of a trader in its field of activity) and it materially impairs an average
consumer's ability to make an informed decision, causing him to make a
decision he would not otherwise have made.' (Out-Law.com, ibid) //

~~~
_delirium
In some cases it may be illegal in the U.S. also. The clearest case would be
if a direct competitor hires someone to post fake negative reviews intending
to damage a competing business (and fails to hide the trail). In that case the
"target" would have a good case that their competitor is engaged in some kind
of tortious interference with their business.

edit: There's at least one case currently in the courts on a similar theory,
[http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2015/02/allegations-of-fake-
inde...](http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2015/02/allegations-of-fake-independent-
reviews.html)

