
Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products - kjhughes
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/03/amazon-bans-incentivized-reviews-tied-to-free-or-discounted-products/
======
vinhboy
FINALLY!!! You can't buy a single tech accessory on Amazon without these fake
reviews.

Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions.

They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One
of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

~~~
in_me_i_trust
> Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product
> versions.

This is huge. It seems to be a common tactic for companies to get a product's
rating up to 4.5 stars, then replace it with a lower quality version. I notice
only when I filter for the most recent reviews.

~~~
chias
I think this is a slightly different issue, which first entered widespread
public discussion in the SSD market.

Basically Kingston (I think?) and a few others released a new SSD and used
very high quality components in them, so that they exceeded advertised
specification. After the early-adopter reviews came in with the benchmarks and
whatnot, they altered the build to use lower quality / cheaper components.
When discovered and confronted, their argument was that the lower quality
builds still met spec, so it was appropriate to sell it under the old model
number and listings, but the upshot was that they got to produce low quality
products while benefiting from reviews and benchmarks that were run against a
higher quality product.

I don't think there's much Amazon can do about this particular issue...
although yes it would be a great help if you didn't see reviews for the 900x
version of something while looking at the 1x version page.

~~~
skybrian
From a few things I've read, I don't think this is specific to Kingston. It's
apparently pretty common for offshore factories to optimize for cost while
keeping the product apparently the same.

There is a principal-agent problem. The company whose brand is on the line
needs to be diligent about catching it in QA.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Walmart will ask the manufacturer to
build a special lower-quality version of the same item to keep costs down. So
a direct price comparison can be misleading.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, I wonder if it's always the fault of the brand, actually.

I remember that during the FTDI fiascos[0] one of the often-raised complaint
is that many vendors don't even know they're using fake FTDI chips, because
it's the factory that decides to replace the genuine chip with a counterfeit
to cut down on costs.

Then again, a cynic in me sees this as a plausible deniability scenario - the
brand can always _say_ that they didn't know about the component switchup,
"it's that Chinese factory that did it, and we're _investigating_!".

[0] - FTDI supplies the most popular USB-to-serial chips, which are present in
pretty much any USB-connected device you have; on two instances they released
driver updates that detected and _bricked_ devices with counterfeit USB-to-
serial chips.

~~~
caf
There's a fine line here between "counterfeit" and "clone". It's only a
counterfeit if it's sold _as_ a genuine FTDI part.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Gomorrah (
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312427794/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312427794/)
) has an interesting discussion of the workings of the fashion industry in
Italy. It goes like so:

1\. A fashion label invites a bunch of clothing manufacturers to a pricing
auction. They all meet somewhere.

2\. The representative of the label describes the clothing they want. The
manufacturers bid for the contract, with bids taking the form "X many items
within Y period of time at Z cost". For example, 800 items / 20 euros per item
/ 1 month.

3\. Eventually, the brand will accept a bid. At that point, every manufacturer
may commit to fulfilling it. Any manufacturer accepting the winning bid is
given the material for free.

4\. Whoever delivers first gets paid. Everyone else is left with a partially-
complete order that they can no longer sell to the brand that commissioned it.

(4a. Manufacturers who show a history of accepting bids for the free fabric
and then failing to deliver get blacklisted.)

5a. The brand sews its label onto the clothes it bought and sells them at
"high" prices.

5b. The slower manufacturers may sell their too-slow clothes to the mafia,
which sews a counterfeit label onto them and sells them at "low" prices.

So now we have the mafia selling "counterfeit" clothing that would have been
"real", if only it had taken a little less time to create. The fabric and cut
are to brand specifications because the clothes were made at the brand's
direction to bear their fancy label. Would you call those clothes counterfeit?

------
flavor8
I sell a niche music accessory on FBA. I didn't have many reviews, and it was
hard to gain traction as a result.

I found a very relevant subreddit and offered to send a sample to anybody who
was willing to leave an honest review, up to 10 total. I got very enthusiastic
responses, and sent out the samples.

Every review that I received from this group was five stars. I at no time
asked for five stars, and was very explicit about asking them to be honest.
Maybe my product is just that good, but I suspect there's at least a little
bias there.

More to the point, every organic review I've received since has been five
stars, which leads me to think there's a crowd effect going on.

I think what I did was a good deal less scummy that what ReviewKick et al do,
since they explicitly find "good" reviewers for you, and the reviewers aren't
necessarily knowledgeable about the product or niche. That said, even my
targeted approach yielded a lot of bias.

For what it's worth, this exercise doubled my sales. I now effectively earn
the equivalent of a full time minimum wage job through one tiny niche product,
and an hour's work every couple of months.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Out of curiosity, what do you sell that takes you half an hour per month to
manufacture but sells for enough to make a living?

~~~
flavor8
Honestly it's easy enough to duplicate that I don't want to describe the
product itself on HN of all places. :)

But I will say that FBA is very easy to get into. If you ever find yourself
thinking "I wish that exists" about a relatively simple product, and can't
find it already on Amazon, jump on to Alibaba and source a factory that makes
something similar and ask them if they'll make what you want.

~~~
shostack
And there's the bit that makes me never want to get into FBA. Half the sellers
won't even mention what they sell because their business is so indefensible
that if someone found out and competed it would no longer be profitable.

Doesn't strike me as particularly sustainable. Especially if you have all your
eggs in Amazon's basket given their willingness to take over entire product
lines with their own brand.

~~~
r2dnb
This used to be my feeling too, but I changed my mind when I worked with a
company doing just what you describe. They grew it to a 50-people company
within 5 years. Initially I felt smarter than them and wondered how on earth
they could have put all their eggs in the same basket in such a way.

Then I realized that with the money they had, they had been able to hire me to
do this work, so perhaps I wasn't the smartest guy in the room after all...

The thing to understand is that capitalism is about identifying opportunities
to accumulate the largest amount of capital in the shortest amount of time.

The truth is if you focus only on "logical", sustainable, defensible,
infinitely scalable business models, you'll be missing out a good 60% of the
opportunities.

If you could let's say accumulate $600,000 in 5 months with a non viable
business, you'd have all the time in the world to work on the viable
businesses you mention.

In capitalism, you rarely know for sure which game the other person is
playing. It's not because she is moving cards around that she is playing
cards.

So the bottom line of my comment is don't be too smart . Being able to make
dumb money is as important - if not more important - than being able to make
smart money.

And I can even say : making dumb money at the right time is more valuable than
making smart money at the wrong time.

~~~
shostack
Fair enough on your main point. But I'll ask the obvious question... What
stopped you or the other employees who understood how the business worked from
sourcing the same or similar products and competing?

~~~
r2dnb
I won't mention basic things like non-competition clauses, honesty etc... The
majority of people are usually honest - especially those senior enough to be
exposed to this kind of secrets / overview.

But past that starting a business, especially a physical product one is not a
trivial thing to do. You need to be very motivated. Like with software you
discover many time-consuming details as you implement. And here not everything
can be automated once solved. Even established competitors do not copy as fast
as one may think because of these forces.

It might be dumb money but it still isn't easy money - and that's what make it
even dumber : why not invest the effort in something "better" someone will
say.

------
TrevorJ
I don't think I'll take this seriously until Amazon stops gaming their own
review system.

For instance, if you take a look at Comcast's rating on Amazon the have 4
stars, but if you click in and look at the breakdown _85%_ of the ratings are
one star. The fact that this magically translates into a 4-star rating in
Amazon's world is a huge issue.

~~~
throwaway13337
I was in sort of disbelief so I had to look it up.

[https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-
term/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-
term/dp/B01B6ZHV7C/)

Yep. 4 stars with 85% one star ratings. Amazingly awful.

To be fair, there are certain categories that amazon weights differently based
on the average rating of those categories. Some types of things are just
always rated poorly. Maybe that has something to do with it?

~~~
mikequinlan
Quoting...

"Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model
instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account
factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and
whether the reviews are from verified purchases."

~~~
timv
But what is the machine learning to do? It sounds like it could be optimising
for sales.

I actually mean that quite seriously - a machine learning system needs to have
some goal to optimise for, sone way to tell whether the rating it produces is
"good". In Amazon's case that is quite likely to be some measure of clicks or
sales.

 _[Edited to remove typo]_

~~~
tajen
I only buy from Amazon when the product isn't available anywhere else: Between
counterfeit products, external vendors that I don't know how to distinguish
from Amazon itself, stuff "Available in 2 days" that gets delivered 2 months
later, bought reviews, strange ratings and pictures which don't natch the
description — I have a 70% chance of paying the return shipment.

------
jsinkwitz
Keep in mind that this is more of a monopolistic move than a quality move;
Amazon was already scrubbing for a while. 1\. Amazon Vine reviews are still
live and will still go live -- there's no more editorial quality to them than
some of the other services. 2\. This policy doesn't impact book reviews, where
fake reviews, incentivized reviews, and review trading is most rampant. 3\.
The easiest way around the policy will be for vendors to get shadier and not
offer upfront discounting. Instead, you'll see non-disclosed reviews where the
reviewer is compensated for the product costs afterwards. If done properly,
that'd be hard to catch.

As disclosure, I'm CEO of Intellifluence, which is essentially a marketplace
for reviews (one supported platform of which is Amazon). We emphasize honest
reviews and have been trying to fight some of the shadier players, but this
policy move isn't going to fix things...it just is a move to push Amazon's own
program.

~~~
shostack
Can you share any stats on the distribution of your review scores? I'd be
shocked if it didn't skew positive to highly positive since presumably those
who don't rate positively would find nobody wanted them to review or would
stop using your service.

------
corysama
This came up recently: Article summarizing the embedded video "Data Proves
Amazon Reviews with 'Free or Discounted Disclaimer' are Extremely Biased"

[http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-
are-b...](http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-biased-
even-if-1786840382)

~~~
andrewstuart2
On that note, I'm sure this announcement will make for an interesting day over
at ReviewMeta.

~~~
MicroBerto
Searched to see if anyone here mentioned ReviewMeta. If anything, this will
make their service even more important because the beauty seems to be in tying
all the fake reviews together, not necessarily using these keywords.

~~~
andrewstuart2
Hmm. They actually may have a really good pitch to make to Amazon if they're
even interested in being bought. If they have some really good models for
detecting fake reviews (which presumably they do beyond disclaimer string
matching), that might be a good investment for Amazon to make for enforcing
their new guidelines.

~~~
MicroBerto
True. I'm close to Tommy at ReviewMeta because we're "competitors" in the
supplement space (he's a great guy), but I'm not sure what his end game is.

What's infuriating is that you _know_ that Amazon has the talent and data to
stop all the fake reviews. Makes you wonder why they allow it..........

------
ashnyc
This is our story, We have been selling on Amazon since 2011 and about 5
months ago, some hijacker took over our listing and started selling smilar
item but of lower quality. It took us 3 months for amazon to take action and
got the seller kicked out of amazon. Basically he used of of those review
services to upload over 1000 reviews with images to make it seem like they are
the owner of the listing. We have been trying to clean up all this mess and we
are getting no help from amazon.com . Here is a sample review of counterfeit
product.
[https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/)
if you look at the listing, our product is totally diffrent.

~~~
joering2
Very interesting but I think there is something more at play here.

Look at the person who left you that review: SpilledInk788

She is "Stay at home mom" but she reviews over 30 products DAILY - some not
cheap at all.

I suspect this is some sort of paid troll who writes positive/negative reviews
(depending on the order/assignment) and post it online to whether boost
someone's company rating or lower them.

No wonder she never replied to you.

------
iplaw
How in the world will this new policy be enforced? I see only one possible
outcome:

The reviewers who used to begin their review with "I received this product at
a discount in exchange for a fair and honest review" will now begin their
review with "I totally paid full price for this product and am a legit
reviewer without paid-for bias."

~~~
hippich
first of all it is illegal to lie like that. so most reviewers will not do
that.

also, amazon employs statistic engine (i am afraid to call it ai yet) and also
a lot of humans who constantly monitor content (results of which goes back
into stats engine)

so yes - they can enforce it on a global scale.

~~~
brainfire
I think it's a stretch to think most reviewers will care about the legality
(especially because it's pretty unlikely to get enforced against them) but it
may get the "career reviewers." I wonder what proportion of these reviews are
from those "whales."

~~~
colechristensen
Every once in a while the FTC goes on a rampage and Amazon not doing due
diligence to ensure product reviews it uses to sell it's wares poses too much
of an organizational risk as its one of the largest targets out there.

------
rconti
It's probably worse than the spread between 4.74 average rating (product
discount) vs 4.36 average (paid full price).

If you paid full price, you probably did at least a little bit of research and
made a semi-informed decision, so it would stand to reason that you should be
pleased.

For a generic product being used by someone with no particular vested interest
in that product or category, you'd expect a much lower rating.

(on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that the high expectations of
the 'desired' product might tend to bring down satisfaction a bit)

~~~
gnopgnip
Most people who are happy with a product will never leave a review. Everyone
who receives a discounted product is required to leave a review.

~~~
rcthompson
Interesting, I hadn't thought of this, and this effect could actually explain
the difference without any bias from incentives.

------
w3designer
As both a buyer on Amazon and a seller, I have mixed feelings regarding this.

On the buying side, I've seen how hard it is to wade through the reviews to
buy simple products. Though I would say that it's mostly recently about
product quality rather than review quality.

On the seller side, the issue is that when you launch a product and have no
reviews, you won't get sales. Without reviews and sales, your product slides
down into the depths of Amazon. Without the ability to give away products for
reviews, we are only left with waiting for reviews to come in naturally or
paying a lot for Amazon PPC to continuously force the product to the top of
the stack hoping to generate some sales and then ultimately reviews.

There has to be some sort of middle ground for this sort of thing. I would
think there has to be a way to launch on Amazon that can get products out to
real reviewers, and still somehow weed out the "fake" reviews. It's telling
that they didn't remove it for book sales as pre-release reviews are so
entrenched that they didn't dare mess with it. If it's working for books, in
theory, it should work for other categories.

Of course, Amazon does have a way to do this legitimately through their
mysterious Vine program that you need to be invited to. Though it doesn't seem
they really have a direction or know how to handle the issue themselves. For
the time being, I can only assume that this will drive the review sites
underground.

------
jrockway
I have a lot of respect for Amazon here. Having every product have a 5 star
review is great for Amazon in the short term, it lets you "do your research"
and hit that one-click ordering button without hesitation. Making the scores
go down will probably reduce sales (of items that would make people unhappy
anyway, but reduced sales are reduced sales).

Long term, if nobody trusts Amazon reviews, then they'll turn elsewhere to do
that research. And elsewhere probably links to a retailer other than Amazon,
that you might click on because you happen to be there.

It is weird that I have to be happy about the right long-term business
decision, but I guess that's the world we live in. Every day I think Amazon is
going to grow complacent and slowly cease to exist. That day is not today ;)

------
vermontdevil
About time. I hate these "free reviews".

I had to start looking at verified purchases and read a few of these with 5, 3
and 1 star ratings to get a sense if the product is worth buying for.

Was becoming too much of a hassle.

~~~
Kadin
One of the few of those silly "life hack" tips that I've seen floating around
that was really useful was a suggestion to look at the 3-star reviews on
Amazon, if you aren't sure about something. They generally aren't especially
biased (people who are biased for or against the product are going to leave 5
or 1-star reviews) and tend to have the most useful weighing of pros and cons.

That's not to say there aren't valid 5 star and 1 star reviews -- including my
own, because I tend not to review products unless they stick out for some
reason -- but a lot of the 2/3/4 star reviews are the most diagnostically
useful.

~~~
nicklaf
Among products whose review distribution is heavily skewed toward 5-stars, the
1-star reviews are often the most useful, since this is where you might learn
that reviewers are being offered compensation in return for removing their
negative review (either by stating it directly, or as evidenced by an
aggressive comment left by the seller in response to the unhappy customer).

~~~
jerkstate
Understanding the rate and nature of bad reviews provides much better signal
than high-star reviews.

You will get a lot of garbage in 1-star reviews but I find you also find
information about expected uses of the product that don't work, or other types
of important feedback (for example, I was looking for a "bluetooth splitter" a
while back and lots of 5-star reviews said that the product worked as
advertise, but some percentage of 1-star reviews stated that several of the
products added a few hundred milliseconds of latency to the audio). I also use
the percentage of low-star reviews between similar frequently reviewed items
(for example, coffee makers with hundreds of reviews each) to approximate
design defects, manufacturing defect rate and/or ease of use issues.

------
baccheion
If Amazon doesn't realize its reviews are one of its main selling points, then
it's stupid. I'm surprised they don't meticulously curate/maintain reviews to
ensure high quality/accuracy.

------
grandalf
This is long overdue! I'd like the option of a partial refund on all the items
I've purchased that had these sorts of reviews.

------
rebootthesystem
Not far enough. They need to flush all reviews from their site and let them
re-accumulate organically over time.

They can do this in phases and as a percentage of sales for a product. They
have the data. I am sure they can come up with an equation to determine how
many reviews to flush out per week. Having all products go to zero reviews
overnight would not be sensible.

Good products will continue to receive good reviews. Same with bad products.
It's the products with scammed/paid reviews that will suffer. Yes, some of
those products might be good and, if they are, they'll receive organic reviews
just as the others.

The other approach, and probably fairer, is to simply age reviews. Anything
more than N years old (or N months old) is deleted. Simple.

------
Overtonwindow
I applaud this but how about getting rid of the vine reviews too? I don't
trust any Amazon review where someone has gotten something for free.

~~~
r00fus
If they want to keep Vine (essentially monopolizing paid reviews), then at
least give me the option of filtering them out with a checkbox or something.

Still not exactly forthright.

~~~
Overtonwindow
Agreed. I would like the opportunity to filter them out. I read an article
once about people who spend most of their day reviewing products, even
products they never purchased. I sense these are the types that get invited to
Vine.

------
omonra
Why doesn't Amazon have a simple 'verified purchaser' flag that users can
filter by?

    
    
      They know who actually *paid* for the item (since they collect payments).

~~~
delecti
They do. Note the "&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews" flag in this set of
reviews:

[https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-
Blu-r...](https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-
ray/product-
reviews/B01D9EUNB4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_rvwer?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1)

------
ceyhunkazel
Meanwhile here few tips for fake reviews:

Select "Show only Verified Purchases" to get rid of most of fake reviews
according to this 96% of "Incentivized Reviews" are not verified purchases

[http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-
problem-...](http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-of-
incentivized-reviews/)

Another tip is finding products with most reviews so you get more overall
rating even it has some paid/sponsor reviews. "Most reviews" sort option is
hidden in most of the categories but there is a way to do it. Here is my
detailed writing about this. Disclosure: I am the author of medium story and
[http://www.jeviz.com](http://www.jeviz.com) which provides more sort options
including "most reviews" to Amazon searches.

[https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-
eliminate...](https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate-
amazon-products-that-have-4-or-5-starts-but-only-few-
reviews-f485d35d5969#.84yeyaffk)

------
markdown
I suppose that would also work against the reverse (paying for 1 star
reviews). This charity pays for one-star reviews of "culturally appropriative"
halloween costumes.

[http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-
to-...](http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-give-one-
star-amazon-reviews-to-culturally-appropriative-halloween-costumes/)

------
hippich
For me personally it will mean way harder to launch new products on Amazon,
i.e. to get that initial visibility. This is since their search algo is based
on sales of product and reviews of the product, so any new product will be
lost in their search results.

(Vine they mentioned is invite only program for large corporate sellers)

~~~
stonogo
This is the outcome I desire. The number of times I've been looking for a
specific product, only to find all the reviews are from people who clearly
only have the product because of these programs, is bordering on infuriating.
Reviews like "I don't really understand how to use this but it seems well-
made" are completely useless. Even for institutional purchasing I made the
decision years ago not to conduct business with any seller who behaves like
this.

~~~
Steeeve
When I got my S7, I went to amazon looking for a case and screen overlay.

I _ALMOST_ pulled the trigger on the most reviewed and almost 5 star average
product when one of the negative reviews caught my eye. The screen overlay
didn't fit. Then I went digging and almost all of the negative reviews pointed
out that the product didn't actually fit. Hundreds of 5 star reviews for
something that would not work at all.

On occasion, the reviews are helpful, but that is becoming less and less
frequent and frankly I've soured on Amazon as a supplier as a result. Prime
isn't the deal it once was, and pricing isn't particularly competitive for a
lot of products when I shop around.

I remember this happening with Ebay a number of years back and I rarely look
to ebay for anything these days. Amazon is a little stronger because they are
still the go-to resource for books and cloud compute resources.

~~~
hippich
Keep in mind that amazon has listings per product (vs eBay with listing per
product and seller)

It is quite likely that original product was fine, that's why all the reviews,
but then it got out of stock and new seller brought new product, which was
different (by mistake or on purpose) and that one was people complaining
about.

------
sr3d
About time! The paid reviews were getting really annoying and I started to
feel that Amazon's amazing review system was going down in terms of quality.
It's a bold move for Amazon and it sends the right message: high quality,
trust-worthy reviews are much better than high quantity, biased reviews.

------
ghaff
For all those complaining about reviews based on free products, I'd just point
out that most non-crowdsourced reviews have been based on free products (which
may or may not be returned after the review is written) for pretty much
forever. Some exceptions like Consumer Reports of course.

Arguably, Amazon reviews are different--because you theoretically expect the
reviews to be coming from regular buyers. But I strongly disagree, as a
general principle, with the view that if you're given a free copy of a
product/book/etc. to review, you're going to simply give a positive review no
matter what. Frankly, discounts feel much more like an implied quid pro quo.

I don't do a lot of reviewing (and I do reviews on my own blog, not Amazon)
but I give an honest assessment and I clearly disclose if I've been sent
product to review.

~~~
subsection1h
You don't seem to fully understand the issue. Companies aren't giving out free
products to random people in the hope that their products will receive
positive reviews; instead, companies are using services like Amazon Review
Trader[1] and Review Kick[2] to find reviewers who only write positive reviews
and who accept free products and discounts in exchange for reviews. For more
information, visit the ProductTesting subreddit[3] where these reviewers chat
about their favorite freebies and discounts.

[1] [https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/](https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/)

[2] [https://www.reviewkick.com/](https://www.reviewkick.com/)

[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/)

~~~
hippich
They do not leave only positive reviews. This is not encouraged by group
owners, nor reality I experienced first hand.

~~~
FireBeyond
That's not really the reality.

Have a look at the FAQ on AMZ Review Trader where they gloss over issues that
will "make Amazon delete your review", including mentioning the product name
in the review, and other things that sound spammy.

They talk about reasons why your request to review might not be selected and
hint about how your previous reviews may not appeal sufficiently to the
seller.

The sites advertise to seller as "make more money!". You as a reviewer get
free products to use in exchange for these reviews.

It's an exercise in hopeless optimism, or naivety, to say that the expectation
is that you'll write honest, including negative reviews.

I'm sorely tempted to sign up and write honest but negative reviews and see
how long my account lasts. I suspect "not long". It'll be flagged for "other
reasons".

In their list of tips for "awesome reviews", great headlines and such are up
there. "Things you didn't like" gets... half a sentence from twenty bullet
points.

"Leave a disclosure. But don't do it at the start. No one wants to hear that
anyway."

------
falcolas
Eh, I'd treat them as ads. The person is paid to review them, the manufacturer
can pay to have that review displayed on Amazon, clearly marked as "Sponsored
Content". Amazon's already showing ads, so there's precedent.

~~~
bananabill
but then I feel like the point of an ad that looks like a review is to
intentionally mislead. Even if it's labeled sponsored content, the idea that
it looking like an ad would be better than a normal ad admits a level of
knowing that it's misleading.

ads should look like ads, and reviews should be left to real humans.

~~~
falcolas
I agree; that was my intention with the 'clearly marked as "Sponsored
Content"' bit. At a bare minimum, if it's clearly marked it can be flat out
ignored or even filtered out.

------
taurath
Its about TIME. I emailed amazon support about a month about this (many items
I was looking for were 80-90% "incentivized" reviews), and they responding by
saying they would forward it to a team to look for "fraud", but gave no
indication it was a problem.

Their response afterwards was:

> "The vast majority of the millions of reviews on Amazon are authentic, but
> we will continue to protect the integrity of customer reviews by taking
> action against those who abuse them."

which left a bit of a bitter taste. I suppose I didn't expect them to say
anything about a change in policy but I wish they had admitted that it was
even a problem.

------
bambax
Amazon is in a weird position on this.

On one hand, they want more and more sellers and try very hard to grow FBA,
because

1\. having outside sellers trying to market new products offsets the cost of
market research and development to those sellers (instead of doing the work in
house)

2\. competition between sellers drives the prices down, which drives prices up

On the other hand, they need to police sellers and try to keep reviews honest,
or they risk losing customers' confidence.

My guess is, the first objective (many sellers) is more important than the
second one (honest reviews), so they will probably not enforce this new policy
very aggressively.

~~~
themodelplumber
> so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively.

I don't know about that. I left one of those "in exchange for my honest
review" reviews without using _that_ exact language, and they refused to post
it. I had to re-submit with the right phrase pasted in.

The language I used in the original review was even more upfront about
receiving the product for free and my review procedure. So I'd guess that they
will enforce something broadly across the board and then be kind of tone deaf
about the way they enforce it.

I think a big part of the problem with reviews is, when you're looking for
something to buy, _and_ you're a savvy buyer, you generally want the product
to fulfill conditions X, Y, and Z. If you receive it for review, you are
generally only looking to fulfill condition X, and _maybe_ Y. For example,
you'd probably never think, "oh, I should test this bluetooth transmitter from
the back seat of my carpooling minivan" if you work from home all day.

That you didn't think of condition Z and still gave the product five stars
will probably piss off somebody somewhere, but really, people with special
conditions or who are aware of specific issues with that kind of product
should be researching _within_ reviews, not just taking some random reviewer's
five stars as a green light. They should be asking product questions. They
should be contacting the manufacturer directly if they buy the product and
they think it sucks. But they almost never do those things.

I agree there are dishonest reviewers, but I think Amazon's goofy review
system--in which 3 stars == failure, and 4 stars == "think twice," is really
the perfect setup for that kind of situation.

~~~
bambax
I'm not saying those paid for reviews are good. I think they are worthless,
for many of the reasons outlined in the article (vendors select reviewers that
only leave 5 stars) and in your comment (professional reviewers don't "need"
the product they are reviewing and therefore don't even know what qualities to
look for (even if they were inclined to be completely honest)).

But what I am saying is, Amazon needs new sellers... and new sellers need
reviews.

------
fma
I like the move, however small sellers will have a hard time gaining traction
now. It would be nice if they limited the number of reviews, or there's a tag
where if you leave a review you say you were incentivized. Those reviews are
hidden by default and does not contribute. Or Amazon shows two reviews, one
incentivized and one not. Even their vine program reviewers can have bias, so
really it's about more control for Amazon.

Full disclosure: I was given a chance to read the article for free in return
for my unbiased and honest comment.

------
perseusprime11
Can they please go back and clean up all the existing reviews? I never
understood the 'honest review in exchange of the product' thing because it was
always 5 stars and rarely honest.

------
shraken
Amazon Vine requires you provide tax identification number as to declare FMV
on your income tax. That's a real non-starter for a lot of reviewers.

------
smegel
> However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in
> exchange for their “honest” review.

Seems like a pretty bizarre exception to begin with.

~~~
clifanatic
I've been in the Vine program that they mention in the article for several
years - I can tell you that, seriously, honestly, no kidding, there are no
repercussions for posting a negative review of a free Vine product. I've
posted scathing reviews of terrible (but free) products, wondering if I'd be
mysteriously "removed" from the Vine program for doing so, and never gotten so
much as a question about them.

------
victorantos
I know someone who spends a good part of day looking to get these discounted
products, although the reviews he writes are honest, biased - I am not liking
the addiction he has got, buying cheap unnecessary stuff non-stop.

Everyday he has to buy something, this might not be sane on a long run, happy
it will end soon.

------
good4something
Sure these trumped up reviews are not arms' length from the vendor, but they
often give details of the product that are not in the official specifications.
That's been useful to me on more than one occasion when deciding between two
similar options.

------
awqrre
This video[1] posted Sept. 19th 2016 got more then 500k views, I wonder if it
has anything to do with Amazon's decision...

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk)

------
rlucas
Finally. Reviews, especially on highly contested catgories, had turned into a
cesspool over the last couple years. The varieties of gamesmanship will
doubtless continue but this is at least one of the hydra's heads.

------
staircasebug
About time, but I think it would be beneficial to have a way of filtering
these "paid" reviews or not counting them towards the overall rating.
Something for everyone ...

------
cauterized
This is actually a terrible idea, IMO. Currently people announce when their
review was of a freebie. Now people will still do it, they just won't disclose
it.

------
hippich
[http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk](http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk)

~~~
CodeWriter23
If you're "Me" in that chat, you have this chat record to fall back on. My mom
is an Amazon Seller (got the top 25% Holiday Seller Award twice) and her
experience when asking about policy matters is the SellerCentral Associates
tend to shoot from the hip and give whatever they think the answer is.

So note to other sellers, ask first and save the record of the conversation,
instead of relying on the something you found on Imgur. Seller Performance
(the legal team) will always give you a pass for bad information from Amazon
Reps when considering the death penalty. No such leniency is granted for "the
other guys were doing it" or "a third party told me something that directly
conflicts with the Amazon Business Services Agreement".

------
arjie
I don't know. The phrase "free and unbiased review" were a strong negative
signal.

------
bobwaycott
It's about time. I can't believe they ever allowed it in the first place.

------
uptown
Good. My highest up-voted comment ever on HN was specifically about this
problem. Clearly something that resonates as a problem with their customers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964)

------
ninv
"Set up an Amazon Giveaway" They promoted it to boost the sale.

------
HelloMcFly
I buy almost nothing on Amazon without using fakespot.com these days.

------
Hasz
Is this a move to consolidate paid reviews into the vine program?

------
Fej
Is this retroactive?

Really should be.

------
fuqted
There are plenty of budding entrepreneurs that will be unable to move new
products because everyone is going to be afraid to buy without reviews

------
modzu
... except their own

------
c3534l
I think reviews tied to discounted products should be be given a weight
reduced by the amount proportional to the discount received. So a product with
a 75% discount should be given a 25% weight in the weighted-average review
score.

~~~
teej
Sellers will just game this by paying someone to buy the product at full price
for a good review.

~~~
bambax
Maybe, but how? I mean, how does it scale? You can call a few friends for your
first product (maybe) but at some point you run out of friends and you need to
recruit people you don't know.

------
Hydraulix989
As a top reviewer, I got sent a link to a secret Chinese Amazon with 31 pages
of free and discounted products to review (some show lingerie in this
screenshot so careful if you're at work):

[http://imgur.com/a/LfO82](http://imgur.com/a/LfO82)

------
Hydraulix989
This sucks. I worked REALLY hard to become a top reviewer (ranked ~10,000th)
so that I could get free and discounted stuff, and just these past few months,
I've finally gotten to the point where I get 1-3 offers per day now.

~~~
vermontdevil
But how do I know you really needed the product and use it in an everyday
situation?

That's the problem I have with these freebie reviews. I want to know if the
product that I need works as advertised as told by people who actually need it
and use it themselves.

Not by people who just liked getting free stuff.

Or do you actually pick what you actually need for free and thus are able to
give a good review?

~~~
clifanatic
I (not OP) am in the Vine program that they mention in the article. I admit
that it puts me in sort of an odd position to be trying to write an unbiased
review of something that I got for free, but I always do my best to mention in
my review whether I feel like I would have paid the cost of the item, all
other things being equal. For me, the most difficult part of the review is
that we're on the hook to review the product within 30 days of receipt - in
some cases, that's not enough time to really get a sense of how well the
product holds up.

~~~
rhizome
Personally, what I'm looking for _is_ a biased review by a person who bought
the item intentionally.

