
Amazon reviews now unreliable: negative reviews filtered (Anker example) - MaysonL
http://notes.kateva.org/2018/11/amazon-reviews-now-unreliable-negative.html
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mprev
I received my first fake from the UK site recently; a microSD card. I too was
prevented from leaving a review due to “unusual review activity” for that
product.

Checking the reviews I saw that many people had also received fakes and left
one star reviews. Most reviews were five star, so I guess there’s some
commingling or similar.

They’ve sent a replacement but, rightly or wrongly, I feel not only was my
time wasted but that I’m subject to a minor coverup.

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dfcowell
Amazon’s entire model is flawed in this respect.

Products on the platform are “deduped” by merging listings from multiple
sellers of the same product under a single master listing, where the price for
the item is the lowest price available from all sellers.

This leads to counterfeit sellers targeting high-quantity items, creating and
selling fakes for just under MSRP and making out like bandits.

It’s impossible for Amazon to police, and they can’t avoid merging listings
unless they want a million duplicate products in their search results.

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dpwm
I'd have thought that even when items are commingled there must be some way
for Amazon to determine the origin and deal with it appropriately.

However, I would have also thought that it was in Amazon's interest to fix
this before the items go the customer as it does have a detrimental impact on
both Amazon and the counterfeited brand.

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adetrest
Apparently, Amazon has no idea which seller sent in the item amazon is selling
you. I don't know how they can get away with it, or how this is even allowed.
What if the item is so shitty that it causes injury or death? Wouldn't amazon
like to know which of its sellers is responsible?

Anyway, one more reason to dump amazon, if their appalling treatment of people
isn't enough maybe the time wasted in buying then returning fake items (if you
can tell at all, if you're buying a product for the first time you can't
always spot a fake) is.

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gnulinux
In my experience, whenever I want to find useful, unbiased reviews of a
product and a discussion around this category of products, reddit is much
better than amazon reviews. If you can find the right subreddit, you can
extract a lot information out of reddit comments and buy the best product.

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gmiller123456
Ebay is even worse. Now, if you contact the seller about an issue in any way,
you lose your option to leave any type of feedback about that seller. I had
switched to leaving feedback first, then opening a dispute, but I noticed in a
handful of situations my negative feedback was deleted.

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snaky
"Censored Amazon Review of Sandisk Ultra 32GB Micro SDHC Card" discussed a
month ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017676)

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kbumsik
What if the OP writes a 5-star review? Will Amazon accept it? It’s not clear
Amazon filtered the OP’s review because it is negative.

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xster
Even 'niche' markets of enthusiasts like reverb.com uses this dark pattern
where you can't leave a non-positive review unless you first try to work out
the issue with the other party directly.

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arintoker
Fakespot.com

