Amazon Merchants Continue to Find Ways to Cheat

Maintaining order on Amazon, which is a running problem for the online giant, is heating up during the busy holiday season: merchants are increasingly sabotaging one another by hiring people to leave critical reviews of their goods and then voting those reviews as being helpful, making them the most prominent feedback seen by shoppers. Freelancers in China and Bangladesh, who are willing to do this for $10 an hour, can easily be found online.

Manipulation of reviews has been increasing the past several months and Amazon doesn’t appear to be fixing the problem, said Chris McCabe, a former employee who now runs a consulting business to help Amazon merchants. The gamesmanship on the site is so bad he has created new teams to help merchants fight review manipulation. "It’s a massive problem and until it’s more publicly known I don’t think they’ll do anything about it," McCabe said. "There’s blood in the water and everyone knows they can get away with it, so it’s a free-for-all."

I was surprised that the author of the article didn't mention fakespot.com. Love using their site to analyze all the reviews and get an overall rating of the review quality.

ignore everything that is not a Verified Purchase.

Those fake reviewers can't possibly buy enough products to write Verified reviews.

Looks like all their Alibaba marked-up goods aren't turning such a good profit now, so they have to stoop lower.

Kdawg said:

ignore everything that is not a Verified Purchase.

Those fake reviewers can't possibly buy enough products to write Verified reviews.

Looks like all their Alibaba marked-up goods aren't turning such a good profit now, so they have to stoop lower.

Click to expand...

Tell that to the average person. They just look at the number of stars

Always look at the worst reviews from the verified purchase reviews. Tells a better story

This is why we still have reviewers. Trusting online reviews can be so messy.

Kdawg said:

ignore everything that is not a Verified Purchase.

Those fake reviewers can't possibly buy enough products to write Verified reviews.

Looks like all their Alibaba marked-up goods aren't turning such a good profit now, so they have to stoop lower.

Click to expand...

I think non-verified reviews are important, as I may have bought the product elsewhere but have valuable information I want to share.

The issue is how they're interlaced. Possibly weight the verified reviews as more important?

So in the hierarchy of the default review display, it'd be:

- Verified Review, Sorted by Most Helpful votes (votes >= 0)
- Non-Verified Reviews, Sorted by Most Helpful votes (votes >= 0)
- Verified Review, Sorted by Most Helpful (votes < 0).
- Non-Verified Review, Sorted by Most Helpful (votes < 0).

As for the score. Again, weight verified reviews more. So if we weight a verified review as 2x a Non-Verified Review, a 3star rating would count as 2 3star ratings (so 1 n-vp score of 1.0, and 1 vp score of 5.0 = 11/3 -> 3.66, instead of 6/2 -> 3.0).

Alternatively, make the "verified purchase" review scores aggregate the default, with a smaller "total reviews" score placed nearby.

I tend to look at the lower reviews first. I immediately ignore the stupid ones like "it doesn't work", "sucks", etc. I try to read the 2's and 3's . I also know I'm getting a lot of subjective opinions by possible r-tards.

Skirge01 said:

I was surprised that the author of the article didn't mention fakespot.com. Love using their site to analyze all the reviews and get an overall rating of the review quality.

Click to expand...

I like fakespot myself, but it to can be manipulated and fooled (algo's are never bulletproof). I use it a lot and have noticed inconsistencies and they always have the suggestion of 'judge for yourself, we're not sure'. I've seen [A] ratings on the product reviews while the company still gets a [D] or [F], I read the reviews and it is the same crap I see all over. imo algo's will never be as accurate with deception as a human can, the algo's can be more consistent than a human under typical scenarios though since we wear out, an algo won't. I've also had D & F results come up from the past scan, fakespot says it's been a while since we scanned this, do you want to do it again, sure I say and wala now a B or A, meanwhile the company is a D or C. To summarize, it can and is manipulated.

Then there is corruption, which always manages to creep its way into any human activity that involves money. The more traction fakespot gets and the more relied on it becomes, the more likely the current owners may become corrupt with the results or more likely sell it (to cash out as that is what it's all about these days) and the new owners bought it to control it, for money of course.

One can only rely on their own "red flag" system, if you see a red flag, walk away. You may miss out on something good (probably manipulated by competition to cast doubt), but odds are you'll spare yourself from something bad.

Kdawg said:

ignore everything that is not a Verified Purchase.

Those fake reviewers can't possibly buy enough products to write Verified reviews.

Looks like all their Alibaba marked-up goods aren't turning such a good profit now, so they have to stoop lower.

Click to expand...

This is a naïve thought my friend, you're thinking is along the lines that the merchant and fake reviewers aren't in cahoots. Much of the China junk, fakes, stolen designs, etc. are cheap to purchase and buyers are as greedy to make sure they get things that make them feel good or look cool as cheap as possible as the sellers are to sell to them. My recent shopping was for cell phone cases and glass shields (all China crap that makes the early search results due to purchase popularity), price ranging $5-20. There is absolutely no reason to think they can't buy these items (and the plethora of other cheap items that scour Amazon) and post their fake review as a Verified Purchase. To think the merchant can't find a way to circumvent the situation (situation like the Giveaway program)and get the fake reviewer their money back (assuming it wasn't credited to their account to buy in the first place) on the item is also naïve. No reason to think this kind of manipulation goes on with more expensive items as well.

The recent crackdown on all the "I received this item for free or at a discount for my honest unbiased review" sure cleaned up (in appearance) really quick once Amazon couldn't stop all the conversations going on about it, but did it really clean up...Nope. Manipulation and even corruption found a new avenue and it always will when money is involved and as a species, we have been in high gear to sell the world now for many, many decades.

Good luck.

IMHO, Amazon.com could care less if their reviews were fake or not. If Amazon.com were truly interested in making their reviewing system "legit", all they'd need to do is calculate product ratings and show, by default, reviews based of off verified purchasers ONLY. Instead of having a button to show verified purchases, they should have a button for showing unverified purchases. Since unverified purchases would not calculate towards the * rating and only be show if you clicked on the button, they would be moot. Granted, there are other ways of cheating the system, but it would cut down on a ton of the fake reviews and make it so that writing a fake review was a waste of time and not profitable.