Amazon Updates Customer Review Policy

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Amazon today announced a significant change to its Customer Review Policy today. The company says that it is eliminating any incentivized reviews that are not part of the Amazon Vine program. Here's a snippet from the press release:

Today, we updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program. We launched Vine several years ago to carefully facilitate these kinds of reviews and have been happy with feedback from customers and vendors. Here’s how Vine works: Amazon – not the vendor or seller – identifies and invites trusted and helpful reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release products; we do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written; and we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product.
 
About time. Might put fakespot out of business though.. Probably not. There are a large number of fake (bought) reviews out there.
 
finally. i lost count how many times i sent a complaint regarding these free stuff 5 star reviews.
 
I hated all those reviews too but even worse are the armies of people in china making fake reviews for all sorts of stuff - especially in the cell phone accessories.
 
rhexis said:
finally. i lost count how many times i sent a complaint regarding these free stuff 5 star reviews.
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Those outfits caught on and started telling the "reviewers" to leave a 4 star review and give some utterly lame reason it wasn't 5 star so they would appear "unbiased"
 
Oh, these programs have already been trying to find a way around this. A recent one is to no longer give a free or discounted product, but to instead give 110% credit after purchase for use in their store.

I suppose that violates the spirit if not the letter ...
 
lol, Amazon be like: we discourage reviews in exchange for products... unless we're the ones giving away the stuff. Great, that should really clean things up. It's "Apple bravery", bravery to do something because it affects your bottom line. GJ!
 
Hmm. I do leave honest reviews and leave a lot of 1 star reviews for the stuff I get at a discount. Wonder how this will affect snagshout.
 
dr_drift said:
lol, Amazon be like: we discourage reviews in exchange for products... unless we're the ones giving away the stuff. Great, that should really clean things up. It's "Apple bravery", bravery to do something because it affects your bottom line. GJ!
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"My playground, my rules."
 
Tsumi said:
About time. Might put fakespot out of business though.. Probably not. There are a large number of fake (bought) reviews out there.
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Though I wish they didn't have a reason to exist, like spam filters and adblockers, I doubt Fakespot is going away anytime soon.
 
dr_drift said:
lol, Amazon be like: we discourage reviews in exchange for products... unless we're the ones giving away the stuff. Great, that should really clean things up. It's "Apple bravery", bravery to do something because it affects your bottom line. GJ!
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The issue is that with Vine reviewers it's clearly labeled as such, that is not the case with a lot of other discount or free reviews. Vine also doesn't require people to give good reviews for products. I've seen several negative reviews of produces from Vine reviewers. Most Vine reviews I've seen have also been really informative, very few fluff pieces. So there seems to be at least some level of quality to the people Amazon picks for Vine. Exactly none of the previously mentioned things are true with a lot of other services. At least if you don't want to take what a Vine review says to heart you can easily ignore them.

Edit: Fixed the first sentence. Somehow forgot to add the part after the comma originally.
 
Yeah I guess the good thing about the Vine Review garbage is that I can see it and immediately ignore it. Probably 95% of them are glowingly positive 5 Stars reviews.

Of Course you love it. You didn't have to pay for the piece of shit.
 
Krab said:
Yeah I guess the good thing about the Vine Review garbage is that I can see it and immediately ignore it. Probably 95% of them are glowingly positive 5 Stars reviews.

Of Course you love it. You didn't have to pay for the piece of shit.
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I don't see that whatsoever and I have 200+ orders yearly from Amazon, granted there are a lot of 5 stars however. I find Vine reviews to be more reasonable because their content has to be deemed helpful in the first place. If they give 5 stars constantly to pieces of shit that everyone else gives 1-2 stars they wouldn't be considered helpful. Plus I like that they tend to include a plethora of pictures that are useful.
 
ReviewMeta.com has an add-on for Chrome that helps with identifying the compensated reviews for Amazon products. Glad to see Amazon is at least trying to do something about this.
 
HeavensCloud said:
I don't see that whatsoever and I have 200+ orders yearly from Amazon, granted there are a lot of 5 stars however. I find Vine reviews to be more reasonable because their content has to be deemed helpful in the first place. If they give 5 stars constantly to pieces of shit that everyone else gives 1-2 stars they wouldn't be considered helpful. Plus I like that they tend to include a plethora of pictures that are useful.
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So you're a vine reviewer. Got it.
 
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