On a similar note, I've found so many items on Amazon are "review hijacked". You'll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.
This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.
Even legit companies abuse that. Dymo's latest label printer models enforce DRM on the paper which is a shitty move on its own. But then what they did on Amazon was swap their model 450 printer to the new model 550 so they would keep all of the good reviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ
The issue isn't dyno (although it is their actions that obviously started it) it's that amazon does nothing to protect their customers from companies like dymo.
This is actually a very complicated topic. Amazon will let sellers of product X “claim” a product page of a (now) poorly performing product Y, or will themselves substitute product Y for product X (swap the listings but keep the ASIN).
It’s not even for remotely equivalent products: my subscribe and save for cat litter was replaced with a birth control test under the same ASIN, after being unavailable for a few months!
its not complicated - its quite simply dishonest. i guess its complicated whether it counts as fraud or not but if someone trusts amazon reviews in 2022 theyre not making good decisions anyways. heavily gamed, paid for, etc.
i bought a wifi card on amazon and it came with a note mentioning a $20 amazon gift card if left them a good review. i reported it to amazon and nothing happened - i dont think they even responded.
i go elsewhere for reviews because amazons are so gamed and untrustworthy.
I meant the mechanics involved are complicated and not as simple as "seller Foo manually swaps out the listing details of product X for product Y."
But yes, you're right. The short and sweet of it is that it's just a gamble getting anything you can't physically validate or verify upon receipt off of Amazon.
I went out of my way once to contact support for this, there is no way to report it directly and got a very strong sense that they intentionally don't care
That is the best indicator of a monopoly that I can see; you see it with utility and cable companies as well, basically they are not worried at all that the customer will go somewhere else because there really is very little competition
I just stopped buying Chinese crap from Amazon - this happened after they had issues with my credit card and of course I had to pay to fix it. This happended 6 months ago and I have been happier since.
My main problem is that there are no alternatives to buying ebooks. In terms of how easy it's to buy and transfer to the device.
I don't even remember the last time I bought from Amazon (or eBay for that matter). It's simply not worth the hassle. At this point even Wish is more trustworthy, so I see no reason to still buy from those - if you need cheap (and often bad) stuff you can get it directly from the source, and otherwise, welcome to the rest of the world of online shopping.
> They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.
It isn't always the same "they", in fact I'd guess it isn't more often than not.
Sometimes a seller is shutting shop, and to make that last few pennies one of the assets they pass on is the account with products with good reviews. Another route to the same effect is apparently inactive accounts getting hacked. Maybe even active accounts, with the sterling reputation Amazon has for support it might be more hassle than it is worth for the hacked seller to do anything about it.
> It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.
This comes under “sterling reputation Amazon has for support” when it comes to it being reported. And they have little incentive to deal with it if it isn't reported until there is a competitor that does it better and takes enough business for them to care – the inflated reviews improve sales of which they get a cut.
Book reviews have become useless too since they are mostly all gushing 4 or 5 star reviews that, oddly, all seem to be composed by professional writers.
Aren’t the book reviews just farmed from Goodreads and splatted onto the book’s store page? Goodreads is kinda trash with all the “ARC provided by SomeWebsite.com” reviews. I’ve noticed that a ton of ARC reviews tend to be by people who don’t even care about the genre the book is in. This is especially true of Sci-Fi. Almost every ARC review for sci-fi books on Goodreads boils down to “I hate sci-fi but this book was free so I tried to read it and I still hate sci-fi.”
Often it's the author themselves using sock-puppet accounts. One of my claims to semi-fame is that I was one of the first to identify a particularly now-notorious YA author as a barely-literate review cheat. (I won't name him because he has spent almost twenty years since then trying to retaliate e.g. with fake legal threats and doxxing combined with some libel of his own, and I'm not interested in fighting another round when his frequent searches for his own name lead him here.) There's at least one Hall of Shame I know of for authors caught doing this, and it has many entries.
For books and many other things you have to simply ignore five-star reviews because the few that aren't fake are kind of clueless ("product arrived quickly"). Often you need to ignore one-star reviews as well because they're packed by competitors and people who couldn't read the directions. There's far more actual information to be found in the middle/mixed ratings.
This might not be comparible but on webfiction platforms review swaps are so common that reviews should not be trusted in any form anymore honestly. "I'll review your stuff if you review mine"
Or pseudo-writers who get paid a pittance for stringing the same short, flattering phrases together, again and again. With a little practice, it gets easy to spot the repetitive cadence of the shills.
This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.