Amazon's culpability with fake reviews

In My Humble Opinion
21

But they do. In fact, the rate of failure generally follows the “bathtub curve” - the rate of failure is highest at the beginning, and if it survives this initial “infant mortality” phase, it’s likely to last a long time until it gets old and starts to wear out. And that’s not even taking into account that people are more likely to misuse a new item and break it than break something they’ve owned for a few years.

And anecdotes are not data. If 3 people report the product failed in the first few months, that tells us nothing about the reliability of that product. Because we don’t know what percentage that represents. Is that 3 out of 50 items they’ve sold? Out of 10,000? You don’t know. People who have bad experiences with the product are more likely to write reviews, so you can’t go by what percentage of reviews mention early failure.

22

This is an interesting thread. I appreciate the OP’s story regarding Amazon. They shouldn’t be pulling negative reviews unless there is evidence that the poster is deliberately causing trouble (such as if they work for a competing seller or manufacturer).

But, yeah, reading the actual reviews in the linked product page makes is clear they shouldn’t be relied upon.

23

A container of granulated salt should always be on hand, but I do find them more useful than, say, Apple App Store reviews, which are utterly worthless, and which I strongly suspect are all written by one 19-year-old guy in Guangzhou.

The inutility almost seems deliberate— the reviews appear in random order, and there’s no way (at least on my iPhone, that I’m aware of) to sort them chronologically, filter by rating, perform a search, or anything else that might be remotely useful.

ETA: Holy shit, they’re apparently going to fix the problem!

24

I find 1-star (or 5-star) reviews to be useful depending on content. If a product is utter crap or a book is crammed full of errors and bad writing, why sugar-coat it with a two or three-star rating?*

One abuse of Amazon ratings (i.e. for books about “controversial” subjects) is for someone to give a review with a 3-star rating (considered negative by Amazon) but which contains a glowing recommendation, knowing that if enough people “like” the review, it’ll show up as the most helpful “negative” review.

Gotta say, the product linked in the OP has obviously fake reviews based on perusal of the first page (with all the canned-sounding comments with similar grammatical errors). Is good lighter, you like! Never saw anything so blatant on Amazon before.

*on the other hand, when I review restaurants online I typically give at least a couple stars to places where I had a less than wonderful experience. It has to be really, really bad to get one star (i.e. totally mishandled, bad-tasting food, nasty staff, food poisoning etc.).

25

In their other job, they are Nigerian princes…

26

I know of one fairly major publisher where reviews are not enabled for their books. This publisher has a full time person to work with Amazon, who threw up her hands. They do publish reviews from legitimate book review journals, so it is not like they have something against the books.

Bad reviews are useful if you get a lot of them with the same thing wrong. “It sucks” is pretty worthless, but long stories of contacting the manufacturer are a lot more believable.

27

But each anecdote is a datum.

Fake reviews are pretty easy to spot, even from verified purchasers. I read the negative reviews and decide if I can accept the issues described.

28

How is that evident?

29

It drives me nuts when people give things 1 or 2 star reviews and then say things like ‘it was okay, but Amazon took weeks to send it out’ or basically anything else that has nothing to do with the actual item.

Another thing that I hate is those questions up at the top. At least half of them have useless answers. Something like “How big is this, the description says 12x15x8, but the picture makes it seem a lot smaller?” and the answer will be, literally, “I don’t know, I don’t own this, but I have the other model by a different brand and it’s pretty big”.

I eventually found out that one of the requirements to get free stuff is answering lots of questions and writing lots of reviews. People are just post count padding.

30

From my own experience of writing a few negative reviews before, all are still there to my knowledge. This particularly company couldn’t even settle for a 3 star review, only stellar five star reviews seem to do.

Does any Doper sell through Amazon? If so, I’d like to hear of your experience, particularly how the review process works from your perspective, especially if you have high volume sales, what plans do they have for you that might be different than what they are offering others.

Either way Amazon is culpable of pulling legit reviews while allowing many fake reviews stay up. Again, I don’t expect them to get all of them, but surely they could do something about it on the most blatant offenders. If others sites like FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are using this technology to catch stuff like this, I think that Jeff Bezos could afford to have a few checks and balances in place to prevent this sort of thing if they wanted to. Not like he’s short on funds. Amazon should at least make it easier to report such companies, and then do something about it.

31

I don’t think that’s enough evidence to conclude it’s the company or seller (you used the word “sponsor”) that is in control of what reviews stay or go. If that was the case, this would be well known. That information would be all over the internet and I would bet Amazon would be in some legal trouble over that. Also, Amazon issues statements from time to time regarding how they are attempting to combat fake reviews. Allowing vendors to do what you’re claiming would be the opposite, and keeping a secret like that with so many vendors in on it would be impossible.

32

x-ray vision, It’s conclusive enough to me know it’s one or the other since I experienced it first-hand. I’m looking forward to getting feedback hopefully from Dopers who have the inside track on how the reviews work and are sellers on Amazon.

I’ve seen various descriptions of the sellers on Amazon, sponsor probably isn’t the best description or even one. Company, sellers, vendors are probably better, I also seen Marketplace Sellers to Amazon and Marketplace Vendors. I’m sure there are others.

Yeah, every now and then Amazon issues statements letting us know they are on top of it, and are attempting to combat fake reviews. After this happened to me, it’s not a confidence builder, and my trust in this company has dropped considerably.

And it’s not too much of a secret when other sites are being created now to show just how bad it really is, and they are aware of it by simply using algorithms. It just shows how Amazon is doing a half-assed job of this, otherwise this company could have been pulled the first day by doing what they are doing. It’ll be interesting to see particularly how long this company gets away with it.

33

You experienced a review of yours being deleted. That the review was removed my a company or vendor was not an evident part of your experience, for the reasons I already mentioned.

:dubious: I said a specific secret would be hard to keep. I entered your Amazon item into the search box on the first fake review site you listed, This was the result:

Not only is that possible due to the type of reviews added and not because any were deleted, your claim that sites such as those show that reviews are being deleted by companies/vendors is false.

34

I said it was evident that Amazon was allowing it to happen on letting the reviews be deleted, while letting the fake ones stay up. I did suspect that some companies may have favor and influence and may be able to get negative reviews pulled that they don’t like by themselves or by Amazon mainly because of what I’ve seen this company has gotten away with so far. Perhaps, Amazon will eventually do something with it, still doesn’t explain why they couldn’t explain to me why my review was deleted, and the two others disappearing with no reason given, all the while letting 39 reviews with most of them probably being fake still stand with the 5 stars.

Most of the reviews I have seen on certain items seem far more balanced with good and bad reviews on a product with some scoring a bit higher or lower than others, this isn’t one of them. Never seen a perfect score like this before with this many reviews. But I’m sure if I looked, other items could have it too. I don’t know the exact process, but only that it still surely has to go through Amazon and have the final say on to pull it, I would think.

Your claim of what I was claiming is false, so naturally. They do show reviews being deleted, just not with this item, nor would I know how they could determine if it was the vendor or Amazon themselves. Reviewmeta shows 0 reviews deleted for this item, so I’ll take their word for it that their data does have errors. I’ve noticed another poster wanting to know why this isn’t getting picked up better besides me on deleted reviews. And there are various legit reasons why some are deleted.

Neither do those two sites I listed actually call any review specifically fake or if they did, I haven’t found that yet, but that’s just CYA, and for legal reasons I can see a site playing it safe, but still give people enough to let them be aware of certain products and companies.

35

If I’m interpreting that correctly, that’s a much more reasonable claim: that others can complain about reviews and Amazon themselves will remove reviews they deem should be. You earlier claim that the experiences you posted on this thread makes it evident that other companies can remove reviews on their own was not a reasonable claim.

How?

I said: I don’t think that’s enough evidence to conclude it’s the company or seller (you used the word “sponsor”) that is in control of what reviews stay or go. If that was the case, this would be well known. That information would be all over the internet and I would bet Amazon would be in some legal trouble over that. Also, Amazon issues statements from time to time regarding how they are attempting to combat fake reviews. Allowing vendors to do what you’re claiming would be the opposite, and keeping a secret like that with so many vendors in on it would be impossible.

I made it clear that the secret I’m talking about is companies being “in control of what reviews stay or go.”

Your response: And it’s not too much of a secret when other sites are being created now to show just how bad it really is, and they are aware of it by simply using algorithms.

I followed with: your claim that sites such as those show that reviews are being deleted by companies/vendors is false.

36

I know 100+ author/publishers who sell on Amazon.

Sellers do not remove reviews. They do not have the control over what stays and what goes.

Your negative review(s) included references to the reviews, rather than the product. Someone, no doubt the seller, flagged it using the “Report abuse” button. An Amazon gnome likely looked, thought your reviews were not on-topic, and nuked 'em.

Are there fake reviews on Amazon? ABSOLUTELY. There are folks on Fiverr and other similar sites who offer such services that “guarantee your product 100+ reviews,” which won’t mention that they’re all fake, but they very obviously are.

The solution to getting such reviews bounced is to report them, as mentioned above. Click the Report Abuse button and point out the specific user accounts. Do not write a review and refer to other reviewers, especially those with whom you disagree. Amazon hates that.

I know several cases in which Amazon deleted phony reviews, sometimes one at a time, others in mass deletions, when they were found to be fakes.

Another thing that will get a review deleted: if you’re one of the seller’s competitors. And yes, they are more quick to respond to such things if you’re a MEGA seller; not some tiny Chinese corporation, but, like, Penguin or HarperCollins. (E.g., just the other day, a well-known controversial author’s most recent release received a 5,000-word, vitriolic screed that was more of a New Yorker article than review. The author himself responded to it. (Which is usually a very bad idea, but I digress…)

I think this discussion ended up getting flagged–the publisher (Penguin) probably got involved–and Amazon temporarily deleted the review, and the hubbub/speculation is that they contacted the reviewer and asked him to submit something less personal, if he wanted. The guy did so and the newer, toned-down but still negative review is up.

(I think part of the reason this was a successful take-down was because it seems pretty clear the reviewer is himself an author in the same general field. As mentioned, that’s a no-no.)

Anyway. Point is, there are all kinds of ways to game the system. This includes purchasing fake reviews, offering compensation to people to download your book (to boost rank) or speed-read through KU books (which are paid per page-view), massive 3000-page books stuffed with crappy fake extra content (again, to add page-views for books in KU), and other such ploys. From time to time, Amazon swoops in and nabs the perps, stripping their products’ ranks or even taking the product down altogether.

But with so many sellers and products on Amazon, they can’t catch everyone. It is definitely wise to be aware of possible fakery and keep your eyes open for suspicious patterns in reviews (such as the OP mentioned–text that sounds all alike, and reviewers who all seem to be reviewing the same group of books). When you spot potential phonies, use the “Report abuse” or, even better, simply click “No” beside the “Was this review helpful?” text–or even more important, click “yes” beside the reviews that did seem legit. Reviews with the most “helpful” votes are usually bumped to the top, while those that are least helpful will fall lower.

And yep, it’s often a good idea to pay the most attention to the reviews in the middle of the pack: 2-stars to 4-stars. (In my experience, it’s the 3-star reviews that tend to be most helpful; they often give the good and the bad.)

37

It isn’t just now, and you do get a lot of mileage from a cut off sentence you used in a quote from me in your initial post. In the OP I did say there that evidently Amazon was aware and was allowing companies to pull reviews they don’t like and letting fake reviews stand. If the companies are getting them pulled through Amazon, so what? And later in the OP, I did speculate and said the reviews can either get pulled by certain companies having more influence, or have it done for them which I assume is Amazon. It still wasn’t a concrete claim that I was making from the OP or through subsequent posts, nor would I be asking from others help on this if I had the whole process figured out. I reiterated later it was just evident to me from my experience that posts were allowed to stay that were probably fake, while my legit review that was at least a verified purchase gets pulled. I’m sure after reading choie’s post, it was probably the seller that got Amazon to delete mine.

I could have used a better term than sponsor in the OP, certainly done better with the terms sites vs cites, (thanks, Mr. Shine). I used the two sites in the OP only to show there was a lot of reviews that are being looked at that are probably fake on Amazon, and that they do show reviews being deleted. I wasn’t trying to use that as proof in itself that the companies were deleting the reviews.

38

Yes, that was about a third of my review on this item that got published briefly, didn’t name any specifically, but did speculate that most were suspect. I’ve seen other posters on various products pointing this same thing out and it stayed in, so thought this was okay. I guess some sellers let it go, while others are successful to claim foul, and have Amazon remove it, while the fake reviews done in favor of their product is a bit more difficult thing to prove when done on an individual basis. Had Amazon taken the time to see the content of my review, that would have been easy enough for them to see what was going on, and could have done something about it then. But I guess it’s a more laborious process to get them removed this way.

Quite a bit of my review was commenting on the item, and was positive for this item. Other part wasn’t really bad, my only complaint of it was not coming with instructions which pertained how to maintain the battery, so I was letting others know how important it is to unplug after about an hour or so, and try not to let it go too long, because these devices rarely do this automatically, and you can easily ruin not your device if you don’t catch it in time.

Never heard of Fiverr before, but do hope steps are taken to shut down such places or make it extremely difficult for them to be effective.

I’m going to try it within the week. Prefer the phone, but missed the abuse button concerning specific user accounts until you and another pointed it out. Think it will be much easier to explain all of the reviews being suspect, arriving en masse, unverified, and other evidence of why there probably fake.

Quite an authors war you’ve covered there, and I’ve seen where that happens. I’ve noticed lots of crazy stuff going on with Amazon when Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus was released. The Amazon staff probably earned some overtime with that one. :slight_smile:

No doubt it’s quite a task, just never seen a seller such as this one be so successful at keeping all of his reviews at 5 stars. I appreciate your insight, and thanks for taking the time, it was helpful.

39

No, it’s not. You started with exactly with what I quoted you saying and you slowly back-pedaled until you were saying something completely different.

I didn’t misquote you nor did I take anything out of context. And you’re first response to me wasn’t to say that I did, it was you reiterating the same claim.

Exactly. So I did not take any statement out of context.

You said something even a little more provocative later in the OP:

“I suppose if perhaps the supplier pays extra, one can limit the negative reviews by having them pulled themselves, or have it done for them.”

That’s conspiracy level shit right there. There’s no way that could be such a well hidden secret.

So? I never used that word. I quoted something you said was evident and I asked how it was evident. Part of your response was this:

“This particularly company couldn’t even settle for a 3 star review, only stellar five star reviews seem to do.”

No, you didn’t use the word “concrete”, but you flat out said a company selling an item on Amazon had the power to have “legit” reviews pulled.

40

My OP also said that Amazon pulled my review. Also, well before you were here, just eighteen minutes after my OP, in #6, I stated to Mr. Shine:

That’s hardly back-pedaling, and saying something completely different now. Since Amazon’s reviews are so skewed, I gave the two sites in the OP just so others can have other tools to help spot fake reviews since Amazon is allowing so many fake reviews to stand, that was my main purpose of the thread. Didn’t know I was going to need to give a deposition.

There are subtle and not so subtle ways money can buy influence and favors in business and politics. The review system does seem better favored to the seller just because how long they get to keep their fake reviews up, and since each individual reviewer has an abuse button one has to report, that’s going to make it difficult to prove on a individual basis, so they will probably still stay up. I don’t think a seller has one, but haven’t had time to look into any further yet.