In the New York Times today, an articletalked about a new Michael Jackson book Untouchable, that got 1-star review attacks by mobs of fans, trying to ruin the book’s reputation.
This could easily be solved by restricting reviews to people who actually bought the item on Amazon. Why does not Amazon do this? Is there is some kind of marketing genius behind allowing hordes of people who didn’t buy or even read a book give biased reviews on it, dissuading actual potential buyers from it?
Reviews sell books.
To limit to just Amazon, you’d be leaving out everyone who got the book at the library, bought it from the grocery store, borrowed it from a friend, or received it as a gift.
Amazon has a monetary interest in gathering reviews from those groups, because reviews on its site help sell its products. The more the merrier.
Take the Three Wolf Moon shirt as a counter case study to Michael Jackson. Fake reviews actually boosted the economy of New Hampshire.
Marketing is about exposure and easy access.
This is the answer. And as a customer, I’m glad it’s this way. Spurious reviews on a tiny fraction of items is a price I’m willing to pay for the useful, well-thought-out reviews on more obscure items I’m interested in becoming more informed about.
I think they have a little tag now next to the reviews that say “verified amazon purchase” or something like that, so you know if the person actually bought it on Amazon or not. Doesn’t help with the aggregate rating though.
A better question is, why do they invite me to write a review of something that I bought as a gift? Ask the person from whose wish-list I selected it!
You could write a review that would be useful to other gift givers:
“My child’s eyes just lit up when she saw her new stuffed dog. A year later she still sleeps with it every night.”
“My girlfriend’s eyes just lit up when she saw her new diamond. A year later she still sleeps with me every night.”
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
My most hated Amazon reviews are those left by someone who buys something on Amazon, gets shafted by the seller, then writes a negative review about the seller, so the author or designer of the product receives a poor rating even though they had no involvement with packing the peanuts for the sale.
That is a waste of everyone’s time, but as a rule of thumb you can ignore the 5% of reviews that gush about the product and 5% that hate the product/seller. The rest give you a good overall review of the product.
They also have the “Was this review helpful?” Yes/No buttons, and I know Amazon does pay attention to the Yes answers at least.
I see the opposite problem. I’ve bought a few 99 cent e-books on Kindle based on their stellar rating. A few have actually been good, but some ratings just cannot be genuine because the book is so sophomoric. (Either that, or the reviewers really need to read some truly great novels.)
Indeed, and it’s usually pretty easy to spot the fake reviews as they’ll aim to be funny or sarcastic while legitimate negative review (or at least, negative review I pay attention to) will explain why the product deserves a negative review without playing for laughs.
I agree with the above postes: “I bought this and it arrived damaged” and “Seller woudn’t refund” reviews are a much bigger pain than false negatives from people trying to affect the overall score.
But the seller is almost always Amazon, or fulfilled by Amazon. If it’s sold by a third party, then isn’t the page where the reviews go always put the sellers name at top, and not link to a generic Amazon page.
I hate DRM as much as the next person, but: with video games, it’s often a game that gets like 96% in real reviews. But maybe it has light DRM, or more likely the reviewer “heard about the DRM” and hasn’t purchased the game. They then decide to come en masse and give 1 stars. Like 80-100% of your gaming experience is something that you can’t see, doesn’t affect your life because you are a basic user, and you are not even sure exists. In those cases, I think it’s better to look at all reviews, see what the 5-stars said, and the 3-stars.
And of course, the funny stuff like Three Wolf Moon. Someone made a list.
It’s fairly easy to spot phony book reviews on controversial topics where the reviewer slams the book, but mostly goes off on personal tangents on the subject while dragging in lots of extraneous material.
Yeah, my biggest peeve is people who use the Amazon review to complain about billing or shipping issues. I don’t care that FedEx left your Dyson vacuum on the porch without getting a signature, I care how it vacuums!
It sucks.
I used to play The Sims and I was always irritated by the people leaving 5-star reviews of the expansion packs while it was still in pre-order. These weren’t people with advance copies. They said things like “This is gunna be the best expansion ever, I can already tell from the screenshots!”. Why allow ratings on pre-orders?
(I’m sure the answer is: money. The answer is always money. Loads of positive ratings help sell products, even if they’re based on the wishful thinking of halfwits).
If outsiders couldn’t post reviews, you’d never get things like this hilarious banana slicer.
wow, thousands of reviews!! :eek:
This is an amazing and useful product. What will they think of next? A Banana Peeler? Perhaps I am dreaming too big.
Surely, surely, everyone who reviewed the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates has read it all the way through.
I’ve reviewed quite a few books that have been re-issued. I’m not about to buy a new copy just to review it. I might buy a new copy if my old copy is falling apart.
And I have no freaking idea how I’m supposed to review a product for “durability” right after I receive it. Well, if it breaks on the first use, obviously I can give it one star, but I’m probably not going to know how durable or fragile something is until I’ve had it for a few months. So I have to delete an item and hope to remember to review it in a couple of months.
Yes. Permit people to comment on something they got elsewhere, but for the love of god don’t let them review stuff they cannot possibly have reviewed. A counterpoint to your The Sims example was Diablo 3 - people were leaving 1-Star reviews (due to the very restrictive and, in hindsight, extremely effective DRM) all over the place for months before the freaking game was even released. Didn’t make Amazon look too good, IMHO.