[pcooney10]

This deal is huge, but I hope Amazon starts doing a little better diligence on their sellers. I was initially drawn to Amazon for their amazing customer reviews - they were usually current and decently, well-written - but most importantly they offered a resassurance that websites without product reviews didn't have.

Over the past year, I've noticed a HUGE uptick in the quantity of fake 5-star reviews. They are so blatant it's frightening, and they usually go unnoticed in Amazon's default "Most Helpful" sorting.

In particular, the Home Office Desk Chairs landscape is pretty insane: http://www.amazon.com/Home-Office-Desk-Chairs-Furniture/b?ie.... I was trying to find a chair back in September, and I was appalled by some of the reviews I was seeing. Top selling products, with several hundred reviews that averaged out to 4/4.5/5 stars.

This is a screenshot from back in September: http://imgur.com/qbCz0yE, and it only contains a small sample of the "Awesome, highly recommend" reviews spattered around. You'll notice this pattern on virtually every chair on Amazon, except the Aamazon basics chairs which wer launched sometime in late September / early October. Their reviews seem pretty good so far (i.e. real), but unfortunately for me I had purchased a chair from eBay before these launched.

These patterns are pretty frighteneing (especially considering a lot of people are actually buying these things), especially considering I've experienced the same issues when shopping for others things.

Has anyone else had an experience like this? Or am I losing it?

[lhecker]

You will probably like http://fakespot.com/ for discovering those fake reviews. ;)

Unfortunately it does not always work accurately, but I think it gives a good estimation whether a product is legit.

Example for AmazonBasic: http://fakespot.com/product/amazonbasics-mid-back-mesh-chair

And for "Engineered Now": http://fakespot.com/product/headrest-for-herman-miller-aeron...

[simonebrunozzi]

Fakespot should create a chrome extension - extremely useful when I navigate Amazon.com

[abledon]

When I go to the page there's a blue popup above that says they have one... (I'm on firefox currently)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...

[captaindiego]

The amazon vine program sends people free items in exchange for reviews. I started running across absolutely crap 5 star reviews for grad level engineering and math textbooks from the vine reviewers 2-3 years ago. They would talk about how the binding seemed good, and how their was a lot of math and equations. Amazon ignored complaints at the time about these positive reviews. I'm guessing the bump in the star ratings lead to higher sales.

I haven't noticed the more organic type you are seeing, but it does not surprise me at all.

[ethbro]

The "best rated" sort became useless after vine reviews.

"This impartial review was delivered after I received the product free or for a discount"? Give me a break. Joe or Judy Amazon are realistically going to be perfectly happy plunking five stars down for free stuff.

If Amazon wanted to do it right, they'd set themselves up as a neutral intermediary, companies could register to get some amount of product in the review chain, then Amazon would randomly distribute it to relevant reviewers, and the resulting reviews would be posted anonymously (with a known pattern, e.g. 'TrialUser'). And drop any users from the program that consistently give five stars.

Instead, they seem to have created a star-for-stuff system.

[jazzyk]

For me, ratings were the most important reason why I used Amazon (plus the convenience of one-stop shopping). This is a major stumble for Amazon, IMO. Hopefully a competitor steps up - this would be good for consumers, Amazon has become too much of a monopoly.

[ethbro]

Sadly, at this point Amazon has the network effect of both consumers and suppliers. They've got the eyeballs, so people want to sell through them, so they've got a diversity of items and people check there to buy first, repeat repeat.

Be that what it may for the market: I think they've been a lot less mercenary than they could be (they could likely jack fees a lot higher now without much fallout), but the potential is certainly there.

Great for low cost optimization, bad for great feature development.

PS: The whole only-being-able-to-price-sort-in-a-single-category is terrible too. How do I know if Thing X is in category Y or Z? It successfully reproduces all the fun of wondering what aisle the grocery store stuck trail mix on.

[chx]

Amazon created a marketplace where anyone can sell anything and let it fester. I find something unbelievably broken every day. I found someone entered an Ethernet cable for like everything recognizable out there with an RJ-45 jack creating some 47 000 identical product pages in the process. Today I looked at http://www.amazon.ca/Manfrotto-Release-Special-Adapter-200PL... this is a tripod adapter and it's #135 in Tools & Home Improvement > Building Supplies > Building Materials . The http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Automotive-Body-Repair-To... #5 Automotive Body Repair Tools is a Visible Cutaway of Padlocks Lock. I have seen ordinary ~20" LCD monitors weighing a thousand pounds, messenger bags fit for King Kong and who knows what else.

[xyzzy123]

Umm, you don't have to buy it though. Noise isn't necessarily a problem unless it stops you finding what you want. Actually, most products (except for the one you want) are just noise. Hence the continuing success of craigslist, ebay, gumtree and so on, despite the low average listing quality.

Actually in a way what whacks me out the most is people's expectation for an "open" marketplace with high average quality.

[ehartsuyker]

I don't want an open marketplace. I want somewhere I can conveniently find most things I need from my laptop for a reasonable price.

If Amazon came alone with insane, draconian policies and made it a very closed market, I'd be ok with that as a consumer so long as I can find what I need.

[webXL]

> I want somewhere I can conveniently find most things I need from my laptop for a reasonable price.

That sounds like Monoprice or Newegg. Slightly more focused for our needs, but not as fast search results or affordable shipping.

[lmm]

They don't have the range of products you can find on Amazon. If Amazon is supposed to replace Wal-Mart then they need to sell the same range of stuff - and with a certain minimum quality standard.

[fluxquanta]

Anecdotally, 4 or 5 years ago I used to go to Amazon to shop with only a "general idea" of what I wanted to purchase. There were many times when I ended up buying more than I wanted, or something more expensive than I originally intended, because I was influenced by reviews and how the items were presented to me on that site (like "People also bought..." listings).

But after getting burned a few times with products that did not live up to the standards presented in bogus reviews or product rankings, now I only use Amazon for the fast shipping. Instead of spending the majority of my time on Amazon doing the research there, I'm spending it on blog posts, reddit, or YouTube looking at real testimonials and going to Amazon only when my shopping is already done. Those extraneous checkout-line addons are no more.

In this way, Amazon definitely does itself a disservice by (seemingly) shifting their priorities away from what they used to excel at to more "big picture" ideas.

[eip]

"Walmart"

"minimum quality standard"

Pick one.

[sytelus]

People want trustworthy marketplace, not the open marketplace where anything goes. This should be the core learning of last decade that has made Windows apps undesirable but App Store apps highly successful. The wetting price that companies pay is totally worth it and is recovered quite well from fees as well as increased sell. No one wants Amazon to be place where all deceivers can put out their listing as they see fit.

Current major issues are:

1. Sellers can name themselves as they like. For example, you can be a seller with a name of very recognized brand deceiving people that you are official source.

2. Sellers either omit information or publish incorrect one. For example, you can sell toys laden with lead and it would be just fine.

3. Amazon has been amazingly unsuccessful leveraging their own data. For example, they can ask simple question "Are you happy with X that you bought last week?" with just Yes/No and use that information to flag products for reviews. Getting rid of incorrect and incomplete listings can not be optional.

4. Listings are not properly conflated which makes people very confused and forces them to spend lots of time to find the "best" one. For example, there are probably dozen listings for exact same product like Syma 107G helies.

[jlarocco]

IMO it is a problem. The extra products are a nuisance and they often get in the way of finding the what I wanted.

It wasn't so bad when the only items sold by third parties were obscure and niche products that Amazon didn't carry. It was actually a good indicator that I might be better off going directly to a site dedicated to bike parts or camera equipment or outdoor equipment or whatever.

But now it seems like every time I search for anything I have to filter out a dozen third party or "sponsored" items that I'm not interested in. If I wanted to be uncertain of what I was getting, have a questionable return policy, and get crappy non-Prime shipping, I wouldn't have went to Amazon in the first place.

[rangibaby]

I usually look at the average / bad reviews that say "it was great but...", and if their concerns about it are unrelated "...this Nintendo wouldn't make my coffee in the morning!" or things that don't bother me, I take that as a good sign about the product. 5/5 and 1/5 reviews are often fake or nonsense.

[crapolasplatter]

I only pay attention to the negative reviews and look for common complaints.

If the common complaint is something that I can't overlook than I look at other products.

[DenisM]

I hope they don't catch on to this.

[flubert]

I'm interesting in what to look out for in the case of someone trying to game 1 star reviews.

[JohnTHaller]

Don't forget about all the spammed product listings. It makes it impossible to look through many categories on Amazon. Try and sort SSDs of a certain size from low to high price and all you get are spam listings. And Amazon offers no way to report them.

https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264

[clock_tower]

I've experienced the mirror image of this: shopping for a good, long-lasting pillow, I found that every promising-looking pillow had plausible-sounding, highly negative reviews from people who just happened to have no purchase history, and to have reviewed nothing except pillows...

[aivosha]

On the upside, amazon almost always covers your shipping when returning a product. I dont think they had that before. So even if you ordered something based on fake 5 stars, you can always return it and leave a negative review. But yeah, I did notice the trend myself.