[kstenerud]

That's what's always annoyed me with Amazon's "sort by average rating" setting. I want to see the top 10 or so items by rating to give me a baseline to investigate from, but instead I get page after page of cheap Chinese crap with one 5-star review each from the resident fake reviewer.

Worse than useless.

Even a simple change like adding a "show only items with a minumum of X reviews" would be a godsend.

[nehushtan]

What's crazy is everyone knows Amazon's ranking is crap, except apparently Amazon - and it's been crappy in the same way for 10 years.

[SamBam]

While Amazon certainly has a vested interest in getting people to trust the reviews (they care more about people coming back to Amazon again and again than selling any one product), I wonder if they also have a vested interest in keeping a large number of products from multiple vendors available.

If Amazon ranked it's items the "proper" way, such that all one-rating products were far from the top, I imagine it would see a lot more clustering of purchases on the most popular version of every product type. All those variations that were not as popular would receive many fewer purchases, and some of those vendors might simply fold.

Amazon may have decided that having a larger ecosystem of vendors is worth more than implementing a better rating system. This, presumably, is not in the customer's interest (unless perhaps the "discoverability" of unknown products is on balance worth the risk).

Whatever the reason, Amazon certainly knows about other ranking systems, so it has to have made this choice deliberately.

[folli]

For Amazon (and equally large companies) I usually tempted to put the proverb "don't attribute to malice which is adequately explained by stupidity" on its head. There's definitely a financial reason behind this.

[oconnor663]

I'd hasten to add "don't attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by people having to deal with more than one problem at the same time."

[logicallee]

> with one 5-star review each from the resident fake reviewer.

don't you think if they switched to this algorithm you would see page after page of cheap crap with 500 5-star reviews each from the 500 resident fake reviewers?

...though now that I've written it like that it does make it obvious that this would be higher a burden on fakers, and cut out some of the products doing this.

[gesman]

There is a good plugin for Chrome "Amazon Sort - Number of Reviews".

It helped me to push chinese crap way below the fold and focus on well-researched items on top.

[zolloie]

I seem to be the only one who remembers this, but for a brief period of time, Amazon implemented the lower confidence bound approach (where you were sorting on the lower bound to the average, not the average itself).

I loved it, but I noticed that not too long after (maybe a year?) they removed it. My sense was that small businesses were complaining that the system was unfairly benefiting larger businesses. E.g., if you have a new product, using the lower bound or something similar is unfair because it penalizes you for being new, relative to established players.

Honestly, I can see that perspective too (which is missing from the linked piece), and am not really sure what to do about it. The linked piece comes at it from the perspective of consumer risk minimization, and not from the perspective of the producer, which Amazon also has to contend with.

The solution is probably to allow sorting by both.

[ocfnash]

I think this comment would be improved by removal of the word "Chinese".

[coldtea]

Would it be more accurate though?

[ocfnash]

I don't know; no doubt we could debate the point at length.

Nevertheless I stand by my original remark. IMHO the conflation of "Chinese" with "cheap crap" is:

  * Not relevant

  * Debatable / Subjective 

  * Divisive

and thus distracts attention from the actual point being made.

[kstenerud]

Meh.

China today makes the lion's share of cheap crap. Before that it was Korea. Before that it was Japan. Next will probably be Bangladesh. Just follow where garment manufacturers go and you'll see the pattern.

They key to selling more cheap crap in this day and age is to game the ratings systems as inexpensively as possible, thus the Amazon one-fake-5-star-review problem.

[stordoff]

FWIW, in this specific case, part of the problem can be that items are shipped from China (so longer lead times etc.).