Give it a week and they will all be back. Amazon will delist and then reinstate as a form of off-contract punishment in my experience.
I once worked for a company that got delisted for a week because they did something Amazon didn't like (Over chat a support agent suggested the customer got a replacement part from a plumbing parts company rather than amazon.com because they didn't stock it, and they got delisted for suggesting a customer goes to a store that wasn't Amazon. This is where we learnt that Amazon is automatically scanning support requests for the mention of other stores and will issue automatic bans if you mention them!). It was a small company (<$5m sales revenue) but was still tens of thousands of pounds of revenue!
It seems like Amazon doesn't have any teeth for some countries. For US sellers, for example, an EIN is a fairly good deterrent as it's cost prohibitive to create a bunch of them for small scale selling. It seems like whatever the equivalent of an EIN is for some countries must be cheap to recycle.
I agree. I used to do a lot of shopping on amazon. I cancelled prime and don't look there at all now. It seems for a long time they knowingly helped sellers defraud consumers with fake reviews, allowed pay/free product for reviews, hid the reviews pointing it out, and basically all around helped these companies lie to amazon customers.
now they're responding but its been years and years of this.
AmaZons profit partially comes from having a good reputation. If everyone comes to understand that their reviews are all fake then people won’t use the site as much. E.g. you might use a trusted blog as a review and they might link to some other site. So they should care.
Or they will just assume that all reviews are fake on all sites, and still buy at Amazon because of their Prime membership. I don't know that Amazon has a good reputation.
I've just started completely ignoring reviews on Amazon. I can send stuff back if it's not up to quality (UK - I realise the this may not apply globally), so it's not worth my time trying to determine what reviews are/aren't real.
Amazon still ends up getting my custom as many other sites have more awkward returns processes or are not competitive on price.
Amazon has a terrible reputation. They make profit despite this, largely because they have no quibble guarantees and free, fast delivery for prime members.
I’m glad these companies aren’t just getting a slap on the wrist. I wonder how effective it will be though - surely they can just spring up under a new name very quickly.
I just had an argument about this with Amazon support. They took down a review for an item where I mentioned that the manufacturer included a card in the item's box offering to pay you for reviews. Apparently my review violated their "advertising" policy
I had a similar experience recently because I called out that the name brand webcam was not in retail packaging. That was the last electronics purchase I’ll likely ever make from Amazon. I ended up returning it and actually found one at Best Buy a few days later.
The best reviews to read are the 1 or 2 star reviews. If the reviews are of the “I bought this RS232 adapter and it won’t plug into my graphics card!!! Total junk!!!!!” and “delivery guy didn’t ring the doorbell when he dropped it off!” and there is a good number of reviews then the product is usually good.
However when the problems with the product are spelled out in detail with attached pictures showing the defect I have to reconsider.
We need a regulator to crack down on Amazon. There are so many products with fake certificates, unsafe or straight up scams. If you report those nothing happens.
I usually check the rating. If its 4-5 stars, then I will proceed to reading a few 5 stars, and a few 1 stars. You can usually tell if the reviews are real and this also helps you decide if the negatives matter to you.
I bought a vaccuum recently and did this process. One of the 1 star reviews was something to the effect of, "this vacuum sucks too hard. Its a workout to use". I have 2 huskies and a sea of fur to contend with, so this 1 star was a 5 star to me.
It's an impossible problem to solve completely. The most trusted of reviewers can still be bought out, for a price.
I think the best way to improve things is via increased transparency - If I can read a reviewer's past reviews, I can make a better-informed judgement of their reviewing integrity.
One thought I had was to show reviews from people you know. It should carry more weight of you know them personally. Then if someone gives a 5-star review to a scam product then you can personally contact them and say "What the hell?" and block their reviews.
The reputation of a reviewer needs to be on the line to get proper reviews, and also the ones reading the reviews need to have a way to gauge the reviewer's reputation.
Knowing someone in real life helps, but so could something where we can review the reviewer.
I think there is a set of problems to solve first before you can "solve reviews".
The first and biggest one (in my opinion) is global unique item identifiers for the products. This reduces the sheer ridiculous volume of reviews you have to contend with. The other problem this solves is that the "review" is now reasonably guaranteed to be attached to a product and not "seller plus product". This leaves very little wiggle room and incentive for dollar-store / drop-shipper / chinese knockoff sellers to fake reviews.
The answer is to stop trying to scale trust and reputation. Those things are valuable because they're hard to come by. Online reviews and scoring systems try to look trustworthy and reputable, but they're counterproductive when literally anyone can write them and there are too many to properly vet.
I agree with others there is no technical solution to a cultural problem like this.
However Amazons intentions are made clear by this fact:
The ability to search or properly filter/visualize the reviews for xyz product has been extremely limited until recently. (And I would argue it still is very limited, intentionally by Amazon).
In other words on Amazon‘s website and their apps the interface for filtering/searching within reviews for a given product is horrible and very limited. Does anyone doubt Amazon has the ability and/or resources to improve the review GUI/interface? Why do they refuse to? (Rhetorical)
The clearest giveaway is lots of customer photographs of the item. Multiple photos of the item and/or its packaging from different angles, adding absolutely no value to the review, is virtually guaranteed to mean a fake review.
Seriously - who takes 10 photos of their new USB cable and the box it came in?
Some companies are requesting fake video reviews now too.
Secondly, fake reviews are required to have minimum word counts. So a 100 word review about a USB cable is also likely to be fake.
Finally, they're required to be at least 4 stars; usually 5. Anything below 4 and they won't pay out.
I hardly buy anything from Amazon anymore except for things I know are chinese garbage or small things like toothpaste. I don't trust that namebrand items are authentic at all and you shouldn't either.
Honestly it's largely Chinese brands selling all sorts of crap. Any time you see a ridiculous-looking off-brand name, it's very likely they're using fake reviews to boost their position in the rankings.
Often they will bulk-sell a cheap product, rake in good reviews, then re-write the entire product page to a different more expensive product but retaining all of the good reviews.
Require every product to be genuinely UL or ETL listed with traceable certificates in order to be sold in a certain country, or ban them from importation. And then test them; if they fail, revoke certificates until resolved.
