> Lots of basic products are being sold to pump up reviews then being switched to a much more expensive item.
This is the most frustrating of them all, reviews mean absolutely nothing anymore when the item can be switched out at will while keeping any old reviews.
The frustrating thing is that it seems like a trivial problem to solve. Changing too many attributes of a product should either be disallowed, or automatically wipe old reviews.
> The frustrating thing is that it seems like a trivial problem to solve. Changing too many attributes of a product should either be disallowed, or automatically wipe old reviews.
If it hasn’t been solved yet, it’s probably not that trivial. How many is “too many”? What happens if I change one attribute every week or so until I’ve completely changed the product?
> If it hasn’t been solved yet, it’s probably not that trivial. How many is “too many”? What happens if I change one attribute every week or so until I’ve completely changed the product?
The problem seems trivial, especially for a company of Amazon's size. All they'd need to do is have some prominent part of the product description (say the product name) be unmodifiable without review and approval by Amazon, and have reviewers that are trained to spot patterns of fraudulent behavior. Any legitimate issues caused by the review can probably be mitigated by giving sellers the ability to get pending changes pre-approved before they go live [1].
If a seller doesn't want to go through the approval, they can delete the product listing and create a new one with a new description, but they'd lose all the reviews. Seems like a fair tradeoff.
However, all that would cost a little bit of money, and would require staff. Amazon probably made the business decision that they like money, and don't mind the costs of allowing the fraud since it's mostly borne by customers.
[1] so the Amazon review for a legitimate product name change can happen while the packaging is being redesigned, and it can all go live in a coordinated fashion
> All they'd need to do is have some prominent part of the product description (say the product name) be unmodifiable without review and approval by Amazon
It's more trivial than that -- the product physical dimensions and weight.
Amazon, the store, may have no idea about the description or product specifics.
But you think Amazon, the logistics company, doesn't know exactly everything needed for shipping and warehousing an item?
I mean - more conventional stores solve this with oversight, but amazon is trying to be amazon scale with zero oversight - can't let those unsustainable profit margins suffer.
All marketplaces have these problems, I would argue. If they don't, it's probably just because the "scammers" and product "spammers" haven't found it or focused on it yet.
As long as you let such individuals into your marketplace without any oversight or data-cleaning requirements, you will have this problem. It's like email and spam all over again.
No this is a problem unique to Amazon because it has both a marketplace filled with third party sellers and an official brand both operating on the same site without highlighting that the marketplace is less trustworthy. If you want to buy an Asus mainboard then you won't be brought to a seller specific page. Instead there is a product specific page that bundles first party and third party sellers onto a single page and both will appear in the search results. The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. Only Amazon sells the "AmazonBasics" brand and by making all non Amazon brands look untrustworthy through third party sellers they steer people toward buying the Amazon products.
This is the most frustrating of them all, reviews mean absolutely nothing anymore when the item can be switched out at will while keeping any old reviews.