Even when it comes to non-scam products (i.e. they actually are selling what they claim to be) I've spotted this "review merging" trick used dozens of times over the last few years; Products with...
Even when it comes to non-scam products (i.e. they actually are selling what they claim to be) I've spotted this "review merging" trick used dozens of times over the last few years; Products with several hundred or even a thousand+ positive reviews, but if you actually read the reviews you will notice that every reviewer is talking about a totally different product. These scummy sellers are simply editing their old product pages and changing them to a totally new product instead of making a new listing, in order to capitalize on the old product's positive reviews.
It doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to totally prevent this. Don't let sellers fundamentally change or significantly alter their old product pages, and especially don't let them change the categories of said product. And yet it keeps being allowed. :/
Amazon even do it themselves to an extent: meaningfully different products end up on the same page with all the reviews and Q&A mixed together, and often the only way to find this out is by...
Amazon even do it themselves to an extent: meaningfully different products end up on the same page with all the reviews and Q&A mixed together, and often the only way to find this out is by clicking through the colours and realising that ”red” doesn’t mean “this product but red”, it means “different features, price point, product name, and title under the same product ID. Also that one happens to be red”.
I don't think that's Amazon itself doing that either. But yeah, I've noticed a lot of that in the clothing, fashion accessories, decor, and linens categories too. The sellers there are abusing...
I don't think that's Amazon itself doing that either. But yeah, I've noticed a lot of that in the clothing, fashion accessories, decor, and linens categories too. The sellers there are abusing Amazon's color/size variation product listing feature to combine the reviews for products that aren't actually color/size variations of the same thing.
You might be surprised! I was helping someone buy a phone the other day, and the Pixel 6, 6a, and 6 Pro “Sold by Amazon” are all under one listing distinguished by colour. It’s not the most...
You might be surprised! I was helping someone buy a phone the other day, and the Pixel 6, 6a, and 6 Pro “Sold by Amazon” are all under one listing distinguished by colour. It’s not the most extreme case I’ve ever seen, and the third parties definitely push it further, but they are still fundamentally different phones with different feature sets ranging from £300 to £600 - and the only way to match up the reviews is if you remember that the 6a was released in “sage” rather than “seafoam”.
I wouldn’t mind so much if there were a dropdown for the model, but it really is just done on colour, with an additionally confusing option for size (128GB, 256GB, or “with buds”) that sometimes auto selects a different colour at the same time. It’s unclear enough to mislead even before they read a review for a flagship that shows at the top even when they’ve selected a budget model at half the price.
Ah, yeah... Now that you've mention that, it reminded me that I actually had seen something similar when I was shopping for Surface tablets, which are also "Sold by Amazon". That was quite a few...
Ah, yeah... Now that you've mention that, it reminded me that I actually had seen something similar when I was shopping for Surface tablets, which are also "Sold by Amazon". That was quite a few years ago though, and nowadays you can thankfully clearly differentiate and select from all the different colors/models/configs in the same listing (E.g.). So I wonder why they haven't used that same multi-select setup with the Pixel listings.
16TB SSD for a hundred bucks sounds like a pipe dream and something that certain unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers pushing scam products would misadvertise on Amazon. I still remember the...
16TB SSD for a hundred bucks sounds like a pipe dream and something that certain unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers pushing scam products would misadvertise on Amazon. I still remember the relatively recent days where a 256GB SSD would push you back several hundred dollars and be the most expensive part of your rig, even when your typical modern game install would fill almost half that drive.
I know for damn sure my next rig will have an (affordable) 1 to 2 TB SSD as the main drive, and likely a 4 to 8 tera hard drive, just because I want to future-proof it.
This is yet another thing that makes me think Amazon isn’t really motivated to fix it. They claim they’ve spent $400m ”to address the problem”, they clearly have a secondary review process that...
16TB SSD for a hundred bucks sounds like a pipe dream
This is yet another thing that makes me think Amazon isn’t really motivated to fix it. They claim they’ve spent $400m ”to address the problem”, they clearly have a secondary review process that can be used because the products disappeared after getting reported on by the press, they have full semantic data on the product for search and recommendation, as well as perhaps the best single database of product costs in the world, but they aren’t automatically flagging massively implausible prices for human review.
Occasionally people buy those things, and then they get money. Also you have to pay humans to do human review, and that costs money. But bad press might mean fewer people buy things, which means...
Occasionally people buy those things, and then they get money. Also you have to pay humans to do human review, and that costs money. But bad press might mean fewer people buy things, which means less money, so they do react to that.
If you assume large corporations are uniformly (a) stupid and (b) unbelievably greedy, you will do an appallingly good job of predicting their behaviors.
It's a major reason why I think brick & mortar outlets will still have their place. You're not gonna beat Amazon on delivery speed or reliability, but you can beat them by providing a more curated...
It's a major reason why I think brick & mortar outlets will still have their place.
You're not gonna beat Amazon on delivery speed or reliability, but you can beat them by providing a more curated physical shopping experience.
Even the plausible stuff is fake on these platforms. So much stuff marketed as USB 3.0 and has the blue plastic but is missing the pins for 3.0, even when it’s in the price range that retail...
Even the plausible stuff is fake on these platforms. So much stuff marketed as USB 3.0 and has the blue plastic but is missing the pins for 3.0, even when it’s in the price range that retail stores are selling the real thing for.
Imo it feels like physical retail has really lifted their game over the last few years and online responded with fraud and deception.
Even when it comes to non-scam products (i.e. they actually are selling what they claim to be) I've spotted this "review merging" trick used dozens of times over the last few years; Products with several hundred or even a thousand+ positive reviews, but if you actually read the reviews you will notice that every reviewer is talking about a totally different product. These scummy sellers are simply editing their old product pages and changing them to a totally new product instead of making a new listing, in order to capitalize on the old product's positive reviews.
It doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult to totally prevent this. Don't let sellers fundamentally change or significantly alter their old product pages, and especially don't let them change the categories of said product. And yet it keeps being allowed. :/
Amazon even do it themselves to an extent: meaningfully different products end up on the same page with all the reviews and Q&A mixed together, and often the only way to find this out is by clicking through the colours and realising that ”red” doesn’t mean “this product but red”, it means “different features, price point, product name, and title under the same product ID. Also that one happens to be red”.
I don't think that's Amazon itself doing that either. But yeah, I've noticed a lot of that in the clothing, fashion accessories, decor, and linens categories too. The sellers there are abusing Amazon's color/size variation product listing feature to combine the reviews for products that aren't actually color/size variations of the same thing.
You might be surprised! I was helping someone buy a phone the other day, and the Pixel 6, 6a, and 6 Pro “Sold by Amazon” are all under one listing distinguished by colour. It’s not the most extreme case I’ve ever seen, and the third parties definitely push it further, but they are still fundamentally different phones with different feature sets ranging from £300 to £600 - and the only way to match up the reviews is if you remember that the 6a was released in “sage” rather than “seafoam”.
I wouldn’t mind so much if there were a dropdown for the model, but it really is just done on colour, with an additionally confusing option for size (128GB, 256GB, or “with buds”) that sometimes auto selects a different colour at the same time. It’s unclear enough to mislead even before they read a review for a flagship that shows at the top even when they’ve selected a budget model at half the price.
Ah, yeah... Now that you've mention that, it reminded me that I actually had seen something similar when I was shopping for Surface tablets, which are also "Sold by Amazon". That was quite a few years ago though, and nowadays you can thankfully clearly differentiate and select from all the different colors/models/configs in the same listing (E.g.). So I wonder why they haven't used that same multi-select setup with the Pixel listings.
Oh that’s interesting, good to see they’ve fixed it on some products, but yeah, I wonder why not on others in that case.
16TB SSD for a hundred bucks sounds like a pipe dream and something that certain unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers pushing scam products would misadvertise on Amazon. I still remember the relatively recent days where a 256GB SSD would push you back several hundred dollars and be the most expensive part of your rig, even when your typical modern game install would fill almost half that drive.
I know for damn sure my next rig will have an (affordable) 1 to 2 TB SSD as the main drive, and likely a 4 to 8 tera hard drive, just because I want to future-proof it.
This is yet another thing that makes me think Amazon isn’t really motivated to fix it. They claim they’ve spent $400m ”to address the problem”, they clearly have a secondary review process that can be used because the products disappeared after getting reported on by the press, they have full semantic data on the product for search and recommendation, as well as perhaps the best single database of product costs in the world, but they aren’t automatically flagging massively implausible prices for human review.
Occasionally people buy those things, and then they get money. Also you have to pay humans to do human review, and that costs money. But bad press might mean fewer people buy things, which means less money, so they do react to that.
If you assume large corporations are uniformly (a) stupid and (b) unbelievably greedy, you will do an appallingly good job of predicting their behaviors.
It's a major reason why I think brick & mortar outlets will still have their place.
You're not gonna beat Amazon on delivery speed or reliability, but you can beat them by providing a more curated physical shopping experience.
Even the plausible stuff is fake on these platforms. So much stuff marketed as USB 3.0 and has the blue plastic but is missing the pins for 3.0, even when it’s in the price range that retail stores are selling the real thing for.
Imo it feels like physical retail has really lifted their game over the last few years and online responded with fraud and deception.