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0 pointsunclekev4y ago0 comments

> How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?

They don't actually ban the accounts doing this. They only remove the reviews/listings, but don't take any action on the accounts (so they just re-list 24 hours later)

Apparently when Amazon acts, they are just removing the fake reviews, sometimes the whole product but never actually banning the sellers account (even if every product that seller is listing is pumped full of fake reviews)

It seems to be a endless cycle of a item being hijacked or a item filled with fake reviews, then when reported to Amazon they simply remove the fake reviews or the product but don't take any action at all against the seller (or accounts making the fake reviews)

This thread[0] on the Amazon Seller forums is crazy with people finding products that are scam listings (with 10,000+ fake reviews), they report them, the products get taken down, then 24 hours later the same sellers have re listed with more fake reviews.

Amazon simply do not care, if they did they would:

A) Address the root problem

B) Ban the seller accounts clearly manipulating the system.

Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.

[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...

0 comments

ansible4y ago

If you can get someone else's account banned for having fake reviews, it would be easy to take out the competition that way.

Fundamentally, it is too easy to sign up as a seller.

seanwilson4y ago

> Amazon simply do not care

Why though? How does this not hurt Amazon long term? What are they gaining from attracting dodgy sellers in the short term?

pas4y ago

Long term is subjective.

But the more important point is, Amazon is a must-use shipping provider with a crappy platform. They don't give a fuck about the retail part. They diversified with AWS, Jeff plays with his billions, fights unions, tracks piss bottles, cancels or renews Prime shows, goes to space, etc.. etc.. the site at this point is almost just a cute idiosyncrasy. As long as it runs and the orders are flowing, it's A-OK. Of course there's are probably many teams working on "reforming" it. The NEW amazon.com. The redesign. The refactor. The revamp. The modernization. But all of those are just to keep people working there so they maintain the old behemoth while their project slowly gets put on the backburner (and/or gets scaled down to a small demo page somewhere that no one ever sees or uses).

modeless4y ago

Messed up internal incentives, I guess. It happens to every large company.

lotsofpulp4y ago

Retail is a low margin business, whereas being a platform for third party sellers is a high margin business. As long as their reputation amongst sufficient number of people is high enough to keep them paying for Amazon prime, then that is the most amount of effort they should put into retail.

fmajid4y ago

Revenue.

efitz4y ago

The answer to _almost_ every question that starts with “why don’t they” ultimately ends up being “money”.

The marginal edge cases boil down to “power” or “stupidity”.

heavyset_go4y ago

> Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.

They banned my customer account from leaving reviews, though, because I mentioned that I got scammed from a listing I left a review on.

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