This sort of gaming is rampant on Amazon. My own experience:
A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.
The same thing happened to me a few years back. I got a product that came with an invitation to a secret Facebook group, with promises of further discounts. I joined the group, and it turned out to be a system where they would send you Amazon gift cards to buy specific products in exchange for five-star reviews. Apparently a large number of ordinary customers were involved, given the size of the group in question (all people using what appeared to be their real Facebook accounts).
I reported it to Amazon customer service, and they gave me a $5 account credit for making the report. Not sure if any action was taken against the seller.
I had a friend who was doing this. The way it worked is there was a secret FB group where items would be posted, and if you were up for reviewing the item you'd message the group coordinator who would send you money to buy it. You'd then buy and review the item. Initially you would only be reviewing small items ($5-$10), but as you gained more trust you could get more expensive items (not sure what the limit was). Some items even came with an additional $20 for doing a review. I cautioned them that what they were doing was a good way to get their Amazon account suspected (I didn't even think about their FB account) and they eventually did stop. Most of what they accumulated was crap, but there were a hand full of nice items - though thinking about it now, the only thing they got that I thought was cool was a decorative snail statue.
I brought a product from Amazon and returned it since it’s defective. Posted a 3 star review, which I thought it’s fair.
For the next two months someone from the seller company constantly sent me emails offering a $30 gift card to me to change the rating to a 5 star. So those “it’s trash...5 star” are probably people being paid to change their initial review.
I’ve thought about taking their money but added in a statement in the review that the 5 star was a paid request from the seller, just to screw their practice a bit. But stopped fearing that Amazon might ban my account.
> I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
I reported one of these attempts to Amazon customer support once and the response I got back was basically "if we catch you accepting payment for positive reviews, we'll ban your account and you'll lose all of your digital purchases." No questions about the seller or the item, just a veiled threat.
A possible explanation: it would be simple enough for someone to slag their competitors by leaving reviews saying “this person tried to bribe me with a gift card to leave a fake review.” For every person trying to buy their way to the top, there is someone else trying to knock down their competitors by falsely implicating them in rules violations ...
I would imagine it would be better to report this interaction to Amazon customer service, including forwarding a copy of the email, rather than addressing this through a product review.
They do allow you to leave reviews for things you didn’t buy from them (there’s a “verified buyer” tag for people who did buy it directly) but here are two other very common scams:
1. I receive emails offering to give me free stuff in exchange for reviews, with the promise of more if they’re good. You can also find job site posting which are similar: get paid to review products, strongly implying that you get more for 5 star reviews. I haven’t actually done this but I’d be shocked if they gave people time or latitude for fairly reviewing anything.
2. I’ve had cards included in Amazon purchases offering freebies for positive reviews - just include a link in your email and get an Amazon gift certificate.
Amazon makes reporting these difficult and the frontline support tend to be confused if you try, and nothing visibly happened when I did. Clearly they do not care about this problem.
Same case in India as well. Here sellers bribe money to consumers, asking to write a five-star review. I have had sellers call me multiple times to leave a review. If you mention in the reviews that seller is harassing you for fake reviews and other reviews might be paid, then your review gets taken down.
Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.
Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and realize the reviews are fake. Amazon rejected my review because it didn't meet their guidelines since it mentioned "Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts."
I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality.
So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review.
A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email.
Several weeks later, another email: this time offering $40.
And so on.
Their latest email is offering me $70 to take down the review. I still haven't.
I'd forward the email to Amazon if (a) I knew they'd do something, and, more importantly, (b) I knew WHERE to send it!
Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people!
Nothing new. This has been the case for years. The worst of it was that they used to (I think this might no longer be the case) accept reviews from anyone with an account, whether they bought the product or not.
We have direct experience on this. My wife used to sell products on Amazon. People were leaving reviews that tagged as "Verified Review" BEFORE the product was delivered. Often times they would buy an item, leave a review and cancel before it shipped.
Even worse, these products required some use before anyone could form an opinion. This did not matter at all. People could leave reviews before buying, right after buying, before receiving and when the package was dropped off, etc.
And, of course, 100% of the reviews left before the product shipped or before it arrived were negative. 100% of the review left by non-buyers were negative.
In other words, sellers on Amazon have been conducting armed warfare through negative reviews, star ratings and seller feedback.
The other thing they are doing is consuming competitor's advertising budget before prime time. Say you have a budget of $1000 per day for click-through-ads on Amazon. That's $30K per month. Competitors would hire people --usually in China or India-- to click on your ads furiously right after midnight US time. By the time people awoke in the US and went to buy on Amazon your $1,000 ad budget was gone and nobody saw your product offerings.
We burned through tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. I had to fight Amazon for months to get them to have a look at the statistical analysis I put in front of them. At the end of that process they refunded us a fraction of our spend. What worse is that we lost all search ratings (some of our products were on page one for applicable keywords) and Amazon absolutely refused to turn back the clock and restore our standing. It was an absolute nightmare. They could not have cared less. This is when my wife decided to stop selling on Amazon. As a doctor she had no patience for that lunacy.
The other problem is that Amazon does not preserve advertising records (or they didn't back then). If you did not manually download your statistics with regularity there was no way you could reconstruct what happened six months ago. If I remember correctly you get a few weeks or one month's download and that's it. I don't know if it's true or not, but their seller-no-service people told me the records are not preserved.
Even worse, they refused to provide us with the identity of the seller or sellers who attacked our advertising budget and through negative reviews. They told me they identified them and banned them from Amazon. If they were in the US or Europe we wanted to seek legal action against them. Amazon, once again, could not have cared less.
Based on my experience and that of others whose lives have been turned upside-down by Amazon product and account suspensions as well as flat out fraud in reviews and ratings, I would not recommend that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon. They could destroy your existence overnight. I know people who are still trying to recover from daring to think they could "build a business" on Amazon. It's a farce. You own nothing. They control everything. And they can flick you off the platform without consequence because you are less than a rounding error.
In our case we both benefited from having careers and a successful tech business, so the Amazon failure didn't hurt us badly. Not so for friends who, quite literally, depended on their "Amazon store" to live, thought they had a shot at improving their lives, risked money they could not afford to lose and actually wanted to own a nice lifestyle business.
Companies like Amazon have no incentives to police gaming of reviews. A purchased item is money to them, regardless of if the purchase was a sponsored purchase. It's why fake products have equal or more reviews than popular products found in stores.
That's the biggest Amazon scam that Amazon itself allows and encourages (indirectly). In my experience, most inexpensive items from unknown brands have transferred reviews.
I've heard of folks gaming at least some of these points by offering refunds (through a different channel, e.g. paypal) to buyers to leave a positive review. I don't know if it's true, but it definitely seems plausible and an easy way to buy reviews from 'legit' buyers.
Amazon could counter this by offering a big bounty on turning in sellers that do this, and/or financially penalizing them (the sellers) if sufficient evidence is produced.
The other day I was shopping for tooth whitening strips and the top result was a sketchy no-name product with 400 5 star reviews and only 2 verified purchases. I left a review warning people that the reviews are fake and amazon rejected it. Apparently fake reviews are fine, and thousands of prank reviews from redditors are fine, but calling out fakes is against the TOS. It was so infuriating and made me feel like amazon is intentionally allowing their customers to be defrauded.
I bought a $50 item and a couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail offering me a $35 Amazon gift card if I leave a 5-star review with a video or picture attached.
I'm surprised Amazon allows these kinds of bribes.
Jessica — not her real name — has spent well over $15,000 on Amazon this year, buying everything from Halloween decorations to a queen-size inflatable mattress. She's purchased over 700 products, including three vacuum cleaners, six desk chairs, and no fewer than 26 pairs of earbuds. And even though most of the products are cheaply made, she’s given each a 5-star review. The twentysomething who lives on the East Coast isn’t a bad judge of quality — the companies that sell these products on Amazon reimburse her for the purchases.
Third-party sellers know what it takes to make it on Amazon: Get good reviews and a high search ranking. But attracting genuine customers is tough, so some sellers use a reliable cheat — bribes. Because of Amazon’s vast scale, inscrutable algorithms, and capricious enforcement of its own rules, unscrupulous sellers and paid shills largely get away with it.
I received a “warning” insinuating that my Amazon account would be suspended for a bad review of a product that offered me a gift card for more than the value of the product in exchange for a screenshot of my 5-star review.
I am not sure what to make of this, I have considered that possibility the company has an employee on their payroll.
A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.
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