FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are up on different tabs every time I buy something new on Amazon, and they do a pretty good job of alerting you to scammy reviews without any internal Amazon info. I can’t imagine it’s not something an internal team could make a serious dent in.
Amazon reviews have been shady for years. To combat this I never buy without running the item link through fakespot.com. The other day I also discovered reviewmeta.com t haven't tried it yet.
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta seem to do a decent job of identifying obviously fake Amazon reviews.
I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.
If http://fakespot.com/ can spot fake reviews, Amazon themselves should be able to do it. It's in their long term interest that product reviews are genuine so that buyers have confidence. If I can't trust Amazon reviews, I'll just shop at Target where at least I can handle the physical product before I buy it.
Since listening to that podcast a few weeks ago I've also started checking both ReviewMeta and FakeSpot for every Amazon listing I think about buying.
It's really made shopping on Amazon a frustrating experience -- well over half the products I've checked (in a couple specific product categories) have had F or D ratings according to both sites. I've wondered if some of these are false positives (i.e. ReviewMeta flags a product's reviews as fake but they're actually legitimate), but when you look at their reasoning in the breakdown they give, it's usually pretty convincing that many/most of the reviews are indeed fake.
I feel like this might be a case where ignorance is (mostly) bliss ... when I naively thought the vast majority of reviews on Amazon were genuine, shopping was much faster and simpler, and I mostly had good experiences buying well-reviewed products despite that many of those reviews were probably fake.
This is why I use tools like fakespot and reviewmeta to make sure Amazons reviews are somewhat accurate. Sure, it's not fool proof, but these tools attempt to filter the obvious bad reviews.
Amazon should come up with a proprietary and secret algorithm (the way Google search is) to do the same thing. They are in the best position to do this, since they have all the info. They could leverage purchase history, payment methods, addresses, account age, etc...; they even have the resources to use slightly more invasive information such as credit score. It's knowable what products are having fake reviews bought for them, they could secretly flag accounts suspected of this and lower their weight. Fakespot can't get half of the information Amazon already has. Amazon needs to fix this for themselves.
I'd imagine that it can't be too hard on Amazon's side to predict whether a product receives a lot of fake reviews or not. Just checking if the reviewer has other reviews would be a simple first step to grab the low-hanging fruit.
Amazon is a huge search engine. They should act like one and prevent attempts of gaming the system.
I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).
I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.
I've taken to keeping a copy of Fakespot[0] open in an incognito browser and regularly submit Amazon URLs to it. Over the past month or so, I've looked at everything from headphones to shampoo and been boggled at the amount of rigging that goes on.
While I can't say for sure that their algorithms are always spot on, they give some interesting feedback in terms of recent review count history, price history, whether Amazon has recently bulk deleted reviews, and some heuristic comment quality ratings. So often I've found that Amazon's Choice is questionable: 4.8 stars, hundreds of reviews within the last 30 days on a slickly packaged, no-name electronics gadget is all too common.
Typically, I use Fakespot to look for red flags, flip back to the reviews area on Amazon, sort them by Most Recent Reviews, and dig around. I don't use the Fakespot Chrome extension, though. Too invasive for my tastes.
Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated in any way with them.)
Or paste the URL into FakeSpot. Although I have found FS to be incorrect at times, flagging reviews as legit when they clearly are not.
It's becoming more and more widely known that there are numerous items with fake reviews, and Amazon doesn't seem to care. I wonder if this might lead to their downfall?
Along with the counterfeit items[1] and poor price/review count sorting. As a made-up example, an item with three five star reviews can rank higher on sorting than an item with say one hundred reviews with an aggregate of 4.7 stars. I'd take the latter any day. And sort by price; it goes (another made-up example) $2, $2.50, $6, $3...
I like Amazon for Prime, the wide ocean of selection, the reviews -- when not fake. But caveat emptor.
It's in amazon's interest to suppress fake reviews, but it's definitely against amazon's interest to highlight the fact that their user reviews are often fake. The worst case for amazon is that users don't trust their reviews, and putting up a warning or score on reviews like fakespot doesn't improve the user's trust.
Amazon does police their reviews (as the article says, they've just sued another batch of companies for posting fake reviews) but they try to do it silently.
I did my dissertation on this very topic (coming soon to my website... at some point). I do not know what tactics or systems Amazon has that deal with fake reviews, or if they even really bother beyond the easy wins like tracking IPs. My dissertation was on textual analysis, which is the hard part - the other signals like IP and behavioral related ones (like # of reviews posted in one day) are more fruitful.
The heuristic you seem to be using is a logical one, but requires more data analysis than Amazon might be willing to put effort into. Looking at these reviews, they are... well, so many on the same day is suspicious. My first theory is that some fake review writing company got tasked with flooding Amazon, and so reviews got farmed out to writers. Or someone has invented a GAN that writes good reviews, or at least a good first draft. I'd have to analyze the data to have more of an opinion. But yeah, verified purchaser means little.
The real question is, how economical it is for Amazon to really care about fake reviews? Buyer beware etc and there are more than enough scams running on Amazon / EBay / etc that I'm sure they're just treading water all the time. They have sued review writing outfits, so they care somewhat, but only after the problem got written up in enough newspapers... It is a hard job, trying to analyze all the data coming into their systems each day. I'm not sure any company has really implemented a lot of the research I read about in my literature survey.
Conversely I’ve come across great results using Fakespot. Looking at their analysis of pricing over time has told me when I should not buy a product, and I appreciate when they show me reviews that they believe are suspicious. I commend you for placing so much trust in Amazon, I’ve never seen anyone else like you, but the experience and trust level for the rest of us on Amazon is severely low.
That said, Amazon could buy Fakespot or one of its competitors with small change from Jeff Bezos' sofa, and they are clearly doing a better job than Amazon at rooting out fraudulent reviews.
Ironically, Amazon's enforcement was turned against them. Unscrupulous merchants are planting obviously fake five-star reviews on their competitors. Amazon then takes down the framed competitor. Genius!
It's not that hard - look at systems like Fakespot that could automatically verify reviewer credibility (without even access to the internal data that Amazon holds).
Or just offer systems for buyers to report suppliers doing exactly this - buying reviews.
Or honeypot it, and just put some fake addresses on sites that sell reviews and then ban companies that send you stuff.
I mean there are loads of solutions, but all of them involve Amazon taking down 5 star reviews that help them sell crap, so the incentives are obviously conflicting here.
Fraud and fake reviews are a major strategic concern, it has been since the start, i.e. for 20 years. Leadership is intimately aware of the problem.
There are many easy things they could do to reduce fraud, #1 being only allowing reviews from actual purchasers, or at least now allowing the others into the rankings.
As mentioned on this thread, there are 3rd party companies that do a decent job at detecting the crap reviews. This means either Amazon is incompetent, and is not even capable of basic filtering, or they are competent and complicit.
It's the later.
Yes, there will always be spam and fraud, but not remotely the levels we see on Amazon. It should be relatively rare.
As it stands, it's pretty easy for a regular person simply to go on Amazon and literally find fake products. This is totally unacceptable. They are trying hard not to find the spam and fraud.
I also like the way they choose not to offer an easy way to report fake reviews. If you get offers to review someone’s products, Amazon will reliably and quickly delete a review saying that the company solicits fake/paid reviews but if you try to report it any other way you’ll never hear back or see any signs of a change in behavior.
Thank you for being a Fakespot user. I thought I'd bring in some perspective to your question.
Your observation of the preponderance of unreliable reviews on Amazon matches what we see across the board.
Unfortunately, ever since Amazon opened up to 3rd party sellers, the reviews have become a marketing tool by a lot of these sellers to move ahead of other products. These sellers use everything from pure fake reviews to gamed verified purchase reviews. This is major reason why so many reviews nowadays are unreliable, it is truly a wild west out there in the eCommerce world and fake reviews can mean $$$.
With that said, we just launched Fakespot Guardian as part of our new Chrome extension which solves the 3rd party seller problem by telling you if a seller is reliable or not. By knowing if seller and reviews are reliable, you will be able to purchase anything with confidence.
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