Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.
Comment on Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews.
Furedadmins@lemmy.world 11 months ago
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.
But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 months ago
people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole
Lol, as of this hasn’t already happened
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.
Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 11 months ago
That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why would this hurt Amazon?
A product with 2002 reviews suddenly has only 2 reviews, and they are not the nicest ones… Whole Amazon with 2002 gazillion reviews suddenly has only 2 gazillion… :-)
Seriously:
I guess they own several of these “companies” where you can buy fake reviews for your product. And now these are facing their revenues sinking.
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.
If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average…it’ll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It’s not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.
I_Comment_On_EVERYTHING@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I can’t even begin to count how many times I have come acrossa slew of 5 star reviews for something COMPLETELY unrelated to the listed item at the very top of search results. Product: Wood Headphone Stand. Review: This kitchen whisk is so amazing, it saved my marriage, 23 out of 5 stars.
OH and don’t forget the reviewer that when you access their profile you see that they have posted 76 reviews in a single day and every single one of them is 5 stars with the title "Great ‘X’! " where x is the product title.
Don’t get me wrong, I used Amazon back when it only sold books and I’ve been using Prime since it came out non-stop but the quality of the items, the search results, and the trust I have in the platform has gone waaaaaaaaaay down.
yiliu@informis.land 11 months ago
That’s basically an exploit. Different ‘products’ can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it’s variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.
But it’s not Amazon who makes those connections, it’s the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they’re not at all. Since there’s millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.
But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.
Plavatos@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I think he’s just suggesting that the plugin filters it down to what an algorithm considers legitimate. These plugins usually only filter when you click the item so it wouldn’t necessarily move the result down, just reduce potential purchases (which would eventually drop the result).
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I guess Do you have any evidence of that?
LOL
Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It won’t. It’s clickbait. It’s dumb.
xkforce@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.
joemo@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
I would assume the whole point of a feature like this is to help them get new users.
Ubermeisters@discuss.online 11 months ago
ill be switching to libre wolf because o fthis.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Well I’ll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.