Average Amazon user intelligence

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Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨LordKitsuna@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0e077063-ee47-44bc-9808-adc2d553c3bd.png

Sometimes it makes you wonder how they manage to even find the reply button

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Banichan@dormi.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
it’s because of a new strategy used by sellers on Amazon to flip their product pages to different products. I’ve seen this before in the reviews how the reviewers will review a product that’s kind of like what I am trying to order, but slightly different model or something

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- faltryka@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah if you go deep enough on an item there’s a good chance you’ll find that it was once something else.
  
  Sellers don’t want to start over with reviews so they just take a retired product entry and change the pictures and item.
  
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  - Fogle@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Some drill bits I bought got turned into or was previously a pair of Bluetooth earbuds
    
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  - MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Add this the list of reasons not to shop at Amazon. (Seriously, I only shop there unless I can’t find something anywhere better, and even then I ask myself just how much I want or need this item.)
    
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- Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s dastardly. Amazon needs to be burned to the ground like it’s waningly verdant namesake
  
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  - Quill7513@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In case anyone is interested, Amazon has headquarters in Seattle, Washington and Crystal City, Virginia. They also have data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and Oakland, California. There’s more, obviously, but those are the ones I have ideas on the location of. The data centers are harder to find. For those you’ll likely need a contact to help you. Your allies will be Amazon employees and meter checkers. You’ll be looking for a building with MASSIVE power draw. And hey. Even if you don’t find an Amazon data center, it’s still good to find buildings with massive power draws because… Well… That’s the worst thing these companies are doing
    
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  - altima_neo@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s technically against their tos to change the product. But sellers are shady assholes.
    
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  - T00l_shed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As long as they keep making buckets of cash, they won’t stop.
    
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- tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sadly not even new, I’ve noticed it going on for at least the last five years, if not more. Amazon could easily detect and stop this but they don’t because (surprise surprise!) better reviews = more sales, even if it is for the wrong product
  
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  - Quill7513@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Amazon reviews haven’t been useful at any point in my time as an amazon customer starting in 2010
    
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  - DakRalter@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Definitely more than five years. About ten years ago is when I saw it.
    
    They will happily keep up unsafe products, why do they care about this?
    
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  - AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
    
    Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.
    
    Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.
    
    I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.
    
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- adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  hardly something ‘new’, it’s been going on for years and years.
  
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  - DakRalter@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep, at least ten years ago I went to reorder some electric toothbrush heads, went to my past purchases to find the same ones, only to see the listing (with my review for the brush heads still there) had a completely different product.
    
    December will be my 4 year Amazon-free anniversary. Screw that site.
    
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- fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I report these through the seller portal (even though I’m not a seller). Most of the time they get taken down.
  
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- i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fakespot is great at catching these. It’ll give a really low score to products whose reviews don’t appear to have anything to do with the listing.
  
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- LordKitsuna@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I am the one that posted the question on that product, the answer came the next day. And I can confirm from having gotten the emails asking for answers to questions in the past that the email asking the question provides you an image of the item and description so even if the listing had been flipped it should have not shown them the dash cam in the email asking the question.
  
  But yes sellers do like to do that to make reviews look good, he have to be careful to actually read the reviews to look for someone describing the product to make sure it matches
  
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- AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Preventing this is one of the few good usecases I’ve seen for LLMs. An llm could tell if an edit is an update or a whole new product pretty easily
  
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- altima_neo@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Or the reviews from last year include pictures of products that are completely different.
  
  They keep the high star rating from the previous product on whatever garbage they’re selling now.
  
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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Amazon sellers have a habit of selling one thing, getting a bunch of decent reviews, and then swapping the entire description, name and pictures to a dodgy item they want to shift.

Which is why you see 2TB USB sticks for £10 with a bunch of five star reviews, but when you dip down into them, they all say things like “Just what we needed. Looks great on my Christmas tree.”

So I’m more likely to blame Amazon here. They are a shockingly shit company.

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- billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah this should be illegal. It’s literally a bait and switch.
  
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  - desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t see why using 2 TB USB drives as Christmas ornaments should be illegal, I do it occasionally with old sata HDDs.
    
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- bountygiver@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  iirc for those products even the reviews are paid reviews, just not in traditional kind of paying bot farms, what they did is doing giveaways but tell you to buy this stuff, but will refund you after you leave a review.
  
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Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Others have said this but, that’s because the merchant has changed the item listed. I don’t believe Amazon should even allow this as a possibility but it does so because they allow it sellers will regularly put an item they know will rate really well out for a few months to get a lot of high rating, and then they’ll swap it out for an item that is either something else they want to sell that usually doesn’t sell as often or something that’s a little lower quality but because they had the old item first all of the reviews for the old item is now stacked onto the new item which makes it look better than it actually is

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captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m in the market for a honing guide for chisels and plane irons. I bought a cheap one, and the little feature it has to grip the sides of chisels wasn’t big enough for my chisel to fit in it.

I found a model I thought I liked on Amazon, but there was no spec on the thickness of chisel it could grip. I asked a question, “How thick of a chisel does this hold? NOT the width, the THICKNESS” Two answers, 1. “i dont know” and 2. 1/8" - 2 1/4" (which was the numbers for the chisel WIDTH spec’d in the ad.)

When someone asks a question like that, it doesn’t seem to go to the seller, it goes to other customers. People get a question in their email. And a lot of them are shitheels who will dutifully answer “I don’t know.” Or they have the reading comprehension skills of the average hagfish.

I don’t think the users are the problem in the image though; I think it’s the seller’s fault.

Amazon has a feature where you can list for sale different permutations of the same item. Say you sell anal lube in 1 oz, 2.5 oz, 8 oz, 16 oz and 55 gallon packages, instead of creating an independent listing for each, you can have one listing with 5 variants. These can have different pictures or descriptions so customers can see and read about the differences, but it’s supposed to be broadly the same product so they share a question and review section.

If the seller is too ignorant or apathetic, they’ll list completely unrelated products under the same listing as different variants. There may be a theme, like “grooming supplies” so they’ll have a hair dryer, a beard trimmer, an electric toothbrush and a rectum bleacher listed as variants of the same product. Or it’ll just be whatever was on the truck from Shenzhen this week, hence the purchaser of a dash cam getting a question about an air filter.

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- Tangent5280@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  55 gallons of anal lube?
  
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  - captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Can be yours for the low, low price of one thousand, nine hundred fifty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, which works out to be $0.28 per fluid ounce. Only one in stock, order soon.
    
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  - billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Some people need a LOT of lube.
    
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  - catbum@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Don’t forget the rectum bleacher! You’ve gotta whiten up all your pearly bits when grooming personally with these here personal grooming products! From teeth whiteners to skin toners, nipple brighteners, and our ever-popular melanin relaxers, they’re all conveniently listed in this one incredibly inconvenient list! No matter which part of your body, which end of your digestive system you want to whiten up, Lighten Up, We’ve Got You (Un)Covered!®
    
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eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
i hate it when i order a dashcam and i get an air purifier

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ramenshaman@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just watched a Louis Rossman video about this (fake reviews), you should check it out.

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cRazi_man@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Is it not well known by now that settlers and scammers do this on Amazon? They build up positive reviews with a different product and then change the product listing so it looks like the new item has loads of good reviews. This listing probably was for a dashcam when that user bought it.

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Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“I don’t know, sorry”

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- wjrii@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So, while in the end it’s still not the sharpest tools in the shed writing those, the questions are often forwarded to your email by Amazon and will very much include a call-to-action. People are made to feel like Amazon or even some other customer is specifically asking for their thoughts, so they will respond just to be polite. It isn’t immediately clear in these emails that the answer will be put up on the listing forever.
  
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  - Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Oh wow I didn’t know that. That makes it make a lot more sense.
    
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- SharkEatingBreakfast@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Image
  
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Nindelofocho@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The Joke aside, if this was genuinely your question the air is pulled in from the front and the clean air exits around the edges. I was looking for a wall mountable air purifier myself like a month ago and came across a few of these

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- LordKitsuna@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  All edges or just the left right? I’ve got really limited space so want to avoid just blowing air into a wall lol
  
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  - Nindelofocho@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thats a good question. Im honestly betting its just left/right
    
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Fontasia@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sir, this is a dashcam

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