It’s almost Christmas and I’ve been doing all my shopping for friends and family online this year at the only place I ever shop… even when it’s not the holidays: Amazon.
I was trying to get ideas for a few folks so I was scrolling through the Amazon Window Shop app on my iPad. The firs time I used this app I was sort of in a rush and didn’t really understand it’s value over just browsing Amazon normally; after an hour with it and 10 new gift ideas for myself, family and friends that are all fantastic, I think it’s a wonderful addition to the Amazon shopping experience and would use it again.
ANYWAY, I digress…
An interesting feature of the Window Shop app is a category called “Peculiar Products” that contained a myriad of completely random, kooky, fun and bullshit products. What I meant by bullshit is that the products are fake. They don’t exist and Amazon doesn’t sell them from what I can tell.
Some quick examples:
- Uranium Ore
- 1 Gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk
- Fresh Whole Rabbit
- “Parent Child Test” – $10,000
- Denon AKDL1 Link Cable (Thanks MrKevvy!)
I doesn’t bother me that test or fake/non-existent items are in the Amazon catalog (I probably wasn’t going to buy them anyway), what bothers me is that they literally have thousands of reviews on them.
Just the fake Tuscan Whole Milk product alone has over 1,200 reviews, all of which are intentionally over the top and meant to be funny (which most of them are). Some of the individual fake reviews themselves have 100s of comments; using the Amazon review system more like a 4chan forum post than a product review.
Again, I don’t actually care about the fake posts. I find them hugely entertaining to read. What bothers me is apparently how easy it is to create reviews on products that doesn’t exist by people that either don’t exist or have never bought them.
I’m not looking for the ultimate/locked down system. Obviously shoppers have to do more research than just looking at Amazon reviews when buying something important, but it really bothers me that for my smaller purchases where I do only look at Amazon, that I might be exclusively reading planted material and nothing legit in some rare cases.
If you have any favorite fake products on Amazon, let us know and we’ll add them to the article.
Update #1: For what it’s worth, IMDB (an Amazon-owned company) is having additional problems with it’s scores being gamed.
Update #2: A few folks on Slashdot left comments to the effect of “It’s funny, laugh and forget about it“. I want to clarify again, I have no problem with the *contents* of the comments, they are funny. I have a problem with how game-able Amazon’s review system apparently is, because I rely on that system to give me legit feedback for products I spend a lot of money on really frequently.
If Amazon’s review system was only for entertainment purposes and didn’t effect how I spent my money, I’d spend all day reading it… but that is what 4chan and reddit are for.
Update #3: Slashdotter DanTheStone provided a good way for shoppers to stay a bit safer when reading product reviews:
This is why Amazon likes to show you the top-rated positive comment and the top-rated negative comment. It’s why they have reviewer ratings and the “Vine” program. It’s why they have the whole meta-rating system in the first place. Don’t ever take the star score at face value. Put more weight behind confirmed real names. Read review comments. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Good advice.
Update #4: Slashdotter Mr.44 pointed out that Amazon does provide indicators of “Verified Purchaser” reviews to help when reading people’s comments:
This exists! It’s called Amazon Verified Purchase. See, for example: http://www.amazon.com/review/R23WKI375G1JJM
There is still a question about if Amazon ranks reviews from verified purchasers higher or lower and how that effects the star rating that most people used as a “go/no-go” indicator when shopping on Amazon.
The rabbit is not a fake product, same with the uranium ore. Don’t libel companies trying to sell products that don’t fit within your narrow world view. Go ahead and order it if you think it’s fake but don’t be surprised when it shows up on you doorstep. (PS- Rabbit can be substituted for chicken in most dishes. I prefer legs, my dad prefers backs.)
The “Parent Child Test” literally says in the description that it is a test product and not to order it. Really crappy of the company that added it, but I can understand why they used a test product if they had thousands to add and wanted to make sure they did it right first.
Most of the reviews are fake: Weirder stuff like this gets linked to a website and they have fun with it. Just look for the Amazon Verified Reviewers (people who actually purchased the product through amazon) and ignore reviews that are over the top. Most normal stuff don’t have joke reviews attached.
LDM, my problem is with how porous Amazon’s review system is — I don’t care that the products are or aren’t real, obviously anyone can leave any comment they want on anything.
While all the examples I gave are *funny* and enjoyable to read, how do I know that the reviews I’m reading on XYZ HDTV are real or ABC watch? As a shopper at Amazon I have a certain level of trust that they are vetting these things even just at a basic level so I can believe a majority (maybe not all) of what I’m reading before I buy it.
10 or 15 fake reviews out of 100 or 200 doesn’t bother me, but the idea that the next time I’m reading about something fairly expensive, that ALL the reviews could be plants by the marketing company that pitches the product, that bothers the shit out of me.
Seriously, Riyad Kalla, go take a hit from a bong or play some games, get a margarita or even better – get laid and stop picking on perfectly normal things. “why do amazon holds fake products” – it’s like coming to a party and asking “why are you guys laughing at that hipster’s story – it’s not true”. Well, in case you did not know, we came to party (and along the same lines go to Amazon) not to get straight facts, but hang out and whatever makes that experience more enjoyable deserves to be there. Is THAT so difficult to understand?
Artiomas, you understand my issue has nothing to do with the fake products right?
Get a life! It’s on the Internet, for crying out loud. Most of the reviews are fake on all the products. It’s inherent in the system – either they are shills for the company or mad because it was a cheap piece of chinese junk.
Riyad,
I have to disclose that my interest in this subject is more than casual. My company aggregates and and analyzes customer reviews to extract customer intelligence for product manufacturers.
Amazon Reviews and other social media sites are our “ore” depositories for our Opinion Mining. As such, it would be unrealistic to expect that every review published there is reasonable, competent or genuine. Just as it would be to expect that every single classified ad is from a gorgeous, young, intelligent and professional person of a desired gender. There were a few well known instances when a company was caught gaming the customer reviews over the years. Examples of Belkin and DeLohghi are well documented (http://evolutionofbpr.com/?s=Phony+Reviews+Exposed%2F+Slapped+with+Fines) and these practices are now illegal.
Our algorithms are processing millions of customer reviews every months, and while they detect about 7% of duplicate reviews, most of them is a result of syndication rather than outright “gaming”.
Gregory,
I appreciate the core of what you are saying, I also agree with it; my expectation is not that every review is genuine. My expectation is that a majority of the reviews are genuine, so I can make an informed shopping decision.
The products I linked to are examples of how seriously game-able the review system currently is (albeit, hilarious examples) which makes me realize if people wanting to get a laugh can generate a few thousand bogus reviews for entertainment, an aggressive marketing company can certainly game it’s own reviews for the benefit of its product that I might end up buying and regretting.
That’s my gripe.
Some things that people have pointed out are tags that Amazon uses like “Amazon Verified Purchase” for the reviewers and “Amazon Vine Review” and other “official” taggings for particular reviews and people leaving reviews — it is unclear to me how this is factored in (weighted?) into the final star review nor is it spelled out clearly when researching products which reviews are more reliable than others. There is the “helpful” indicator, but again that is a community-voted element and you can see from some of my examples, just being a funnier reviewer can get you more than a thousand up-votes on a nonsense review… so again, no help there as a shopper looking for legit reviews.
I don’t think Amazon would need to go far to make this harder or fix it, I just wanted to point the issue out as it has the potential to be much worse than it already is… assuming of course that marketing teams aren’t already gaming the hell out of it. Who knows.
Riyad,
I am not debating your point, I just offered to you some statistical evidence that this largely self-regulated community does work as reasonably expected. In other words – the system works in my opinion, to support consumers decision making process under reasonable circumstances. It surely can be improved and that is what we are trying to do at http://www.amplifiedanalytics.com.
Last time I checked, there was no weighting algorithm to curate or moderate the scores (stars). It was an average score calculated by adding all customer assigned scores and dividing the sum by a number of reviews. That is one of reasons we completely ignore these stars and rely on actual text, words, expressions and sentiments algorithms for our analysis.
I almost agree with you, but how do you propose to police a community run review system? Who will have the authority to say which reviews are true and correct and which ones are bullshit…on legitimate products! Just as there is room for abuse in the current system, I see room for abuse in a moderated system too: don’t like what someone says…just censor it! Big companies paying big money for favorable reviews, Plus, if there were some long and convoluted process for posting a review, I doubt many folks would, and that would dilute the system a bit: you’d just have professional reviewers and pissed off people on there.
Steve, you are absolutely right, a moderated system would be too far down the scale in the opposite direction and bring all the problems you mention.
I think the solution is *probably* along the lines of weighting “Verified” purchase reviews much heavier then unverified reviews or breaking the reviews down in a different manner so users can make an educated decision easier… like “Here is the *Verified* score from all verified reviews and here is the *Overall* score from all reviews” — again, I’m just shooting from the hip here, some cohesive presentation would be in order.