Amazon reviews

Discussion in 'Marketplace Discussions' started by zonka, Nov 20, 2017.

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  1. jay.dee

    jay.dee Forum Resident

    Location:
    Barcelona, Spain
    Well, not for me. :) Whether an item has been purchased on Amazon or not I really could not care less. What I find relevant (and it does work in the music's section) is how the others have assessed it, because most customers are not idiots and they can easily separate wheat from chaff. The best and most insightful comments are more than frequently those with a high rating. That's why I am not keen on wading through "item received", "lost in transit", "love it" or "this music sucks" to reach the most interesting section.

    Besides, when reading the majority of comments one can easily assess their value by how they're written. I do not think that Amazon Gorts who decide what is acceptable/trustworthy have listened to, read, seen or checked everything in stock. Far from it, they just read a review and assess its value by the content only. Just like everyone else can do.

    When Amazon started to tinker with the comments section they imposed the "verified purchase only" filter upon the initial visit to a product, so one had to switch it to "all reviews" to see a properly ordered list with all the entries. It seems that they have quickly discovered that their customers are not interested in the "verified purchases" subset at all and hence this most recent "patch" to make the access even more difficult to the most valued (but not purchased on Amazon) reviews.

    I wonder what happens as soon as they learn that their customers immediately start paging to skip the unwelcome noise to get to the desired section. Will they remove the "unverified" reviews altogether to protect their customers from any "inappropriate" content? :) We'll wait and see.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2017
  2. There are apps that can re-write reviews to make them look different. I suspect that happens a lot on Amazon (even if they are verified purchases - the company who makes/owns the products effectively buys a lot of them back in order to put in a lot of 5 star reviews). Last week, I was looking around for a digital tape measure on Amazon and was amazed to see how many 5-star reviews there were for one specific brand/model that basically said the same thing - 'I bought this for my husband and he absolutely loves it.'

    I've seen other vendors who will give you free stuff if you leave 5-star reviews. There's a lot of ethically-questionable things going on when it comes to those reviews.
     
  3. I gave up writing detailed, polished Amazon reviews a couple years back. The site has shown they don't really care about the reviews as anything but marketing fodder. After they started merging reviews for unrelated items, I rarely even bother looking at Amazon reviews anymore.

    It's a shame, because for many years Amazon's reviews were truly valuable guides.
     
    Shawn, rob68 and Gumboo like this.
  4. uzn007

    uzn007 Watcher of the Skis

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    I think they're still valuable, just not so much for records & cd's & books (where there are a lot of different editions mashed together). I still consider Amazon reviews valuable for things like appliances.
     
  5. The problem now is that you often have to wade through so many garbage reviews to find relevant feedback.
     
    Shawn likes this.
  6. hvbias

    hvbias Midrange magic

    Location:
    Northeast
    I noticed this for the first time a couple of weeks ago with the recentish Glenn Gould Goldberg Complete box: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Glenn-Goul...d=1511646042&sr=8-1&keywords=gould+unreleased

    I thought it was unusual to see 14 reviews for a rather niche product! I don't read Amazon classical reviews because they are way too uncritical, but I had to see why there were so many for this. They were sure enough merging reviews from the regular CD.

    Amazon have basically turned into an empire to make it by with their non-AWS services just to pump all their profits straight into AWS. Even their site's search engine has gotten much worse and I often resort to using Google to find something on their site. Quite a different company from what Bezos envisioned in the 1999 shareholders letter, but it's doing something right...
     
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