Sometimes it makes you wonder how they manage to even find the reply button
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.
Yeah this should be illegal. It’s literally a bait and switch.
I don’t see why using 2 TB USB drives as Christmas ornaments should be illegal, I do it occasionally with old sata HDDs.
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, so they get a bunch of ‘legitimate’ reviews.
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.
55 gallons of anal lube?
Some people need a LOT of lube.
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 parts of your body, which orifices, which end of your digestive tract you reeeally want to whiten up, Lighten Up, We’ve Got You (Un)Covered!®
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. Pack of 1. Only one in stock, order soon.
Only 55 gallons!!, how am I supposed to fill my pool with that little lube!
Makes me want to post in some Ask Lemmy community.
“Perverts of Lemmy, have any of you actually bought an industrial drum of sex gel on Amazon? How did it go?”
I just watched a Louis Rossman video about this (fake reviews), you should check it out.
i hate it when i order a dashcam and i get an air purifier
Sir, this is a dashcam
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
On top of this, Amazon is able to remember what you purchased in the past so when it gives you those notices it doesn’t give you the current information on the item it gives you the information that provided when the item was purchased, so for example if you asked a question on the item, using what they received they’re probably thinking that you’re the dumb one because they likely got an email showing a dash camera with the same question
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
I report these through the seller portal (even though I’m not a seller). Most of the time they get taken down.
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.
Some drill bits I bought got turned into or was previously a pair of Bluetooth earbuds
found a hard drive that apparently was clock oil for grandfather clocks. was a fake drive a client bought, which is why I dug into it, was weird.
But did they work well being drilled into the wall?
Add this to 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. Very similar policy to the one I have regarding Walmart.
On a related note, I would say “Fuck Walmart with a rusty spoon”, but I figure that would be a massive insult to the rusty spoon.
That’s dastardly. Amazon needs to be burned to the ground like it’s waningly verdant namesake
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
Us-east-1 will go down all my itself thank you and please 🙏
First time I’ve seen someone mention that one by name. Fuck that data center.
Let just put SSO all in one place? That’s cool with everyone, right? Right guys?.. Yeahhhhh
Don’t forget to make it the default on everything you, especially IoT!
You DevOps bruh?
That was the best day ever when it went down a few years ago while I was doing an install of an Amazon site. They have some “test” software that we have to run to validate the system and it was completely down. Still got some things done that day, but it was utterly hilarious to watch all of the Amazon personnel run around in a panic for a few hours. Fucking Prime trucks stuck on the side of the road with no instructions on what to do next. Utterly precious.
Whatever you do don’t use bucket replication and lambdas to push a massive number of small objects into one bucket that then blows up another bucket
It’s technically against their tos to change the product. But sellers are shady assholes.
There’s no way Amazon is powerless to stop sellers from doing this. They just don’t care.
Never said they were powerless. Just that it’s against the tos.
Is you report them, sometimes Amazon does something about it. Sometimes.
It’s super easy to detect change of product category and a bunch of other similar major changes. Especially now with ML classifiers, it’s even easier. They could automatically lock the page and require review
But that could affect profits! 😱
As long as they keep making buckets of cash, they won’t stop.
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
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.
I heard about the diaper thing, it’s garbage. Definitely illustrates the point though; Amazon don’t care at all because whether they act or don’t makes no difference to their bottom line.
Someone comes to Amazon looking for a reusable diaper, they will search and usually buy whatever is near the top of the first page, because that’s just what people do. Amazon make a sale and are happy, they don’t care who the vendor is.
And oh - Amazon retail has more turnover than AWS but AWS makes more profit.
Amazon reviews haven’t been useful at any point in my time as an amazon customer starting in 2010
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?
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.
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
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
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.
hardly something ‘new’, it’s been going on for years and years.
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.
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
All edges or just the left right? I’ve got really limited space so want to avoid just blowing air into a wall lol
“I don’t know, sorry”
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.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. That makes it make a lot more sense.
I think they may be dialing it back, but I got one as recently as two years ago. Here’s some random internet user’s emailed question from after Amazon mercifully added the “I don’t know” button.
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.
