Does anyone know a higher up at amazon? I bet with the new baby I spent 5 figures there last year, but there website is really suffering from a MAJOR trust issue and it's setting them up for a huge lawsuit.
How does a company with more than 500,000 employees and a nearly trillion dollar market cap not do some very basic things - like mainly protect the integrity of their reviews?
The reviews can no longer be trusted. I put the baby monitor in with the wash last night so I need to buy a new one. I was going to just re-purchase the one I had last time but the price has double it and it only has like 25 reviews at like a 3.5 rating. When I saw that, I thought, "That's weird. I can't imagine I bought something with that low of a rating and that few ratings. I almost always go for four stars or. I wonder if they wiped out a bunch of fake reviews."
So I go to their website to look for a different product and start by sorting by reviews. The #1 item that is like 1/5th the price of the wirecutter recommended one and has 421 reviews - all of them 5-star. All of the reviews appear to be from yesterday and non of them are from verified purchasers.
1) Why in the world would amazon let any product put up 421 reviews in a single day? Wouldn't an algorithm designed by a 5 year old catch that
2) Why in the world won't amazon let you sort by "verified purchases only?"
3) When amazon eventually uncovers the fraudulent reviews and removes them and lowers the rating for their item, why don't they automatically contact all customers to let them know they may have purchased an item based on fraud?
4) When they do uncover the fake reviews, why don't they ban the seller (the only reason I can think of is a competitor might do it to screw someone over)?
So Amazon execs, if you are reading this, please contact me. I will take a month long sabbatical from LetsRun and come and work for your company and the tell the programmers what they need to do as it's quickly turning into a joke.
Here is the item with the 421 reviews.
Here is the one I purchased last May that only has a few reviews.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C73WL89/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1