This is among greatest abuse Amazon allows in its product listings. Any change to a page should reset the reviews unless otherwise vetted by an Amazon employee. Changes shouldn't be material in nature, only corrections. A new revision/version of a product IS NOT THE SAME PRODUCT. Different product == different listing.

That would be an easy way to get rid of negative reviews.

There already is an easy way to get rid of negative reviews. Just create a new product. That’s what they do.

That might be going a little far. Adding an extra-large size to a listing for a T-shirt (for example) shouldn't invalidate all of the existing reviews.

A more targeted approach might be to disallow sellers from adding variants to products which are not currently for sale. I suspect that would cut down on most of the abuse.

> Adding an extra-large size to a listing for a T-shirt (for example) shouldn’t invalidate all of the existing reviews.

If you want to deal with this problem rather than channel more of it into a place some of it already goes, it should, because completely different products are added as “sizes” or “colors” of existing products already.

If you add a review fraud control and leave this an escape hatch, well, the results are predictable.

An instant ban for vendors detected and confirmed to be doing this. Amazon has plenty of ability to deal with this, from a ML detection system to human validation. They just don't want to.

They do, but they just pop up as a different seller under a different name with a different business address and the cycle goes on. That's why all the sellers have weird names and make no effort to drive any sort of brand awareness or loyalty.

So mark a vendor as "new vendor", add mandatory ghost shopping to all product skews (postage returns paid by vendor), funds only clear after product arrives + n days for new accouts, etc to build in security that products sold are legitimate. All you need to do is make cost of standing up a scam more expensive than the real thing.

The weird brand names are primarily to make obtaining trademarks easier (though I'm sure easily changing business names after getting busted for fraud is a nice bonus): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...

That's something different though somewhat similar.

All that tech, platforms, manpower and literally all the backend data about it (access patterns, descriptions, sales, back accounts, user agents, IPs, everything) and they can't detect something that's blindingly obvious to anyone paying attention?

Even more than that, they require government IDs and other documentation to set up seller accounts, but at the end of the day it's easy to come up with new straw front people for your scam, with clean papers, addresses, and bank accounts.

Noone at Amazon is looking at the id. If they did it would add 'friction'

Why would they not want to? This is a serious business problem for Amazon, isn't it?

I don't know why they don't want to, but a database query for "\d{2}TB SSD" with a price under $100 is surely not beyond a global top-three AI company with a half-trillion dollars of revenue.

fair point, that said it would take amazon a blip of resources to have some NLP diff to delay validation of title changes that are too strange

Adding something should trigger a manual review by an amazon employee.

> Note the reviews refer to all different stuff - phone chargers, arm slings, extension cord organisers. What a total shitshow.

This is an exploit which has been abused for years -- as I understand it, Amazon sellers can list their products as a "variant" of another, often unrelated, product which is no longer available for sale. When they do so, their product inherits all of the reviews from the previous product, and no obvious indication is given that the other variant ever existed (because it's not available).

Yep a "legit" example of this is Dymo, the Dymo 550 added DRM Paper (yes DRM paper) to the product, but they listed the 550 as a variant of the 450 which was not DRM, all of the great 450 reviews followed to the new 550 trash product that no one should ever buy...

This should be preeeetty trivial to build a classifier for... At least to reduce the need for human review to only the egregious examples.

That 2TB one even has an "Amazon's choice" label on it. "Amazon's Choice highlights highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately."

How can you even expect regular people to know it's a scam? I only vaguely have an indication that £30,99 (the price it gives me) for 2TB seems too good to be true. I work in IT, but I don't spend all days buying portable SSDs so I don't really know what these things cost today, and the "Amazon's choice" label makes it give a false sense of trust ("wow it's really cheap, but maybe just some discount or whatnot? Well, I guess it must be alright because it's Amazon's Choice!")

"Amazon's choice" means what it says: highest value for Amazon. No wonder the fake stuff is there, it has higher profit margin.

Sometimes I wonder if I've been taken. The only external SSDs I've bought from Amazon were brand name Samsungs, sold-by-and-shipped-from Amazon, but both have been flakey and one failed outright. I should open them up and see if they're just really good counterfeits.

Same happened to me with a couple of Sammy m.2s. Thought it was bad luck or bad case airflow, now I wonder myself.

Samsung external SSDs are known to have had issues IIRC.

>I should open them up and see if they're just really good counterfeits

They could be legit and failed QA in the factory (flaky after all) but they "fell off a truck" on the way to the electronics recycler and ended up for sale. Semi-counterfeit "3rd shift" products that are made off the books on the official line, often with lower or nonexistent QA, are common too.

tl;dr counterfeiting is complicated and just opening it up might not give you a reliable answer

This shop has everything. An external SSD, extension cord holders, furniture anchors, and then "pjur Analyse me! Moisturising - Water-Based Personal Lubricant - for Comfortable Anal Sex"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=LuBanSir

at what point is Amazon criminally liable for this? They are defrauding customers on their marketplace and in many cases letting these products buy premium real estate via their ad platform

When they politically upset an Attorney General of some state for some unrelated reasons that triggers the need to make a political example out of the company

I feel that part of the problem fuelling fraud like this are reviews such as the three star one I've copied below. Given it corrupted files why did the person keep it and also still give it three stars.

3.0 out of 5 stars Good storage capacity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 January 20231

Colour: Black-1Verified Purchase

While the storage capacity is good for the value I would only use this for small files as it corrupted any large video files I had, additionally, the transfer speed was quite slow (especially for USB 3.0) reaching speeds of up to 16mb/s and regularly dropping to 0mb/s, this is not a fault of my pc as other USB 3.0 devices can reach speeds of 80mb/s on my pc.