> Amazon is notorious for allowing shady practices
Yes! As a heavy, long-time Amazon user I hate this and have to believe Amazon is knowingly complicit either in continuing to enable this shady vendor behavior or conveniently looking the other way. Of course, shady vendors will game whatever measures Amazon might take to prevent such tricks but it's so prevalent I don't think Amazon seriously invests in detection/prevention of 'rating swapping' on an ongoing basis anymore.
Another super annoying thing Amazon enables is allowing sellers to list multiple different products (SKUs) on the same listing. This was originally intended for things like different colors or sizes of the same product but it is frequently abused by vendors to bundle quite different products into one listing and thus sharing one rating.
Before they were the overwhelming market leader, Amazon used to care about and invest in the accuracy and credibility of product reviews and ratings. About 10 years ago they seemed to stop putting as much effort toward this and certainly in the past five years they don't seem to care if vendors subvert the system. I understand bad behavior can never be 100% prevented but Amazon could police and penalize it far more effectively. For example, requiring sellers above a certain volume of sales and listings to have increasingly stringent "real ID" type verification, making it harder (or at least more costly) to just relist under a new identity when caught cheating.
Yes! As a heavy, long-time Amazon user I hate this and have to believe Amazon is knowingly complicit either in continuing to enable this shady vendor behavior or conveniently looking the other way. Of course, shady vendors will game whatever measures Amazon might take to prevent such tricks but it's so prevalent I don't think Amazon seriously invests in detection/prevention of 'rating swapping' on an ongoing basis anymore.
Another super annoying thing Amazon enables is allowing sellers to list multiple different products (SKUs) on the same listing. This was originally intended for things like different colors or sizes of the same product but it is frequently abused by vendors to bundle quite different products into one listing and thus sharing one rating.
Before they were the overwhelming market leader, Amazon used to care about and invest in the accuracy and credibility of product reviews and ratings. About 10 years ago they seemed to stop putting as much effort toward this and certainly in the past five years they don't seem to care if vendors subvert the system. I understand bad behavior can never be 100% prevented but Amazon could police and penalize it far more effectively. For example, requiring sellers above a certain volume of sales and listings to have increasingly stringent "real ID" type verification, making it harder (or at least more costly) to just relist under a new identity when caught cheating.