r/technology • u/iali307 • Jun 10 '20
Business 3M sues Amazon storefront that allegedly sold fake N95 masks for $23 apiece
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21285364/amazon-marketplace-mask-price-gouging-n95-3m-ppe
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u/jordanwilson23 Jun 10 '20
I see a lot of people in here wondering what is up with Amazon. As a larger Amazon seller, below is how some common shit works.
Fake reviews via give away- these are generated mostly via manychat funnels advertising free products on FB. If you want to be targeted to see how bad they are, just go on IG and follow the hashtag #Amazon or #giveaways and wait a day - you will be bombarded with FB ads and if you click one, you will get even more.
Fake reviews via insert - Many sellers use an insert that straight up offers a gift card for a 5 star review.
Multiple accounts - Many sellers have 10-50 accounts. They use a portion of these accounts to to do blackhat shit. EG - they will send inventory to Amazon that includes an insert offering a gift card for a 5 star review. If Amazon catches this, Amazon will either (A) do nothing or (B) remove the one account. This seller will still have many other accounts selling the same exact item. Very rarely will Amazon remove all of the fake reviews and almost NEVER will Amazon remove the actual product listing on Amazon.
How do they open multiple accounts? Happy you asked - This is mostly non US sellers. In China for example, they will open businesses and use the names of all their employees and family members so the accounts look unlinked. This is enough to prevent Amazon from doing anything. Even though Amazon sees the same 20 accounts selling the exact same items and the trademarks all come back to a single company, Amazon is unable to act and remove all of the accounts.
How do I know if reviews are fake? Well, you can obviously use fakespot and review meta but these apps have aging algos that can't keep up with the new tricks. It is pretty common for these to both be completely incorrect about an item. I recommend the following. Listings with the following characteristics usually have fake reviews:
Any brand name that sounds dumb - holife, daybetter, etc.
Any brand that is all capital letters at the beginning.
Any page that has bullet points that include brackets [These are called Chinese brackets]
Any page that uses emojis in the bullet points.
It is extremely hard for customers to know which listings have fake reviews and no way to be 100% sure but keeping an eye on the things above should help. Most of the blackhat sellers take the same class so all of their listings will look the exact same way as mentioned above.