Amazon astroturfing

[unixronin]

After buying an anti-snoring mouthpiece from a third-party seller on Amazon, reader Bob received an email from the company offering him a free mouthpiece in exchange for a five-star review.  He noted this attempted bribe in his Amazon review, and Amazon deleted it.  Twice.

[...]

(via randwolf)

Comments

[skellington.livejournal.com]

I got an offer of a $50 bribe to remove my bad review of a company who'd sent me the wrong product, and then delayed crediting my account for 3 weeks after I'd returned it. (And wouldn't send the right product either.)

I never ended up responding to the final offer.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Heh.

I'd be tempted to accept the bribe and leave the review up.

Or put up a review that says "While this company's service blows, they did give me $50 to change my review, so at least I'm up on the transaction."

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

While don't condone the seller's/manufacturer's actions, I sort of agree with one of the commenters and with Amazon:

The Amazon product review is for a review of the PRODUCT, not a review of the seller. Saying (hypothetically), in a particular review, that a given product gets 1 star because _one_ seller of that product delivered it late, delivered it broken, etc. ... is not fair a fair representation of the product itself. And, therefore, it is an inappropriate review _of_the_product_. It's a great review of the company, and a lousy review of the product.

Reviews of the sellers belong in a different place (for which, I believe, Amazon also provides a place to make those reviews). There's some grey area in this one case because the seller (and unethical actor) happens to be the manufacturer. But, what about re-sellers of the product who might get stuck holding stock for a good product that has a bad review, because the bad review isn't about the product at all? The manufacturer isn't getting punished here, the re-seller is. And not because they bought a bad product to resell.

I think the proper thing here is to err on the side of "Product reviews go with the product, seller reviews go with the seller". And, thus, Amazon was right. Though, maybe they should have been better about communicating all of that with the OP.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

The product in question is here (http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Tonight-Anti-Snore-Guarantee-Silence/dp/B001IVF8TS/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=hpc&qid=1240518205&sr=8-9).

A few points:

• The product is no longer available. The question of who marked the product as unavailable (Amazon or the seller) is an unknown, as are the reasons why.
  
• Amazon product reviews are just that, product reviews. This was an issue with the seller; there's a separate area for seller reviews. As such, Amazon had a clear reason for removing the reviews.
  
• Admittedly, the previous point gets murky when a product is only available from one third-party seller.
  
• While Amazon did remove the reviews, there is no indication that they ignored the concerns raised therein. After all, the product is no longer available.
  

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

(Then again, there is admittedly no indication that Amazon delisted the product over the astroturfing concerns, either. I suspect we'll never know.)