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Moving Away from Transparency: Amazon No Longer Displaying All Reviews

April 25th, 2019

It’s not often that shoppers read past page 500 of the reviews for a product, but Amazon seems to have recently decided that nobody can, even if they wanted to.  Here’s an example: the 500th page of reviews for a product that has 22,000+ reviews:

https://www.amazon.com/Tobias-Colon-Day-Quick-Cleanse/product-reviews/B00ISAPPLI/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_paging_btm_next_500?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&sortBy=recent&pageNumber=500

Screen Shot 2019-04-25 at 6.19.01 PM

This looks totally fine.  We scroll to the bottom to try and continue paging through the reviews:

Screen Shot 2019-04-25 at 6.20.27 PM

But it seems Amazon no longer wants to see anything past page 500:

Screen Shot 2019-04-25 at 6.22.05 PM

As stated earlier – it’s unlikely that very many shoppers click through more than 500 pages of reviews, however ReviewMeta looks at all the reviews.  In order to perform a complete analysis, we want to consider every last review that is available.  Also, in order to determine which reviews have been deleted, we need to see an entire snapshot of all reviews.

At the moment, it doesn’t seem like there is any good workaround.  (I say “good” because there are some workarounds, but none are good).  For the time being, we’ll be showing the following notice at the top of reports with over 10,000 reviews:

Screen Shot 2019-04-25 at 6.27.01 PM

Again, we encourage Amazon to consider our proposal for how their reviews should look.  Our contact at Amazon did not immediately respond to our request for comment.  I’m still waiting on their comment about the millions of fake reviews we noticed pouring in this year, so I don’t have my hopes up, but I will update this post if they respond.


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