ReviewMeta

This has been going on for a long time, but I don't think that the public realized to what extent. Incentivized reviews have not stopped in 2016, they were just pushed underground. Amazon could be doing much much more.

Hi Hulagirl47- This is not the case - you can use ReviewMeta with Safari! Simply copy the Amazon URL and paste it into the search bar on ReviewMeta.com - this will work on Safari. You can also download the Chrome browser, the Firefox browser (both free) and install our extension there. You can also get our free Mobile App that will work on your Android or iPhone: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/reviewmeta-phone-apps/ We'll update this thread when we launch the fixed Safari Extension.

Hello- Thanks for your question. I definitely agree that there are a lot more fakes on the internet than just Amazon, but we've only had the resources to focus on Amazon at the moment. We hope to expand to other platforms in the future, however currently we're at our production capacity just focusing on Amazon. It's a lot of work to add other platforms.

It's because we throw out all one-tap ratings: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/why-does-amazon-show-more-ratings-than-reviewmeta-shows-reviews/

This is a form of Review Hijacking: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ On the RM report, you can click the link that says "Show all variations" and it will help show you the different variations that are pooled together: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/reviewmetas-hidden-features-for-power-users/ I think Amazon does this to simply inflate the perceived number of reviews on any listing. It's very frustrating that it's not totally transparent and many people are caught by surprise.

Thanks for pointing this out! It's definitely displayed incorrectly. When we run a preliminary report, we don't collect every review, so we don't know the breakdown of ratings vs. reviews. (What you see on the "global reviews" on Amazon is not accurate.) Will be changing that to "ratings" and adding a star.

Wow. Did you end up getting the refund + $80 gift card even though you told them you wouldn't take down the review? Good to see the first product I checked by this brand on RM shows a FAIL: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07Q5TYPFQ

This seems to be textbook Review Hijacking: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/

Thanks for the kind words! We've had some suggest that we start analyzing the seller ratings. It's definitely something that would seem to be helpful, but it is a massive undertaking, so it's unlikely that we'll be able to integrate it anytime soon. It's on the "someday" features of our dev to-do list.

Hi Austin- Thanks for chiming in. We do use some forms of machine learning, but we're not just looking at the deleted reviews on Amazon. One of the issues with strictly using machine learning based on deleted reviews as the answer key is that it's not a perfect answer key. We can't say for certain that all undeleted reviews are honest and all deleted reviews are dishonest. Sometimes a user deletes their account and all their reviews. Sometimes a company pressures a customer to remove their review. Sometimes the reviews violate a policy on Amazon that we don't necessarily agree with - for example, you're not allowed to call out other fake reviews in your review. So those reviews will often get deleted. Technically they are against Amazon's TOS, but we don't consider those to be "fake". Furthermore, we don't actually have the ability to collect every single deleted review. We only know if a review is deleted when we collect it at one point, then check back on a later date and see it's no longer there. So if a review is only live on Amazon for 1 day, it's unlikely that we'll ever see it. We did a blog post on the topic of gauging our accuracy based on the deleted reviews a while back, might be worth checking out: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/how-accurate-is-reviewmeta-com/

We did have a skewed helpfulness test (https://reviewmeta.com/blog/skewed-helpfulness/) however had to discontinue it because Amazon stopped displaying the number of helpful and unhelpful votes. Now they only show the total net helpfulness, which isn't as helpful to us.

Wow, and just today I got this spam email, literally 5 times: Hello Merchant, I’ve made an Analytics on your Amazon Product Reviews that are Converting your shoppers till SALES. So, we’d love to help you with each of your Amazon Product for their Customer Reviews that will increase your sales better than before. What is this? It’s called, “Amazon VOTES” Means - “Helpful” or “Report Abuse” thumbs for your Product Reviews. In this way, we can easily push down your Negative/Critical Reviews from the top reviews page or product home page and keep up only the best Positive reviews under top page to attract more shoppers and maximum conversion of SALES! ADVANTAGE OF VOTES? 1. Bring the best Customer Reviews of your Choice to page#1. Let your Buyers only see the Good or Best Reviews of your Product. 2. So, You get to manage featured 5 Star reviews on the 1st page. 3. Improve conversion by turning potential buyers into customers. 4. Improve SEARCH Results of your Product Keywords in Amazon. 5. Beat your Competitor’s attacks to your listing by VOTES! “It’s almost a rearranging of your customer reviews list as you’re expecting as a best seller” Please have a look in details: https://www.getamazonreviews.com/amz-votes-for-reviews We're a big team and agency here to take care of your amazon product reviews by Votes and many more. Regards, Rashedur Jaman CEO, GetAmazonReviews.com Email+Skype: [email protected] +17249244185

I agree, this definitely looks fishy. Immediately when you flip to the second page of reviews, the helpfulness count drops from 30+ to 1-2. It appears that someone was trying to get these reviews to the first page. This probably isn't the only seller engaging in something like this. What's interesting is that I often get spam emails that look like this: Hello Amazon Seller, If you’re worried about your 1 or 2 star Negative Reviews those are highly damaging your daily sales by making customer Confusion when it’s showing over the front page of your all Customer Reviews list. In that case, We’re helping Amazon sellers to scale up their sales by Up-Vote (Helpful) your Positive Reviews or Push Down all of your Negative Product Reviews to attract more shopper and then boost your sales instantly. Why us: 1# Always Pay after seeing results, no advanced or Upfront money needed to begin with us. 2# Doing Votes by real even Regular purchase background customer profile, NO BOT or anything like that. 3# 100% Guaranteed for Seller Safety, Privacy & Faster Results. 4# Available for any Country or Any Amount of Votes. I would really love to appreciate your comments or queries. Feel free to Contact $kype: rollonvotesservice Email: [email protected] So I'm assuming they're flying under the RM radar because they only had a few carefully placed reviews, and then leveraged any 5-star reviews with the helpful votes pushing them to the top. This is one of the reasons I often recommend that people sort reviews by "recent" and read some of those. It's hard for a seller to constantly be stuffing fresh reviews in, so often times, the most recent reviews will help show a more current picture of the product.

We don't currently support writing custom backend extensions. Haven't really taken much of a look at HD recently.

That is awesome! I really appreciate it.

Thanks for this! I've been told this is the single largest fundraising event for AIDS research/treatment and one of the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of donating to. Really excited to be a part of this!

How would that work?

To be clear, the extension doesn't install on your Mac, it installs on your browser. Which browser do you have? Here's our extension page with links to install on all the different browsers: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/ Make sure to read our notes for Safari and Opera on that page: Safari: Sorry! Looks like Apple decided to remove their Extension Gallery (where our extension was available) and force us to go through their Mac App Store. We haven’t had the time to jump through all their hoops yet, so for now the extension is not available for the Safari browser. Opera: We’ve submitted our extension to the store and are currently waiting moderation.

I'm seeing the opposite on the notifications list myself. Where are you seeing this? As far as the share button from the app, that's something I noticed recently too! Definitely need a share button.

Oh, my bad - you need to request the full report. The one you sent is just the preliminary. I requested it, so in a few minutes you should be able to see the graph.

We include a rating trend graph on every report - can you post a link to the particular report?

This is why it's always good to read the report - we have to draw the line somewhere, and often when there are products with very few review, there's not enough data to trigger a fail. On this report, we show a WARN for many of the tests, but it's just not enough to throw out the reviews.

Hey Craig- Dang, looks like these guys are really abusing the system here. I always find it interesting when ReviewMeta automatically calls out some obviously suspicious datapoints (https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07Y2BJMPX) and Amazon somehow doesn't notice (or doesn't care). This isn't the first office related product we've seen that's been heavily manipulated. We wrote a whole blog post about this "Amazon's Choice" office chair a few months ago, and since then, it's only lost the badge, but held onto the obviously manufactured reviews: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazons-choice-badge-given-to-product-with-1000s-of-incentivized-hijacked-and-deleted-reviews/ I think what you are doing is the best strategy - document the abuse and keep reporting them to Amazon. Call them out on social media as much as possible. Keep hammering it until Amazon does something. It sucks that sellers and shoppers must be the ones to police Amazon's own platform...

Definitely 100% against Amazon's TOS. It's crazy how many sellers still do this though since it seems so easy for Amazon to prove...

Yikes. Can you post a picture of the directions? The report still seems to be calling into question many of these reviews: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07PJWVC9S