The individual items on Amazon are sometimes removed, but the hijacker continues doing business on Amazon.
Why does Amazon not terminate such accounts who blatantly continue hijacking inactive products and co-opt those inactive products as variations to boost the ranking of the garbage they sell on Amazon?
Is Amazon protecting those hijackers somehow? Multiple reports of these hijacking violations to Seller Performance fall on deaf ears.
Hijacker# 1
https://reviewmeta.com/brand/sumpol
if you check their products
multiple hijacking of inactive products is their modus operandi
including the item that reviewmeta gave "Pass" rating
https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B01NCUFYCX
but viewing the actual item on Amazon shows the reviews are NOT for pest repellers but for the hijacked ASIN that used to be made in usa Garden Spikes
The ASIN B01NCUFYCX is actually Garden Spikes that has been hijacked by the Sumpol, check out the reviews and photos on those reviews.
Hijacker #2
https://reviewmeta.com/brand/asavea
they never launched a product without hijacking someone elses reviews... tens of thousands of them.
I am sure you know there are thousands of companies who aggregate other (inactive) product reviews as hidden variations.
It seriously undermines the consumer's trust in the Amazon marketplace. It will not take long for enough consumers to get burned by these scammers, one unhappy customer tells about their experience to 15 of their friends and Amazon will go the way of eBay destroying the trust they had.
These review hijackers are using Vendor Central interface on Amazon to overwrite inactive Amazon ASINS with their title, images, description, and brand. How can Amazon give anyone with Vendor Central account the ability to hijack products and their reviews by THOUSANDS and not know? I am sure Amazon knows. WHY do they let this going on that is the real question. Obviously, it cannot be because they cannot police the issue. ReviewMeta is proof of that. If you could write a code, that easily identifies fake reviews and fake review accounts and fake review buyers, so can Amazon, with their billions in resources! So I tend to think Amazon finds that it is more profitable for its bottom line to let this go on and sweeps it under the rug, thinking it's too big to fail.
Besides Amazon customers who are being fleeced and duped into thinking they are purchasing a quality product that earned lots of 5-star reviews ... the honest sellers who sell quality items lose on multiple levels:
- If sellers' items that have good reviews go out of stock, the hijackers use those Vendor Central accounts and overwrite the inactive item's title, brand, description and images and aggregate it as an invisible variation to the low-quality item they are pushing on Amazon. It is almost impossible to get the hijacked item reverted back to before hijacking version. Amazon has not trained it's catalog team to assist sellers in recovering the hijacked items and many many sellers tried for MONTHS and still could not recover their items from the hijacking. This is a major problem for sellers on Amazon.
- Amazon algorithm elevates items with lots of positive reviews to the top of the search, so those low-quality items with hijacked reviews are presented to Amazon consumer on top of the results and the sellers who actually have quality products with real reviews are never seen as consumers tend to buy based on the reviews and based on the ranking. So high-quality items with real reviews have no chance in certain categories that are flooded by the review hijackers.
- The affected Amazon sellers whose items have been hijacked are spending time trying to either convince Amazon to revert their hijacked item back to original listing or convince Amazon that the hacker sellers ( mostly based overseas ) are gaming the system. That time should be spent on servicing customers, improving the product, rather than defending from scams. The amount of time a seller is forced to invest in just defending their product is so significant, many sellers of quality items simply gave up and moved on.
My question is: Can reviewmeta develop tools for Amazon sellers to assist in defending hijacked products?
For example, something like a section on reviewmeta that would relate brand/seller to a suspected product hijacking volume? I would like to be able to have a section like this
https://reviewmeta.com/brand/asavea
which would also aggregate suspected hijacked inactive asins so when seeking assistance from Amazon catalog team to revert an item this brand hijacked from us, I would be able to provide additional evidence of a pattern in their activities