Sometimes it makes you wonder how they manage to even find the reply button
Amazon sellers have a habit of selling one thing, getting a bunch of decent reviews, and then swapping the entire description, name and pictures to a dodgy item they want to shift.
Which is why you see 2TB USB sticks for £10 with a bunch of five star reviews, but when you dip down into them, they all say things like “Just what we needed. Looks great on my Christmas tree.”
So I’m more likely to blame Amazon here. They are a shockingly shit company.
Yeah this should be illegal. It’s literally a bait and switch.
I don’t see why using 2 TB USB drives as Christmas ornaments should be illegal, I do it occasionally with old sata HDDs.
iirc for those products even the reviews are paid reviews, just not in traditional kind of paying bot farms, what they did is doing giveaways but tell you to buy this stuff, but will refund you after you leave a review, so they get a bunch of ‘legitimate’ reviews.
it’s because of a new strategy used by sellers on Amazon to flip their product pages to different products. I’ve seen this before in the reviews how the reviewers will review a product that’s kind of like what I am trying to order, but slightly different model or something
Yeah if you go deep enough on an item there’s a good chance you’ll find that it was once something else.
Sellers don’t want to start over with reviews so they just take a retired product entry and change the pictures and item.
Some drill bits I bought got turned into or was previously a pair of Bluetooth earbuds
Add this to the list of reasons not to shop at Amazon.
Seriously, I only shop there unless I can’t find something anywhere better, and even then I ask myself just how much I want or need this item. Very similar policy to the one I have regarding Walmart.
On a related note, I would say “Fuck Walmart with a rusty spoon”, but I figure that would be a massive insult to the rusty spoon.
That’s dastardly. Amazon needs to be burned to the ground like it’s waningly verdant namesake
It’s technically against their tos to change the product. But sellers are shady assholes.
There’s no way Amazon is powerless to stop sellers from doing this. They just don’t care.
In case anyone is interested, Amazon has headquarters in Seattle, Washington and Crystal City, Virginia. They also have data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and Oakland, California. There’s more, obviously, but those are the ones I have ideas on the location of. The data centers are harder to find. For those you’ll likely need a contact to help you. Your allies will be Amazon employees and meter checkers. You’ll be looking for a building with MASSIVE power draw. And hey. Even if you don’t find an Amazon data center, it’s still good to find buildings with massive power draws because… Well… That’s the worst thing these companies are doing
Us-east-1 will go down all my itself thank you and please 🙏
First time I’ve seen someone mention that one by name. Fuck that data center.
“I don’t know, sorry”
So, while in the end it’s still not the sharpest tools in the shed writing those, the questions are often forwarded to your email by Amazon and will very much include a call-to-action. People are made to feel like Amazon or even some other customer is specifically asking for their thoughts, so they will respond just to be polite. It isn’t immediately clear in these emails that the answer will be put up on the listing forever.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. That makes it make a lot more sense.
Others have said this but, that’s because the merchant has changed the item listed. I don’t believe Amazon should even allow this as a possibility but it does so because they allow it sellers will regularly put an item they know will rate really well out for a few months to get a lot of high rating, and then they’ll swap it out for an item that is either something else they want to sell that usually doesn’t sell as often or something that’s a little lower quality but because they had the old item first all of the reviews for the old item is now stacked onto the new item which makes it look better than it actually is
On top of this, Amazon is able to remember what you purchased in the past so when it gives you those notices it doesn’t give you the current information on the item it gives you the information that provided when the item was purchased, so for example if you asked a question on the item, using what they received they’re probably thinking that you’re the dumb one because they likely got an email showing a dash camera with the same question
I’m in the market for a honing guide for chisels and plane irons. I bought a cheap one, and the little feature it has to grip the sides of chisels wasn’t big enough for my chisel to fit in it.
I found a model I thought I liked on Amazon, but there was no spec on the thickness of chisel it could grip. I asked a question, “How thick of a chisel does this hold? NOT the width, the THICKNESS” Two answers, 1. “i dont know” and 2. 1/8" - 2 1/4" (which was the numbers for the chisel WIDTH spec’d in the ad.)
When someone asks a question like that, it doesn’t seem to go to the seller, it goes to other customers. People get a question in their email. And a lot of them are shitheels who will dutifully answer “I don’t know.” Or they have the reading comprehension skills of the average hagfish.
I don’t think the users are the problem in the image though; I think it’s the seller’s fault.
Amazon has a feature where you can list for sale different permutations of the same item. Say you sell anal lube in 1 oz, 2.5 oz, 8 oz, 16 oz and 55 gallon packages, instead of creating an independent listing for each, you can have one listing with 5 variants. These can have different pictures or descriptions so customers can see and read about the differences, but it’s supposed to be broadly the same product so they share a question and review section.
If the seller is too ignorant or apathetic, they’ll list completely unrelated products under the same listing as different variants. There may be a theme, like “grooming supplies” so they’ll have a hair dryer, a beard trimmer, an electric toothbrush and a rectum bleacher listed as variants of the same product. Or it’ll just be whatever was on the truck from Shenzhen this week, hence the purchaser of a dash cam getting a question about an air filter.
55 gallons of anal lube?
Is it not well known by now that settlers and scammers do this on Amazon? They build up positive reviews with a different product and then change the product listing so it looks like the new item has loads of good reviews. This listing probably was for a dashcam when that user bought it.
I just watched a Louis Rossman video about this (fake reviews), you should check it out.
