Amazon review scams

One day I was watching youtube and found this video. It is a great video and a lot of points I already knew and I decided to write a short guide on how to buy anything on Amazon and how to reduce the chance that you will be taken advantage of.

As you know, Amazon is quite popular in the USA and I’m buying almost everything there except food. There is a great choice of products, prices are quite low, delivery is fast and they have a great customer service. I also have 5% cashback by using their credit card and that card has no international transaction fee.

But very often you will have too many choices that it is really hard to choose the right product. Everybody wants an affordable and quality product. And nobody wants to be ripped off by paying more or get garbage. And here steps that I use to buy good products.

Buy from a known brand

Many companies have stores on Amazon. For example, if you would like to buy Samsung SSD you just find one that sells directly by Samsung and that product will have a very high chance of being a legitimate product.

Prime or Amazon choice

Most of the time I’m trying to buy products that are marked as Prime or have an “Amazon Choice” tag. It is much easier to deal with customer support and in general, Amazon has more checks for this kind of products. It does not guarantee that the products will have good quality but increases the chances.

Too good to be true

If you see a product that is too good to be true, then in 99.99% it is. For example, if you see 50 USB cables for $2 it is clearly an extremely low-quality product. And most of the time I would not recommend buying it. It will go straight to the landfill.

Price range

I suggest doing some initial search and finding out the price range for your product. For example, you would like to buy a pen. Find out the lowest price and highest price. Usually, I’m not trying to buy close to the lowest price. I usually prefer close to middle range.

It may sound a bit counterintuitive because nothing stops a seller put a high price for a very low-quality pen. And this is correct. But very often putting a high price on a cheap product will not work well for the seller. Let me explain how it works.

Imagine that a decent pen costs $1. If I will buys a pen that cost $0.1 pen for $0.2 most of the time I will blame myself that I bought a cheap product. And I definitely will not bother with returns. It is simply not worth my time.

But if I will buy $0.1 for $1 I will feel that somebody took advantage of me. And I will be highly motivated to write a negative review and I definitely will return the product. I can also leave complaint to Amazon. As a result, doing that is very dangerous for a seller.

So in general a product has a more or less reasonable price and buying a low-priced product usually means lower quality because it is very hard to make a product much cheaper without substantially lowering its quality.

Cheap products

For some products, it has no sense to spend a lot of time trying to figure out if that product is good or not. For example, when I buy a USB cable to charge my iPhone I don’t spend a few hours researching. I select something that looks reasonable and buy it. If they are bad, it is not a big deal and I will buy a different product until I find a good one.

Reviews

I’m sorry to inform buy reviews are pretty much useless now. Let me explain why. It is very easy and affordable to buy positive and negative reviews. And it is easy to get a “Verified purchase” review. A company that does these reviews will buy the product. It will obviously does not work for very expensive items but it works fine for most items.

Somebody can state that some product has a few thousand reviews and buying so many reviews will cost a lot of money. And they are right. But they usually do it differently. They place relatively a simple product for a very good price. Then they buy a few good reviews. People will start buying that product and will leave organic reviews. And because the product has a very good ratio of quality to price it will become popular. And the bad people then will just edit the product and replace it with a completely different product. As a variant, as stated in the video, they will add product variation that is a completely different product.

I recommend reading a few earlier reviews and usually, you quickly find out that you are buying a coffee maker but reviews mention USB cable. In this case, I usually blacklist that seller and I close that product for good.

Then it is time to read reviews. Ignore all reviews that state that the product arrived damaged or stopped working shortly unless there are a lot of these reviews. We are living in the era of mass production and every product can have defects.

Also ignore stupid comments like: “I expect something else” or “It arrives too late”. Check how detailed are reviews. Most companies that place fake reviews put something very general. Usually, it is easy to distinguish a real review from something very basic and general.

Firstly, I read 1 and 5-star reviews. If I see that most of the reviews are fake then I will close that product and noting the seller. Most of the time I check 2, 3, and 4-star reviews. They usually give quite a good impression of this product.

Questions

Read questions and answers. If you see too many questions that look like “Does this coffee maker makes coffee?” and then answer: “Yes, our best in the class coffee maker does the best coffee” then you will know that it is fake. Read questions and try to find out if a real person will ask these questions.

Made in China

It is a bit personal, but any product that is made in China goes to the bottom of my list. I don’t want to support a country that wants to start a war. Sometimes I have no choice and I will buy a such product but I’m trying not to. Somebody will tell that it is not the seller's fault that he lives in China. I agree with that, but the seller pays taxes that will finance a war and it is a big no on my list.

Conclusion

I shared a few tricks that I use to find legitimate products, but keep in mind that all bad markers can be used by a competitor. For example, somebody can buy a lot of low-quality reviews for a competitor and people will think that that seller is trying to sell something very bad. But it will work only in cases when there are not many competitors.

I hope it will help someone.