I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
Amazon took down one of my reviews because I included a picture of the item's manual which had a page offering to pay for Amazon reviews (the item had unanimous 5 star reviews). To me that seemed like valuable info and legitimate context to include in a review but even after I appealed they disagreed because my picture was "irrelevant".
You're supposed to report review manipulation offers to Amazon. Reviews are for the product itself, not the seller (in theory multiple sellers can offer the same product, but for alphabet soup brands that's never the case).
The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.
How convenient that the information only goes to Amazon, who can choose to do nothing, and isn't allowed to go out to other customers to help them make a purchasing decision.
>More than 50% of those are below 3 stars.
Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
I get them for free, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690563
> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.
Some people treat it like an adventure or a gamble or are just too curious, they know it's hit or miss but it's cheap and usually you can return it easily. See Atomic Shrimp channel for example. I don't get those people but I don't judge
> I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon
Why did you do that? Did they pay you? Or did you get the stuff for free?
Yeah I get the items for free in exchange of honest reviews, look up Amazon Vine, it's an official Amazon program.
Note that if anything they are more stringent with the quality of the reviews we need to write, not less.