I have a habit when I shop on Amazon. I search for products and pay a lot of attention to both the average customer reviews and the number of them. Today, I was searching for a way to keep my cats out of my neighbor's newly planted vegetable garden. 2/
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Easy enough. I went to Amazon and searched the following: cat deterrent outdoor ultrasonic Then I changed the sort order to "avg. customer review." 3/pic.twitter.com/BV815kRDmf
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That owl looking one looked promising. 2600+ reviews with a 5 star average. So I drilled into it, read the product description. All seemed fine. Then I got down to the Q&A section. What's this about flags? 4/pic.twitter.com/bUj68wwd1l
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Scrolled down further, to the actual reviews. Definitely talking about a flag. All verified purchases, too. 5/pic.twitter.com/qFW7Xs7qFn
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I shrugged it off as something getting screwed up on the webpage side of things. So I checked a different one from the results. And I immediately saw more issues. Compare. 6/pic.twitter.com/GqM6S39XMu
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Same product description. And supposedly different brands (PETBROO and Laixwec). Scrolling down on the Laixwec one, the Q&A this time did seem relevant, but the reviewers were all talking about different things-- driveway stain removers and decals. 7/pic.twitter.com/W7cD4jRhyj
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A third. This time the Q&A and reviews appeared to be about a saw. 8/pic.twitter.com/wNwK6qGc5t
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You can check this out for yourself. Click on any of the products named above or any of the ones that are made of green plastic on a stake. https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=cat+deterrent+outdoor+ultrasonic&s=review-rank&crid=1QJZDPJHDILTS&qid=1618359805&sprefix=ultrasonic+outdoor+cat+deterrent%2Caps%2C196&ref=sr_st_review-rank … 9/
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I saw a similar thing a few weeks ago. Some sort of promoted ad on Twitter. "Buy yours now!" Looked like a fun thing for my granddaughter, but when I clicked through to whatever site was linked on Twitter, it was vastly overpriced. So I searched Amazon for something similar. 10/
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Again saw dozens of similar things, all priced about half of what the promoted tweet's site had. All had hundreds if not thousands of 4 and 5 star reviews. But the reviews themselves seemed to be about the wrong product. That day I dismissed it as a website glitch. 11/
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So this time, I contacted Amazon. Got them to do one of their call-backs. I tried to talk the lady through how to find these, and she could not. She had me read the ASIN for one of them to her. It was not in their system. That should be impossible. And yet. 12/pic.twitter.com/OPzZlsPXEb
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I then figured that it would be easier to show by doing a web chat with an Amazon associate. I shared the links, and he saw it too. He has escalated it to a community product team. So, maybe it will get resolved. 13/
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My warning to you all is-- read the details. Make sure that the reviews fit the product and so does the Q&A. Make sure that you have heard of the brand. Do not take the average number of stars at face value. 14/
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Look for boilerplate product details on several different products. Look for things you look for in spam emails, like poorly edited information. /15pic.twitter.com/iZ0MYKi9Jp
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ps- I lied when I said the thread was short. I am a lying liar who lies when it comes to saying, "it's a short thread."
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Those who were telling me, "Amazon knows but Amazon doesn't care" have more evidence to back that view up now.https://twitter.com/GerryDales/status/1382396248578166785?s=20 …
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