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
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.
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
Web application developer working with Kubernetes clusters by day, obsessed with networking, cloud, Linux and UNIX by nights/weekends. Also ran into annoying issues with AWS a handful of times and never went back.
That was the best day ever when it went down a few years ago while I was doing an install of an Amazon site. They have some “test” software that we have to run to validate the system and it was completely down. Still got some things done that day, but it was utterly hilarious to watch all of the Amazon personnel run around in a panic for a few hours. Fucking Prime trucks stuck on the side of the road with no instructions on what to do next. Utterly precious.
It’s super easy to detect change of product category and a bunch of other similar major changes. Especially now with ML classifiers, it’s even easier. They could automatically lock the page and require review
Sadly not even new, I’ve noticed it going on for at least the last five years, if not more. Amazon could easily detect and stop this but they don’t because (surprise surprise!) better reviews = more sales, even if it is for the wrong product
I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.
Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.
I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.
I heard about the diaper thing, it’s garbage. Definitely illustrates the point though; Amazon don’t care at all because whether they act or don’t makes no difference to their bottom line.
Someone comes to Amazon looking for a reusable diaper, they will search and usually buy whatever is near the top of the first page, because that’s just what people do. Amazon make a sale and are happy, they don’t care who the vendor is.
And oh - Amazon retail has more turnover than AWS but AWS makes more profit.
Yep, at least ten years ago I went to reorder some electric toothbrush heads, went to my past purchases to find the same ones, only to see the listing (with my review for the brush heads still there) had a completely different product.
December will be my 4 year Amazon-free anniversary. Screw that site.
I am the one that posted the question on that product, the answer came the next day. And I can confirm from having gotten the emails asking for answers to questions in the past that the email asking the question provides you an image of the item and description so even if the listing had been flipped it should have not shown them the dash cam in the email asking the question.
But yes sellers do like to do that to make reviews look good, he have to be careful to actually read the reviews to look for someone describing the product to make sure it matches
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
But did they work well being drilled into the wall?
found a hard drive that apparently was clock oil for grandfather clocks. was a fake drive a client bought, which is why I dug into it, was weird.
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
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 🙏
Whatever you do don’t use bucket replication and lambdas to push a massive number of small objects into one bucket that then blows up another bucket
I remember that!!!
First time I’ve seen someone mention that one by name. Fuck that data center.
Let just put SSO all in one place? That’s cool with everyone, right? Right guys?.. Yeahhhhh
Don’t forget to make it the default on everything, especially IoT!
You DevOps bruh?
Web application developer working with Kubernetes clusters by day, obsessed with networking, cloud, Linux and UNIX by nights/weekends. Also ran into annoying issues with AWS a handful of times and never went back.
That was the best day ever when it went down a few years ago while I was doing an install of an Amazon site. They have some “test” software that we have to run to validate the system and it was completely down. Still got some things done that day, but it was utterly hilarious to watch all of the Amazon personnel run around in a panic for a few hours. Fucking Prime trucks stuck on the side of the road with no instructions on what to do next. Utterly precious.
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.
Never said they were powerless. Just that it’s against the tos.
Is you report them, sometimes Amazon does something about it. Sometimes.
It’s super easy to detect change of product category and a bunch of other similar major changes. Especially now with ML classifiers, it’s even easier. They could automatically lock the page and require review
But that could affect profits! 😱
As long as they keep making buckets of cash, they won’t stop.
Sadly not even new, I’ve noticed it going on for at least the last five years, if not more. Amazon could easily detect and stop this but they don’t because (surprise surprise!) better reviews = more sales, even if it is for the wrong product
Definitely more than five years. About ten years ago is when I saw it.
They will happily keep up unsafe products, why do they care about this?
I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.
Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.
I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.
I heard about the diaper thing, it’s garbage. Definitely illustrates the point though; Amazon don’t care at all because whether they act or don’t makes no difference to their bottom line.
Someone comes to Amazon looking for a reusable diaper, they will search and usually buy whatever is near the top of the first page, because that’s just what people do. Amazon make a sale and are happy, they don’t care who the vendor is.
And oh - Amazon retail has more turnover than AWS but AWS makes more profit.
Amazon reviews haven’t been useful at any point in my time as an amazon customer starting in 2010
hardly something ‘new’, it’s been going on for years and years.
Yep, at least ten years ago I went to reorder some electric toothbrush heads, went to my past purchases to find the same ones, only to see the listing (with my review for the brush heads still there) had a completely different product.
December will be my 4 year Amazon-free anniversary. Screw that site.
I report these through the seller portal (even though I’m not a seller). Most of the time they get taken down.
Fakespot is great at catching these. It’ll give a really low score to products whose reviews don’t appear to have anything to do with the listing.
I am the one that posted the question on that product, the answer came the next day. And I can confirm from having gotten the emails asking for answers to questions in the past that the email asking the question provides you an image of the item and description so even if the listing had been flipped it should have not shown them the dash cam in the email asking the question.
But yes sellers do like to do that to make reviews look good, he have to be careful to actually read the reviews to look for someone describing the product to make sure it matches
Preventing this is one of the few good usecases I’ve seen for LLMs. An llm could tell if an edit is an update or a whole new product pretty easily
Or the reviews from last year include pictures of products that are completely different.
They keep the high star rating from the previous product on whatever garbage they’re selling now.