As a customer I find it infuriating, and it feels as though it has been made more difficult over time to read the reviews for just the selected product.

I suspect that many transactions on Amazon simply would not happen if customers were better informed about what they are buying. I have no doubt that this is true across retailers – just think of all the things that have been hyped and sold that end up in garage sales barely used. It's far more common to see crap with five-star reviews than something great with three- or four-star reviews.

The feature kind of makes sense for purely cosmetic changes, like color – but even then it would be useful to have information about the actual variant.

I don't think this is some UI problem. I am quite sure it could be solved very quickly by showing reviews for the selected variant first, and then making it clear that other reviews are for other variants.

There is a way of somewhat mitigating this merging feature: Don't just look at aggregate review scores. Read the lower-end reviews. If the flaws are petty or expected, then that's great. If your variant is the worst of the bunch, you'll find out. But even with all that, it doesn't sort the takeover problem in the article.

It also knows that positive reviews have a huge influence in increasing sales, and negative reviews really dampens sales. This is why Amazon also allows what I call Product Page Hijacking.

How this works is, Amazon allows multiple models or variants of a product to be listed on the same page, so that all their reviews are mixed together. This deceptive practice hoodwinks many customers. There are 2 kinds of product page hijacking - somewhat obvious ones and the really sneaky kind.

Example of a somewhat obvious one - https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL - here, one product page actually lists multiple router models that have different features and configurations. While it is a bit obvious, the buyer still has to carefully read the reviews to figure out what model the review is about.

Example of the sneaky ones are products that only partially list their model number, and list and sell slightly different variants of model under a single product page.

E.g search for "TP-Link WR841" in https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ - there are 9 variants of the same model (in essence, 9 different models) that are differentiated by a version number (v9, v10, v11 etc. after their model name).

But instead of creating a product page for each variant - "TP-Link WR841N v9" or "TP-Link WR841N v11" or "TP-Link WR841N v13" - only one product page is created under "TP-Link WR841N" and all the variants are sold under it. The variations in the models are sometimes not minor - some of the variants have a higher RAM and even totally different CPU! Since all the variants are sold under one product page, the reviews posted are actually for all these different variants. But the buyer will often have no idea of that. And they may not even receive the product they think the reviews are recommending!

This is why they need to merge listings into 1. It is also why there is soo much fraud on Amazon, and I dont believe they will ever fix it, the logistic costs would make Fulfilled by Amazon unprofitable if they had to stop mixing stock

And then they added a feature where if multiple marketplace vendors are selling the same thing it combines them.

And a third feature lets you classify items as various colors of a product (but the same product - think blue vs pink socks) and all the reviews get combined.

So if you do all three in the right order you can change anything to anything now, even taking another listing.