> Put up a review "hey, this is satin, not silk" and amazon will take it down.

Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.

Internally we brag about how our LLM black hole "delights our customers"

It was always free to ignore customers. A thin layer of AI slop doesn't change the behavior. Competition should close the loop here, but free markets don't exist and power has marketshare has been consolidated.

An "Every Wrong Door" Policy

> Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate

They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.

I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.

Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes

The problem is that they have an obvious incentive to err on the side of positive reviews. Because if every product on the site has a 1 star review few people will buy anything. But if most of them have 5 stars people will be much more eager to purchase.

> Not am Amazon fan, and please let’s not do the Reddit “understanding something is the same as excusing it” thing.

That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.

Yeah, they can't always get it right but something that would go a long way towards combatting it: Reputation scores on reporting. Accounts that have spent a fair amount of money over a fair amount of time and which do not have a track record of making false reports should be allowed to flag things. And if a product gets enough flags a human looks into it. The more times you flag something that is deemed wrong the more your vote counts in the future. The more times they decide it's clearly legit the less your vote counts. (And there would be a not sure range in the middle that produces no change.)

And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.

You make good points, but I'm not convinced this isn't deliberate on the part of Amazon. First, Amazon deliberately keeps buyers in the dark - e.g. sellers can pay extra to avoid comingling, but Amazon gives buyers no way to find this out. Second, this kind of reckless approach to fakes is what enabled Amazon's rapid growth over traditional retailers with hand-picked, verified goods. It's not surprising they try to sweep problems with their approach under the rug.

Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.

> It’s fun to be outraged but a more nuanced read is that Amazon is stuck battling all kinds of fraud and it can be hard to differentiate.

Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.

But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.

Sorting out all the fraud Amazon faces is tricky and frustrating. You might find Hifivestar useful since it helps track and manage fake reviews better. It made spotting false feedback easier for me.

There’s an old law school adage that A students become professors, B students go to work for C students.

It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.

> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

I’ve been playing with cssbuy (there is pandabuy too) lately. Aliexpress range at temu prices basically.

"It's great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks nice"

(average aliexpress review on many tech items)

With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.

I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected.

So it really depends where you live.

I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).

Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.

I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.

The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.

Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.

>typically a week or more

I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.

It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.

Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.