The Amazon User Review Conspiracy

I was surfing Amazon the other night and landed on the page for the movie "The Grey". I couldn't believe people were reviewing this "survival" movie so high. I thought it was a horrible movie. So I decided to do some research because it just didn't seem right. I found out that companys will post multiple 5 star reviews for their products. That includes anything from electronics to books. Amazon will not do anything about it because higher rated products equal more sales.

Amazon #omer Discussion: Fake Reviews

Amazon Fake Reviews

Amazon Fake Book Reviews

So, if you didn't know before (like me) don't trust the Amazon.com User Reviews.

reply to post by MrSandman


It's an accepted reality in the world of e-commerce. If you want to accept "store front reviews", freely from anyone who purchased (or hasn't) the product, then you have to also accept some people will take advantage of it. While bad, worse would be censoring too many posts or just disallowing the "store front reviews". Amazon reviews is a unique beast all it's own, and I often spend more time reading the conversations by-proxy that go on there, rather than spending the time to actually buy things. Take all reviews from all sites with a grain of salt. Only accept the reviews that give fair criticism, such as those who express their joys with the product, and also give many critiques.. "I like this a lot, but this part really sucks".

Ultimately it's up to the buyer to research something before they buy it. It definitely happens, and it's gross.. but nothing can really be done about it.

As SyphonX said above, this is standard practice in e-commerce, and not just with Amazon but with many review sites, most of the time it is not the company selling the products that generate the fake reviews, but affiliates that are promoting them on their own sites etc.

There are a number of sites that you can go to where affiliates will pay you to highly rate products they are promoting.

I had a similar experience on Amazon. A book that was portrayed as being co-written by James Rollins caught my eye so I ordered it. Turns out to be one of the worst books I ever read and in no way did THE James Rollins have a hand in that mess. I didn't read the reviews till after I read the the book...and lo and behold, the author under various names had given himself several 5 star reviews. I discovered this by reading the comments attached to some of those reviews and a discussion thread that was also in the review section. The book was "Solomon's Key, the Codis Project" and the author was R. Douglas Weber. Some of the back and forth between Weber under all his names and the commenters got kinda rough so I don't know if Amazon still has it but It was funny after awhile. Weber would have an entire comment section bantering back and forth with himself about how great the book was and what a genius the writer must be.

I checked Amazon's page for this book. They now have a disclaimer stating the James Rollins associated with this book is not THE James Rollins. They probably received alot of complaints

It's not exactly a conspiracy.Hyping by another name goes back to the sales of Beatles records back in the 1960s,as above it goes on a lot more than you probably think.Witness the antics of our ITV company and the way they manipulate the winners of our so called talent shows.

Not just Amazon but IMDB, i couldn't believe it when i saw the movie Drive has 8/10. Its truly an awful movie .In many forums people are saying that the reviews put forward on IMDB are from the company that made it.

reply to post by MrSandman


wow - is any one suprised ? really ???

we have thread after thread of accusations that ATS is full of disinfo agents , shills etc etc - and further accusations are almost mandatory in every thread that has opposing views

so the opinion that this happens elsewhere is hardly surprising

I find that on Amazon, the 5 star reviews are always the first ones and they sound too good to be true most of the time anyway. I scroll through the reivews and reading the bad ones gives me more information than the good ones. I can see what people didn't like or you can usually tell if someone just got a bad product. Unless there are hundreds of reviews and all good then I'll believe them. Take it with a grain of salt but if you take the time you can usually get some good information out of them without spending hours reading them all. I review on Amazon everytime I buy something (which is pretty often)

reply to post by MrSandman


There are two problems that I discovered when trying to judge user reviews on Amazon and other websites. First, like you mentioned, prouct manufacturers are writing numerous 5 star reviews for their own products. Second, sometimes a product's competitors are posting multiple negative 1 star reviews.

It seem this is happening on all store websites with users reviews and it makes product research a time consuming nightmare. The only reliable reviews I can find these days are on small user forums and random websites, the ones a few pages deep in the search results.

Originally posted by PhoenixOD
Not just Amazon but IMDB, i couldn't believe it when i saw the movie Drive has 8/10. Its truly an awful movie .In many forums people are saying that the reviews put forward on IMDB are from the company that made it.

Yeah dude, i couldnt agree with you more. I wanted a list of the best 100 movies so i could download a few and Drive was #1! Having already seen it, i immediately disregarded the whole list as a load of s***.

As for the Amazon reviews, i thought it was pretty obvious that alot of them are clearly written to 'big-up' the product in question.