Aukey Kicked Off Amazon After Fake Reviews Scandal

[Yehudaa]

Apparently RavPower and TaoTronics are gone now.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/16/22536976/amazon-ravpower-battery-charger-removed-amazon

[Essen est zich]

Apparently RavPower and TaoTronics are gone now.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/16/22536976/amazon-ravpower-battery-charger-removed-amazon

Wow. I'm surprised about ravpower.

[YitzyS]

I'm starting to think it's a tactic to quash Amazon Basics competitors...

[Shmulie]

Pretty annoying as RavPower and Aukey were 2 pretty reliable brands

[EliJelly]

Pretty annoying as RavPower and Aukey were 2 pretty reliable brands

TaoTronics too

[Ver hut gazugt]

I'm starting to think it's a tactic to quash Amazon Basics competitors...

I hate amazon basics ( lost 6 figure product to them). I also don’t let me wife buy any amazon basics items.
In this case, If you read the article it shows that they offered a gift card for costumers to leave a review. Amazon has been cracking down on this Recently.

[EliJelly]

In this case, If you read the article it shows that they offered a gift card for costumers to leave a review. Amazon has been cracking down on this Recently.

Then good for them! I still haven't received my gift card.

[yuneeq]

Apparently RavPower and TaoTronics are gone now.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/16/22536976/amazon-ravpower-battery-charger-removed-amazon

TaiTronics has been gone for weeks but they already relaunched under a bunch of accounts using the TaoTronics name.

Wow. I'm surprised about ravpower.

Pretty annoying as RavPower and Aukey were 2 pretty reliable brands

TaoTronics too

They're all a bunch of scammers and completely deserve it. Billions of dollars scammed from US consumers. Good riddance.

I'm starting to think it's a tactic to quash Amazon Basics competitors...

Just the opposite. Amazon loves these scammers on the platform and maximized their length of stay until the bad publicity outweighed the sales they benefited from. Amazon makes more money from 3p sales vs 1p. All these sellers have been scamming customers and blatantly breaking the rules for years to the tune of tens of millions of orders with Amazon's explicit knowledge - their scamming wasn't a secret at all.  To this day Amazon refuses to delete the listings that benefited from tens of thousands of fake reviews and even allows these sellers to continue selling on these listings under new accounts even using the same seller name.

No surprise that Amazon allowed RAVPower to remain until WSJ pointed out that this huge seller has been scamming for years, days later they finally removed the scammers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-reviews-and-inflated-ratings-are-still-a-problem-for-amazon-11623587313

[EliJelly]

They're all a bunch of scammers and completely deserve it. Billions of dollars scammed from US consumers. Good riddance.

They might be scammers but they've got some awesome products for awesome prices.

[yuneeq]

They might be scammers but they've got some awesome products for awesome prices.

That’s what they scammed you to believe. They are literally investing tens/hundreds of millions yearly to deceive customers instead of offering better prices or better features for the same price. They can offer an inferior product at their current price and manipulate the reviews to display their product above products with better features or a better price. It’s simple math if you think about it but hard for people to grasp the hidden costs of what they don’t see.

[ah giten]

The products I bought seem great from all of these companies, and far better priced than competitors. I don't see where I was scammed.
Great value for the price paid.
Did they do wrong by paying for good reviews? Of course. But I fail to understand why you would call them scammers.

[yuneeq]

The products I bought seem great from all of these companies, and far better priced than competitors. I don't see where I was scammed.
Great value for the price paid.
Did they do wrong by paying for good reviews? Of course. But I fail to understand why you would call them scammers.

Again, you are missing the hidden costs. If they invest millions into fake reviews, that increases their costs. Higher costs = higher prices. You could have bought the same thing from a different brand for a lower price. Or you may have seen a better product for the same price. But since Amazon runs on algorithms and most people only check the top few results, the scammers put fake reviews to win the top placements, preventing innovation and pricing from naturally prevailing and succumbing to manipulated results. They manipulated not only their customers but the entire market. And they spend millions precisely because it’s effective at manipulating the results.

One last thing - some of these products may be great but extremely unsafe in certain scenarios. What looks good to most may be unnecessarily dangerous to a small percentage of buyers. That is another hidden and oft-ignored cost.

[yuneeq]

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/izzybenoliel_amazon-technology-machinelearning-activity-6811340859657736193-fmsa

[Euclid]

Again, you are missing the hidden costs. If they invest millions into fake reviews, that increases their costs. Higher costs = higher prices.

Don't all products have marketing costs built into their pricing? Granted this is black hat marketing, but it's still money that would've probably been spent on marketing either way.

[yuneeq]

Don't all products have marketing costs built into their pricing? Granted this is black hat marketing, but it's still money that would've probably been spent on marketing either way.

This is on top of that.

It boils down to this - if they are not getting a competitive advantage from spending millions on fake reviews, then why are all these huge companies doing it instead of investing only in completely legal marketing methods?

As someone experienced on the platform, I can say with certainty they are getting a competitive advantage. If they were on the 5th page of search results for a very competitive product category, they aren’t able to charge a fair price for a decent item and become a best seller. They need the fake reviews otherwise they would have to drop their prices to razor thin margins to sell more units.

[AsherO]

This is on top of that.

It boils down to this - if they are not getting a competitive advantage from spending millions on fake reviews, then why are all these huge companies doing it instead of investing only in completely legal marketing methods?

As someone experienced on the platform, I can say with certainty they are getting a competitive advantage. If they were on the 5th page of search results for a very competitive product category, they aren’t able to charge a fair price for a decent item and become a best seller. They need the fake reviews otherwise they would have to drop their prices to razor thin margins to sell more units.

You’re arguing that a superior product at similar price point will sell itself on Amazon. If you have experience selling very similar products in the same categories then you’re biased, and if you don’t have such experience, then what you know about product ranking algorithms and naturally rising to the top might not be applicable to their heavily saturated categories.

[jj1000]

@yuneeq

Don't all products have marketing costs built into their pricing? Granted this is black hat marketing, but it's still money that would've probably been spent on marketing either way.

This is on top of that.

It boils down to this - if they are not getting a competitive advantage from spending millions on fake reviews, then why are all these huge companies doing it instead of investing only in completely legal marketing methods?

As someone experienced on the platform, I can say with certainty they are getting a competitive advantage. If they were on the 5th page of search results for a very competitive product category, they aren’t able to charge a fair price for a decent item and become a best seller. They need the fake reviews otherwise they would have to drop their prices to razor thin margins to sell more units.

This question makes no sense!

If they found an advertising method that works incredibly well, than why are they doing it? Did you really just ask that?

As someone experienced on the platform, I can say with certainty they are getting a competitive advantage.

Of course this is giving them a competitive advantage! You don't have to be a seller to know that. So do billboards in times square and ads across the web and purchasing Amazon placements. 

Just because a company uses illegal or against T&C advertising methods does not conclude that their offer an inferior product to the market standard or that they are charging more because of it!

Coke spends 2 billion dollars a year more than Pepsi on ads therefore coke is inferior and costs more than Pepsi. Does that argument make sense to you? The cost of advertising does not equate or reflect on a brand or price IMO.

Counterargument to this is, most brands spend X to get Y results in advertising dollars. They found a way to spend 10% of X and get 10x of Y in results. That means that company can now actually drop the price for the same product!

(I don't mean to defend their practice of buying reviews and I truly sympathize with honest businessman like yourself and many friends I have selling on Amazon and getting screwed by these scammy sellers, yes they are scammy doing this. But I disagree with your broad conclusions based on this practice.)

[Lurker]

You’re arguing that a superior product at similar price point will sell itself on Amazon.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion from what he wrote. My understanding is that he agreed with Euclid that this money is earmarked for marketing and built into the price. However, while legit marketing may improve perception of the quality of the product and name recognition, Amazon's algorithms give more weight to reviews, which makes this method of marketing more cost effective. If they only did legit marketing, they could still be buried on page 5, which would force them to lower their price to boost sales over the products on the 4 pages in front of them. Ultimately, the products on page 5 may be superior to the products on page 1 and even priced exactly the same, but if you're stuck on page 5, you will still have limited sales and therefore limited reviews, which makes it impossible to move up in the rankings.

[yuneeq]

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion from what he wrote. My understanding is that he agreed with Euclid that this money is earmarked for marketing and built into the price. However, while legit marketing may improve perception of the quality of the product and name recognition, Amazon's algorithms give more weight to reviews, which makes this method of marketing more cost effective. If they only did legit marketing, they could still be buried on page 5, which would force them to lower their price to boost sales over the products on the 4 pages in front of them. Ultimately, the products on page 5 may be superior to the products on page 1 and even priced exactly the same, but if you're stuck on page 5, you will still have limited sales and therefore limited reviews, which makes it impossible to move up in the rankings.

Well said. Not sure why it’s so difficult to understand.
@jj1000 This not a simple advertising expense. They consistently used an illegal competitive tactic that distorted market prices. That makes them dishonest thieves.

[jj1000]

That makes them dishonest thieves.

I never said anything to the contrary.

And you never said anything conclusive that shows RavPower's products are inferior or more expensive BECAUSE of this practice!