What do you mean it doesn’t look legit? I ordered it from Amazon!
I ordered a pair of jeans from Amazon a few weeks ago. The item shipped to me was nothing like the pictures. At all. The sizing wasn’t even correct. I’d be surprised if the company still has their Amazon page up in a few months, but the product will likely be sold under a different brand name. My dad was complaining to me about a flashlight he got from Amazon that functioned poorly. You wouldn’t know it from the reviews though, which mostly seem glowing. Many manufacturers on Amazon are “fly by night” companies. They’re factory direct sales that use an Amazon store listing as their branding and storefront. They just come up with random names and re-sell their products after the negative reviews pile up to counter the fake reviews they paid for. You’ll find the exact same cheap products sold under multiple brand names too. Amazon even shipped me an opened box used item as “new” once. It’ll all be “shipped by Amazon,” as though Amazon has laundered them.
Digital storage scams are nothing new. A company makes an external drive that supposedly has a ton of storage for a low price. Often, it’s nothing more than a USB flash drive inside of an enclosure that has been formatted to falsely report a large amount of storage. Secretly, it just overwrites older items, seemingly having infinite storage space. It’s an old scam, and it’s finding success on Amazon.
Why is Amazon so susceptible to scams? Because they made it easy to sell anything, and know people won’t always return these scam products, even if they’re shipped the wrong thing. That means there’s profit. Until people become as wary of Amazon as they are other retailers (looking at you, Wish), Amazon’s going to keep it up. But have they reached a breaking point? Have they finally damaged their brand image too much? Probably not.
Looking for Fakes
Amazon is flooded with lousy products, but it can be hard to tell. The same companies that engage in shady practices like creating “fly by night” companies that sell the same white label goods with a randomized name also engage in manipulating reviews. Shocking, I know. Amazon does next to nothing to stop it either. Those fake ratings lead to higher sales of these cheap products that lead to high returns for Amazon. Amazon has been successful at getting Chinese manufacturers to release cheap, poorly-made products direct to Amazon, cutting out distribution costs and making it easy to avoid bad reviews with fake branding.
So how can you look for fakes? For these poorly made goods with fake reviews or imitation products? You’ll want to use a combination of techniques. The first is just looking at the price. If it’s obscenely low, it’s likely too good to be true.
Next, look at the design of the product. Look at other products in the same category. Does that USB-C flash drive look a lot like one Samsung sells, but at a fraction of the price? It’s likely a poorly-made knockoff. Look at the above solid state drives. The top one is from Samsung, it’s the popular “T5” portable SSD drive. But the other two are “Portable SSD Mobile Storage” drives that look just like it and are sold at a fraction of the cost. Oh, and those bottom two drives? They may look identical, right down to the writing, but they’re actually sold by two different “companies.” That’s why there’s no branding on the drive, so they can keep selling the same product under different brand names. That’s another dead giveaway, when multiple companies with names you don’t recognize have the same exact product, it’s likely a fake. Hell, sometimes there will be branding on the product, and it won’t match the branding in the listing. That’s definitely a cheaply made product just being sold under a variety of brand names.
Which is a good transition into the next step: look at the names. If you don’t recognize the brand name and also have no idea how anyone could even pronounce it, it’s likely a fake. Is it named something that looks like a completely random jumble of letters? It’s not a translation mistake, that doesn’t make sense in any language, it’s literally just random letters. If you have no idea why someone would name their company something like that, it’s because they didn’t. They basically got a cat to walk over a keyboard, loaded the listing with fake reviews, and started selling. If they start getting too many negative reviews, they’ll just get the cat out and come up with a new name.
You can also look at the reviews, even the fake ones will tell you more than you’d think. Are there 10 5-star reviews with no text, but the only one with text is a 1-star review? Might be a fake. Are there tens of thousands of reviews, but people mention getting an Amazon gift card for reviews? Yup, cheap gear. Maybe the positive reviews all sound repetitive, calling the item “a high quality product” constantly, and the only ones that actually mention what the “product” is are negative? Garbage product. Sometimes you’ll also find other unscrupulous companies review-bombing their competitor’s product with reviews that say things like, “Bad quality, 1 star,” or other such generic reviews. You can often find more realistic reviews around the 2-4-star mark. Does it only have 5 reviews and they’re only 5-star or 1-star? Maybe find something else or look elsewhere.
Fakespot
There’s another option for review analysis: Fakespot. This analyzes reviews, looking for common patterns in fake reviews, and gives a product an adjusted score and confidence level. It can be an easy way to quickly scan a product’s reviews to see if it’s fake or not. It even works across websites, not just Amazon, showing you whether or not a product is reliable or if a website’s online store has a good reputation.
Now, I want to say this: when a product is free and doesn’t take donations, I don’t trust it. Unfortunately, companies need to make money. We can’t just subsidize necessary products like fake review trackers. So how does a company that doesn’t collect donations, doesn’t charge for analysis make money? 9 times out of 10, the answer is, “tracking or selling your data.” And, if it’s a browser add-on, that could be tracking elsewhere. Fakespot shows up on a variety of websites that sell things online, even warning you if an online store has a dubious record with customers. It’s a great tool. But if you’re worried about privacy, it has access to all of your websites, data on those websites, your tabs, and stores data on your browser… that’s a recipe for disaster.
Fakespot has a privacy policy available on their website. They do collect unique identifiers and how users interact with storefronts after getting reviews. They also collect browser information, purchase history, and search history on storefronts. That’s a ton of data collected. They could use it only for in-house analysis and improving their analysis tools… or they could use it to sell you products. Worse, a company with this kind of data could sell data to other companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, who build giant, predictive models of people.
Fakespot is a great tool, but I do recommend perhaps only using it via their website, and perhaps always in a private browsing window so they can’t collect too much information on you. Unfortunately, it does seem like they want to collect data on your shopping habits for profit, and if you don’t want anyone having that information, it’ll be best to leave it off your browser.
Profiting From Fakes
Obviously, Amazon makes money from things they sell on their website. Many people will order these cheap or fake goods, use them too long to return or not want to return them due to hassle, and Amazon makes money as do the companies making this junk. However, that’s far from Amazon’s only means of making money. Amazon also does a lot of data collection. They do this for advertising, of course, but also to figure out how to make their own products. If they see a lot of users buying a particular product, they can make something that looks very similar at a lower price point. If Amazon, the multi-trillion dollar company, can find a way to cut costs that a smaller company couldn’t, they’ll often push them out of business with an “Amazon brand” version. Even those fakes and poorly-made products can tell Amazon what price point people expect and the design of popular products.
Amazon makes more money off of fakes and poorly-made goods than their cut of the sale price alone, and, thanks to that, they’re not in any hurry to get rid of fakes. As long as Amazon’s reputation doesn’t get so bad that people don’t want to shop there anymore, they’ll be able to continue offering just enough lousy products alongside legitimate ones to keep making huge profits. However, with the way Amazon’s been operating over the past few years, it might not be long before the joke about lousy knockoffs from Wish become, “Oh, it’s an Amazon version.”
The Sure Way to Win is to Not Play
The only way to really protect your privacy and get quality goods is to not use Amazon. Go visit a brick-and-mortar store, or shop from another website. Go directly to the manufacturer. Even if they don’t sell from their website, they often will list retailers where you can find their products. It might take a little more effort, but you can be sure you’ll get the real product and at a decent price. I won’t lie, it’s hard to pull yourself away from it, especially when you can order a variety of products and have it come in one delivery, reducing emission costs of your orders. So, another thing you can do is support politicians looking to break up large tech companies like Amazon, forcing them to separate their storefront business from manufacturing businesses and therefore engage in less scummy practices. This might make a bigger impact than a boycott.
One thing’s for sure: second-guess anything you find on Amazon. If the deal’s too good to be true, it probably is.