Emptying Your Amazon Basket, Forever

Published June 24, 2019 in Technology - 2 mins to read

Yesterday, I went to amazon.co.uk to buy a hat - more specifically, one to go running with. So naturally, I searched for ‘running cap’, and was quickly drawn to this item, in part due to it’s slightly garish colour, but also it’s price and large number of high rated reviews. When scrolling down to read a couple of said reviews, I was surprised to see that the top review claimed that upon receipt of the product, they had been offered a second one for free if they posted a 5 star review on the site. Combined with an incredible proportion of the 249 reviews being 5* - 95% of them - I completely believe it to be true. And so I left Amazon and went and bought a similarly priced cap from an online sporting goods retailer in the UK instead.

It should come as no great surprise that Amazon’s reviews are being manipulated, there have been articles posted about it for years now, and the system certianly lends itself to being gamed - especially when the stakes are sufficiently high, and naturally on the world’s largest ecommerce platform, they’re as high as they come. Third party sellers are constituting more and more of Amazon’s choice of products, as it becomes a paradise for drop shippers and scammers. An article in today’s New York Times suggests that Amazon couldn’t care less about counterfeit products, and there are hundreds of horror stories to be found with minimal Googling.

Their advertising practices are getting progressively more aggressive as well - the penny has dropped for Amazon that money is in data right now, not products, but they figure why not both. I had to pay £10 extra to buy a Kindle without ads - sorry, without ‘special offers and sponsored screensavers.'

Sure, not using Amazon will sacrifice some amount of convenience, but with a password manager and PayPal, it’s not much effort at all to buy from other online retailers these days. And you won’t be contributing to Satan’s divorce proceeding legal fund in the process, so you can sleep soundly in your bed at night as an added bonus.