They might pop back up with a lot of positive reviews: I just came across a product (random cheap drone) That had lots of great reviews... Only before a certain point, they were for a different product (some type of art kit) even with reviewer pictures of that older product.

So sellers are doing a sort of "money laundering" of product listings, placing new items, descriptions, and photos over an existing item.

> I'm honestly shocked by this comment - warning sides aside, paying for reviews should cause a ban.

The likely result of that policy would be that scammers would order the product of their competitors, take a picture of it with fake gift cards, report it to Amazon, and drive out the non-scummy vendors.

> They won't pop back up with 12k 5 star reviews immediately?

No, they will pay for those and have them soon enough. Even the OP says the product was sitting at >4,000 reviews at time of purchase and now is over 12,000. The reviews are easy to come by, of course.

I am not pointing out that the seller here is right by any means. I fully agree that paying for 5-star reviews is reprehensible and unethical, and it's similarly unethical for ANY marketplace to feature items that have paid for positive reviews. But now we've arrived at a part that is beyond Amazon itself, haven't we? The concept of "paid positive reviews" is not confined to Amazon, naturally.

This is why it's important to be a "literate consumer". That is to say, keen and discerning and aware. Like I said in my post, the buyer (in this case, OP) absolutely CHOSE a product that was visually an unbranded "knock off" of a webcam that Amazon actually featured HIGHER in their own search results. You can see which camera I am talking about being the "knockoff" and which is the "original", I hope.

A person with high "consumer literacy" will not just pick the cheap option with a bunch of 5-star reviews. Not in 2020, and not on Amazon.com -- these plain facts mean nothing about the seller's reputation or the product's quality. Every "literate consumer" should already know this! It doesn't mean it's OK for the seller to do what they do, but it's important that we all know the reality is that they DO do it.

Amazon shows the reviews, it should be accountable for them. These are not comments from users, this is used to promote sales.

> Every "literate consumer" should already know this!

So, it is my fault that Amazon promotes false advertising? Should I be punished for not seeing thru the lies that Amazon shows in their website? I don't think so. Don't blame the victim, blame the scammer.

> So, it is my fault that Amazon promotes false advertising? Should I be punished for not seeing thru the lies that Amazon shows in their website? I don't think so. Don't blame the victim, blame the scammer.

Who was the victim here? The OP was a repeat buyer, implying he already had the item and was satisfied enough to buy it again. Hardly sounds like a victim.

Look, I'll rewrite what I wrote earlier but more simply: Paying for good reviews = bad. Posting a good review to get paid for it = bad. There are approximately 12,000 bad people in the scenario this thread is about.

But there are platitudes and there is real advice. The platitude is "scammers are bad". Very good, I agree with that. The advice is to be cautious where you spend your money, and be aware of who you're giving it to. That is the consumer's choice. You can choose to give it to the no-name company you've never heard of who just-so-happens to have more reviews than any other item for the search term "webcam", or, you can choose to buy the Logitech for a little more.

Your notion of "consumer literacy" is a treadmill.

Hoping individuals will solve this won't work, because the malignant vendor has a much stronger incentive to find new ways to cheat than individual consumers do to figure out those cheats and take countermeasures.

The proper level to solve this at is higher up. Platforms and regulators in specific.

> paying for reviews should cause a ban

Morally it should, but business-wise, for Amazon, it shouldn't. Amazon already has the monopoly and drove a lot of smaller retailers out of business; the counterfeit problem is not (yet?) causing people to shop elsewhere, probably because for a lot of goods there either isn't an elsewhere or the elsewhere is still a worse experience (longer delivery, etc).

Our regulatory environment also doesn't hold Amazon liable for selling counterfeit and/or dangerous goods (bad batteries which catch fire, etc), so there is yet again no pressure on Amazon to do anything.

Amazon doesn't really care whether you get a bad/counterfeit item, they get their money regardless. Until this changes there's no reason for Amazon to act.

Well, he does have a point. I just checked amazon.de for "webcam". Holy crap, the first page is just no-name webcams that all look the same, probably built in the same 2-3 factories in the same city in China with different names on them. If you buy some JellyTech Webcam or a Webcams Webcam for Eu 20-30, what do you expect. The funny thing is, all of these have 1k+ ratings and 4,5 to 5 star reviews, while more expensive webcams from Microsoft are at 3,5-4 stars and 150 to 300 reviews.

A lot of products have extreme monoculture.

For another example, most ice machines for consumer use all use the exact same flawed mechanical mechanism.

Someone cut a few cents of the BOM by dropping detection of when the water tray had fully rotated, and instead the mechanism will eventually break due to repeated stress as they just run the motor a few seconds too long. For occasional use it works. For frequent use and you'll easily cause them to break in the exact same manner each time after about a year.

Models keep disappearing, presumably because too many break within the warranty period, but then new ones with slightly different exteriors and the exact same broken interior mechanism appears. This has gone on for many years.

When I last bought one it took ages to find one that used another design, hampered by lack of pictures showing the tray. Finally did find one and never buying another brand again if I can avoid it.