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So you entered Amazon to buy a product of some kind, but you are not sure exactly which model you want and which company, and everything looks the same. What are you doing?
If you behave like me, and like what appears to be quite a few Amazon users, you start sorting the products according to reviews, because there’s nothing like the wisdom of crowds, right? Then you find a product with thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of positive reviews and think you’ve hit the jackpot. But Amazon has a serious problem of fake or bad products that are often hidden behind mountains of fake reviews. So it seems that Amazon is starting to address the problem in an indirect way, and soon you will be able to avoid making the wrong purchase – which is even better for Amazon than it is for you.
Caution: Repetitions
The website The Information reports on a new tag that Amazon is beginning to attach to products that may be problematic, not because they contain too much sugar or dangerous substances, but because they are returned by buyers too many times after purchase. The new tag will indicate that some product is “Frequently Returned”.
Amazon doesn’t tell you exactly why this product is returned so many times, nor does it state what the threshold is for determining that a product will receive the label, but it does state that it is recommended to check the product details and buyer reviews to learn more about it. That is, Amazon tells you that something here is suspicious, and you go figure out for yourself what it is (tip: sort the reviews by Most Recent, and this will usually reveal some reviews that are more honest than what Amazon shows at the top).
Recall that in 2021, 13 million correspondences between sellers on Amazon and customers willing to write fake reviews without receiving the real product were exposed, which led to the deletion of the Mpow and Aukey stores that are also sold in Israel.
If you’ve ever returned a product to Amazon from Israel, you surely know that it’s quite a journey that involves talking to Amazon’s (excellent) customer service, printing a return label, packing the product you’ve been waiting a long time for, and worst of all – leaving the house to the return station which is usually located in Store and operated by sellers which is the last thing they want to do for you. In the United States, for example, the situation is a little different, and you can also sometimes simply place the package with the label outside the door to be collected by the postman, but still – this is a hassle that can and should be avoided in advance.
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The returns are not only a pain for you
Amazon is not making this move out of kindness or just to make your shopping experience comfortable. Product returns are indeed something that is important to be available to the customer (ahem ahem, KSP), but of course this does not come for free to the company, and it requires personnel, transportation, processing – and in short, a lot of money. For a company that fired 27,000 employees in a few months (even if these are a few percent of its total employees), and claims that it needs to become leaner and more efficient, this is a move that can save it money.
It is also important to note that sometimes the returns are not related to the quality of the product, but to the compatibility between the product page and the product itself that is actually received, or even its photos that do not correspond to reality. This means that a legitimate seller who discovers that such a label has been affixed to their product page may try to improve the page itself and make it one that better reflects the product you will eventually receive. In short – everyone can benefit from it.
This move joins another move that improves transparency on Amazon: adding a tag of “X purchased this product in the last month”, which can also help you understand if it is a product that the masses have really purchased, or if fake reviews have glorified it for nothing.