Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2022. It describes Amazon’s fake-review problem as it stood in 2022; Amazon’s policies and enforcement may have changed since.
You’ve probably come across ads more than once that say something like: “This product sells on Amazon for €40, while on AliExpress you can get it for €5. You can make a big profit margin. And that’s what we do.”
Until fairly recently, we knew that when you bought a product on AliExpress for €3, you got what you got: the low-quality product you were expecting. If you wanted better quality, you’d look for a similar product on Amazon, even if it cost more. That’s what you were after: quality. So you find the product. The customer reviews are positive, meaning other people who bought it are happy with it. It doesn’t cost €3 but €30, and you gladly pay it because you want quality.
The product arrives at your home and you discover you’ve paid €30 for a piece of junk that sells on AliExpress for €3. How do you feel? Cheated; ripped off. You’ve fallen victim to these so-called entrepreneurs who have found a very profitable niche. But even more profitable is the niche found by those other entrepreneurs whose most plausible venture, as usual, is selling courses that teach others how to start a business, even if it’s at the expense of deceiving end customers. And let’s not dress it up or play it down. They’re scamming people.
The goal: turning Amazon into a more expensive AliExpress
A few years ago things were a bit easier, because the business model these so-called second-rate entrepreneurs used was dropshipping. It basically consists of taking a cheap product from AliExpress, marking it up a little and selling it on your own website, without having to handle shipping, since the manufacturer or distributor sends it directly to the customer’s home. Dropshipping as such does nothing to improve the customer experience: we don’t get their product to them faster, and we don’t improve the product. We just make it more expensive.
At least that way, the only name being dragged through the mud is that of the entrepreneur’s own website, because many customers realise something is wrong with the product and that it’s worse than it seemed. The most attentive will notice that the same product is available for much less in stores like AliExpress. That’s why many entrepreneurs who tried dropshipping as a business had to give it up quickly, unable to cope with large numbers of returns. Some even ran into legal trouble because they couldn’t refund their customers.
But now it’s much worse. Now they use the biggest e-commerce store in the world, a store whose founder, Jeff Bezos, follows the philosophy that “the customer comes first, and the whole company must be devoted to customer satisfaction”.
When you buy on Amazon, you expect a certain quality and impeccable service. Amazon spent many years building trust with its users, even at the expense of short-term profits. And these entrepreneur-scammers are polluting Amazon. Am I being harsh in calling this a scam?
Honestly, no, because they’re not only deceiving their customers, they’re also deceiving Amazon by getting around many of its policies.
To begin with, if you want to sell something worth €3 for €30, you need a description that promises more than you’re going to deliver. You have to use misleading marketing, because if you say, “It’s the same junk you can find on AliExpress, but we’ve marked it up”, obviously nobody will buy it. So the product description has to make the customer believe it’s different from what they’d find on AliExpress.
Second, Amazon has another serious problem with fake reviews. End customers are social creatures, so, exploiting their social proof bias, they need to see that other users have bought the product. And not only that: those users must also be happy with it. This is where these entrepreneurs have to invest in people who leave fake reviews.
That’s why you may at some point have bought a product on Amazon because lots of people raved about it, and when it arrived you thought, “What kind of idiot thinks this rubbish is any good?” Well, as a rule, it isn’t 10 or 20 idiots who like the product, but a single scammer who has worked hard to gather fake reviews for it. In short, a scam, like so many others, that you’ve fallen for.
The thing is, Amazon needs to find a way to solve several problems, the fake reviews and the scammers on the platform, because otherwise it could destroy the reliability it has worked so hard to build.
Entrepreneurs: some advice for your future
I know we’re living in the era of the quick buck, where anything seems to go as long as it makes money, but that isn’t the entrepreneurial path. Doing business this way, you tarnish the image of the entrepreneur at every turn. The most basic principle of business is to improve the customer’s life, as well as, as an entrepreneur, having certain principles and values.
See also: How to import clothing from India: tips
Starting a business with this “anything goes” mentality for money will lead you off the straight path, and history shows that those who are willing to stray from the straight path tend, over time, to stray even further. And honestly, it isn’t worth it.
You can use the same Chinese factories, you can put your own brand on a product and choose whether to improve its features to increase its value, or instead choose a mediocre, cheap product (a guerrilla product). Either way, you’re on the entrepreneurial path, and someday you’ll prosper in business. But deceiving customers is rarely good business.
Featured image: Amazon Warehouse DSA6 by Chris Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
