2018
was full of news on how scammers of China are manipulating Amazon. From fake
buyers, fake reviews to negative feedback making genuine merchant’s account
shutdown, China’s scammers are manipulating Amazon and its sellers are under
attack.
WHAT?
Sellers of china are hiring consultants for
boosting up their sales on Amazon by paying them huge amounts of money. These
consultants are well versed with the amazon’s algorithms and they manipulate product
listings on amazon to boost the sales of clients. They claim to turn some
random business in to a global business by these techniques and charge huge
sums of money in return.
WHY?
From
half a million products listed on Amazon but people tend to buy from the first
5 or 10 products listed. As sales are generated from the top sellers only, some
China’s sellers are willing to do anything to be on the top spots.
HOW?
How
are these sellers violating the rules of amazon and grabbing the top spots?
1.
Fake reviews by artificial
sales- one
of the way sellers use to improve their position on the list is by adding fake
(positive) reviews of their products. The more the positive reviews and
ratings, the better is their position. But the question is how are they able to
generate thousands of fake reviews? Investigation told us that some specialized
websites controls thousands of buyer’s accounts and use them to sell “fake
reviews” to the sellers based in China or other regions.
However,
if amazon finds that sellers are using some tactics, amazon suspends that account,
but these Chinese sellers hold multiple selling accounts, so suspension doesn’t
make any sense that way as they use the other ones.
2.
Taking down the competition- “I wake up in the morning
one day look at my computer and I see zero sales the reason was my main
products were suspended” said a genuine amazon seller.
Another
way of getting the top position is by tearing apart your competitors by
exploiting ‘Amazon’s automated system’. Scammers buy the products of their
competitors and return them by saying they are ‘dangerous’ or ‘fake’ or ‘not as
described’ and they increase the return rates which immediately leads to
suspension of the product of the genuine seller. It takes weeks for the seller
to get back in the business which costs them huge amounts of money in terms of
sales.
3.
Bad reviews- scammers also add fake bad
reviews for their competitors’ products to bring them down from the top spots.
4.
Fake sales (brushing)- the more are your sales the
higher rankings you get. Some seller of china, to boost sales artificially, commission
third parties to buy their products and on a higher level, they even send empty
boxes and claim genuine transactions.
5.
Bribe- amazon has investigated
that some of their own employees are giving advantages to sellers like deleting
negative reviews, removing legitimate suspensions and providing restricted
amazon data to boost up their sales by accepting bribes.
How to spot a
fake review?
·
Check
for the language- if the language is too broken, it is a fake review.
·
Content-
some reviews can be easily spotted as fake reviews by just reading them.
·
Length
of the review- if a review is very short, it is fake. Like ‘it’s awesome’, ‘it
works’ and much more.
What is Amazon doing?
·
Constantly
looking for websites and accounts with suspicious activities.
News authored by Prachi Londhe
.
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