this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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I was just talking to a Chinese friend who works for a company that sells various goods on amazon.
He told me they budget to buy between 50 and 100 fake reviews for every single product they launch.
He said that without the fake reviews, the products will never start to sell on their own.
Whether to blame Amazon or blame the sellers, I'm not sure. But Amazon writes the rules of the game.
I mean he’s right, i won’t buy a product that has 0 ratings, seems sus
Then, once it really starts to sell, he should be afraid of Amazon taking over the product and including it as their own product line.
The product lifecycle at Amazon
Indeed you're right. Amazon watches out for Amazon.
How else are they going to get off the ground? That's the reality when you're competing in a digital marketplace. You have to have some reviews or nobody's buying.
That’s why Amazon has the Vine program. They give “free” items to customers to review and they are genuine reviews, or should be. And for the purpose of giving new items a chance on Amazon to start with some reviews and other reviewers are aware of it.
I’m part of it and I have to pay income tax on the stuff I get, but that’s it.
I did have one asshole seller recently who said I and other reviewers were lying. The listing showed a completely different product and myself and others stated such and the seller reported us for fake reviews and removed the pictures showing they were lying. Fucking pissed me off and I still get emails telling me about my review getting removed sometimes now.
I used to do the illegal way before I knew it was illegal. A guy from China would hit me up and I would choose a few items off his list and I would order them, give them 5 star reviews and I would send him the receipt and he would send me back the money in PayPal and a little extra, like an extra $5-$7.
I gave everything 5 stars and part of it was adding pictures/videos, but I tried to be honest, in terms of actually talking about what I liked about it.
Only did it like 3 times and got a kids camera and vacuum and a HDMI converter. I still have the stuff so it wasn’t all crap.
I think a lot of these sellers prefer the illegal way because it’s guaranteed 5 star reviews than just exposure, especially when they know they’re selling straight up garbage.
This is really fascinating to me!
I didn't know about this Vine program. Maybe that's what his company uses. Or I wonder if it is limited somehow ... If all the sellers use it then perhaps instead of it being an advantage it just gets you up to sea level. I know those guys will do just about anything to get an algorithmic advantage.
They might! A lot of the products they offer through Amazon Vine are clearly Chinese products, through and through. Definitely just seems to be small time sellers trying to get their products seen and get some reviews to get a better head start in exchange for giving some people a free sample.
On Reddit, there’s a subreddit for it and people like to show off their hauls. People sometimes get laptops and cell phones and you can tell because they’re usually Chinese, not the standard Apple or HP kind of laptop. But a free laptop is a free laptop!
Though sometimes we get some non-Chinese stuff like I got a $300 water cooler recently that wasn’t from a small time Chinese shop. Probably made there, but not the same type of thing shipped and sold from there.
If anyone is interested in joining, it’s invite only and the invite seems to get triggered when you do enough Amazon reviews. Not sure the threshold and I don’t think they make it public. It’s probably more so a ratio thing, how many products you receive versus how many reviews you do for those things bought and then you sign into their portal and they have a whole slew of stuff to pick from. You’ll see in the reviews a little green badge that indicates if a review has been done by someone who received it in Amazon Vine for free, so you’ll often see a lot of these small time operations’ listings have tons of Vine reviews.
Not sure how sellers post their stuff, they might not even know the program’s name.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9361204b-a5fa-49c6-8d93-b2f6f77e1bd1