How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon | WSJ

this was actually one of the first hoverboard factory they could produce maybe 15,000 hoverboards a month on animals I pushed them up in the first page bestseller actually and you guys remember not just Amazon us we're talking about Amazon Germany and a little of France Italy and the UK meet Howard ty the man who claims credit for turning this anonymous Chinese hoverboard factory into a successful global business I guess that's what they called me over because I teach them how to sell on Amazon his job manipulate product listings in Amazon to boost his client sales for the someone treated tea saying that goes out at me pulled a gun home choose your vehicle if he's I'm falling out so much for do a tell him to ginger go no no Jude he's one of a number of self-proclaimed experts who are sometimes called the gurus so there's different gurus for different things most of them they do have their own traits their own expertise if you are an Amazon user you may have noticed that sometimes it's really hard to figure out which products you should buy sometimes they all look the same there are half a billion products all in one site all vying for your attention and the reality is the vast majority of buyers would only click somewhere at the very top of the list to get one of those spots some sellers are ready to do anything fake reviews artificial sales and even bribes all of which violate Amazon rules Howard ties advertised illicit tactics to potential clients and charges thousands of dollars for his consulting but says he does it mainly to defend sellers who have come under attack did I just get myself in trouble or anything I did I do anything back yet The Wall Street Journal investigated for months around the world and we came to China's tech and manufacturing hub to know more about the shadowy tactics used by online sellers here to beat their rivals okay we found that many sellers choose a radical approach to become one of the first listings you see when you search for a product they take down their competitors so here is our logistics center as you can see we have here like a small assembly line Amazon entrepreneur mayor sim he moved from Israel to China 11 years ago he says he has been a target of several attacks holiday seasons two years ago just before Christmas before Cyber Monday and Black Friday I wake up in the morning one day I look at my computer and I see zero sales the reason was my main products were suspended if a competitor want to kill you just have to leave few fake reviews to your product every day you wake up the first thing you do is checking your reviews you wanted to know if you're still in the business or not insiders say one reason attacks are so common is that they're extremely easy to pull off the manipulators exploit Amazon's automated system returning a product and flagging it as dangerous or fake can trigger an immediate suspension they will purchase our products and then they will return it claiming that the product is not as described by returning the product they will also increase the return rate which will make Amazon suspend our product page so then what do you do is your product just finished in some cases yeah you cannot come back from this kind of attack amazon says it is put in place of fistic ated systems to monitor attacks that genuine sellers are promptly allowed to list again however sim he explains it can take weeks to be back online it's a jungle it happens all the time for me it can cost like tens of thousands US dollars a year another way sellers are violating Amazon's rules to try to boost their products is by writing fake reviews because the more positive reviews sellers have the higher up their products will appear in listings making customers more likely to buy when you look at the reviews for this product you can see that it's very popular but there's almost something too perfect about it when you dig down a look into the reviews you realize that while this product is a pair of headphones the reviews described and screen protector it looks like a very clumsy piece of manipulation in the case of these headphones we emailed the seller but he didn't reply so if you are an average buyer how can you spot fake reviews from China it's easy according to Howard he sat down in our studio to explain it's just really about how it sounds like as long as it sounds like it's from natively from the US and has some kind of saying and and doesn't have too much broken English you know then it should be a good good review anything short I would think it's really fake it's awesome kind of sounds pretty fake to me the question is how do people actually generate thousands of allegedly fake reviews every day during our investigation we found that specialized websites control thousands of buyer accounts and use these to sell fake reviews to sellers based in China or anywhere else in them if amazon discovers that a seller is using illicit tactics amazon will ban that account however many Chinese sellers have multiple selling accounts so if they get banned from one they'll just switch over to another and if that one gets banned they'll just make even more [Music] on Amazon in general the more vendor sells the higher is ranking so to artificially boost sales companies have commissioned third parties to buy their products some professionals told us they even sent empty boxes to random us addresses and claimed genuine transactions it's particularly widespread among producers of cheap generic products like those on sale in this market here we are at one of gen gen the largest wholesale markets I mean it's just incredible what a range of electronics and how cheap all of this is what we see here is that they're selling tons of generic electronic products they're basically indistinguishable from one to the other it's your cell phone charger versus another cell phone charger and because these are all virtually indistinguishable whoever can corner the market by making sure that their product rises to the top of the listings is going to get all the sales so that gives sellers a huge incentive to manipulate the market and drive their products to the top and finally let's talk about corruption which of course is totally against the rules during the course of our reporting we discovered that Amazon is investigating certain of its own employees to determine whether they are accepting bribes to give advantages to sellers according to people familiar with or involved in these transactions sellers pay bribes ranging from $80 to $2,000 to Amazon employees in China to delete negative reviews restore banned sellers accounts and obtain restricted Amazon data that will help them boot sales so what does Amazon say about all of us they told us they are constantly monitoring the website for suspicious activity and that users trying to abuse it system make up a tiny fraction of activity on its site Amazon also uses sophisticated technologies like machine learning to combat bad users they also pursue civil and criminal penalties but people like mr. ty saying that so long as Amazon will be governed by algorithms and artificial intelligence there will be humans out there to trick the machines you get this kind of problem where automation and will will lead to a lot of loopholes because their system right now is very vulnerable and they don't do enough and many sellers are getting hurt [Music]

Channel: Wall Street Journal

Views: 2,427,737

Rating: 4.3850594 out of 5

Keywords: SCAM, CHINA ONLINE SHOPPING, ONLINE SHOPPING, AMAZON, E-RETAILERS, HOLIDAY SHOPPING, ONLINE SALES, AMAZON VENDORS, AMAZON GURUS, GURU, HOVERBOARD, BEST SELLER, AMAZON ENTREPRENEUR, AMAZON SELLER, GET RICH SCHEMES, Amazon's Systems, Amazon.com Inc., E-commerce, Supply Chain, Asia, China, United States, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Shenzhen, product listing on amazon, scammers, the wall street journal, wsj, online business, selling on amazon, manipulate, fake reviews, amazon products

Id: vOj-tRTbFfY

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dignifiedstrut]

Should have also touched on the tactic of bombarding your competitors with obviously fake 5-Star product reviews so they get their products taken down indefinitely while locked in the endless appeals process.

[u/phuphu]

It’s not only Chinese seller.

Try selling a used textbook on amazon.

Big publisher like Cengage is believed to report counterfeit on their textbook to get sellers ban from selling.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-subpoenaed-by-textbook-publishers-over-counterfeit-sales/264945

[u/Kimchi_boy]

Greed. All of it.

[u/bboy1977]

It’s easy to point the finger at the Chinese but there are plenty of US based jerks also. I’ve had a couple US based AZ “consulting firms” file false IP infringement claims against some of my listings. Take a bit to your performance metrics, account goes to at risk status and listing are suppressed. A nightmare dealing with AZ trying to get it all cleared.

Also the merged listing hijacking. Way more than the Chinese using that nonsense trick.