Amazon Review Manipulations

4 min readJun 17, 2021

Part 2: Brand merge

Let’s check this product:
https://www.amazon.com/Cordless-Electric-Hand-Massager-Compression/dp/B08M5JD413/

A healthy 6329 ratings. Let’s check them via Keepa premium tool (amazon price, reviews, sales rank tracker):

Huge jumps like that indicate review manipulations.
What’s happening is this product is getting reported for review manipulations, Amazon slices away the reviews again, with no penalty for anyone (seller, product being sold, product donating reviews). After a few hours, the seller combines reviews again and relaxes until the next time Amazon splits away the reviews.

So what about the reviews? Where do they come from?

From the first look, everything seems fine - customer images show the product being sold, ‘reviews that mention’ contains words related to the product, they have reviews from the USA.
Let’s check further.

Global reviews talking about multivitamins? But isn’t the product sold is the massager?
Let’s check further.

We finally see photo proof about the manipulation

We have visual evidence about multivitamins. USA reviews are fronted and they seems to be legit. But the product is merged with some multivitamin listing not sold in the USA. How do we find it?

Just googling the full text of the review with the image finds us this link in Amazon DE marketplace:
https://www.amazon.de/portal/customer-reviews/srp/-/R2GZ0LFFJWDGMZ/

But that’s too easy. Instead — let’s check Variation Wizard on Amazon Seller Central: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/listing/varwiz

Let’s search for our customer scamming ASIN, which is B08M5JD413.

What we see here is the full ASIN family of B08M5JD413. We have:
B097BD5QYL — parent ASIN.
B08M5JD413 — the product being sold (massager).
B075RCPZ3P — product donating reviews (multivitamins).

Product Name for B075RCPZ3P just plainly states it’s multivitamins!

To find the product, we would need to go through all the Amazon marketplaces (there are many), but we already know from the title and reviews it’s in DE marketplaces, based on the language.

I will still list a few examples of how to change the marketplace link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075RCPZ3P
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B075RCPZ3P
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B075RCPZ3P

https://www.amazon.de/dp/B075RCPZ3P

So how is this manipulation done?

There are many amazon marketplaces. Each marketplace gather different amount of reviews. Each marketplace might also have a bit different information on the same ASIN. If you find a product with a great review count on one of the marketplaces but it’s neglected in your marketplace — this product would be a great review donor.

Amazon reviews are shared ONLY if these conditions are met:
• Brand is the same,
• Main category and subcategory are the same,
• ASIN family is the same

Using Amazon Vendor accounts (these have much higher authority on amazon and better support) or bribed amazon employees — fraudsters take the donor in the marketplace they sell, change the brand name, category and move them into the family of the ASINs they sell.
All the conditions are met and the global review count is being displayed on the detail page. Voilà!

How to report this?

Use this link: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/abuse-submission/form/incorrect-variation

Select ‘The product is incorrectly added as a variation of another product listing’ and give amazon information on both ASINs.

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Unfortunately, do not expect harsh action from Amazon. We have reported 1000’s review manipulations similar to this over this year. 99% of the time, we have either of the two outcomes:
1: No action taken.
2: Variation parent is removed, reviews are split away, ready for the fraudulent seller to recombine them immediately in a new ASIN family.

Remember this graph?

Immediate review count drop is variation family being split away (usually the parent ASIN being deleted). Scammers can recreate the family immediately!
I can count at least 12 corrective actions from amazon for this exact product (B08M5JD413) in the last three months.

Legit sellers are getting banned forever because their aunt left a review on their product.
Frauds like this keep on chugging after 12 successful review manipulation reports and corrective actions from amazon.

— — —

Amazon Review Manipulations

So how is this manipulation done?

How to report this?

Written by Amazon Uncovered

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