Do you trust Amazon’s Choice recommendations?

It’s pretty simple really, don’t trust anything that anyone who is trying to sell you something, says about it. Treat anything anyone else says with a healthy scepticism.

I buy most stuff online, apart from groceries. Anything moderately expensive I’ll aim to ensure that there is some kind of provenance for anything I buy – I’ll look for a manufacturers’ part number or whatever, and physical retailer presence, but also use Which? reviews to avoid the lemons.

I’ll try to get a UK source first, but for cheap stuff (<£15) I will risk buying from abroad since it at least avoids import tax and extortionate courier charges. I recently bought some 'pre-used' CPU's on eBay to upgrade my ageing computers, less than a tenner from China, doubled the processing power of my kit, arrived in about a week, worked perfectly.

I look at reviews, but only really take notice of any actual facts, and always have a quick scan of the negative comments and the trend over time.

I think the social media consumer memes being promoted by so-called 'influencers' are pernicious, and an extreme example of the kind of antisocial behaviour actively promoted by the online corporations. First thing I learnt from the early days of the web? Online, no-one knows you're really a dog. Woof.

But plenty of well known high street retailers have a long history of poor consumer treatment, hard selling of extended warranties being a prime example.

I wouldn’t use Amazon if they were giving their stock away. Just pure greed. They don’t pay their proper taxes, are multi multi billionaires, but they still want more. Maybe boycotting them would be a good thing, then our high street shops can get back to normal ! Our government should step in, and do something about it, but I doubt they will do nothing.

I am a loyal and regular Amazon customer, but my trust in them has now taken a very severe knock after reading your Which article.
Amazon now need to respond immediately and robustly if they wish to retain my custom and my confidence in them.
Amazon the ball is in your court !!!

I am a sole trader and I sell on multiple platorms and I am saddened by the impact these sorts of issues have on “innocent” sellers who are trying to make an honest living.

The trick is not to avoid the platforms, but to confront them and to seek out the honest traders and ensure you are not supporting these practices that result in the inevitable “race to the bottom”.

I don’t think people really understand how much AI runs most of the processes now and corrupts what you see.

For instance you may not see all options actually on sale depending on where you live and your AI “perceived” preferences , and you may see a key item that the supplier has paid extra advertising costs to promote when it is not the best value at all – but you wouldn’t even be aware it had happened.

As your review has highlighted, “choice” is not actually selected by any human decision at all and lacks all the quality and safety aspects that AI cannot determine from the platform itself.

This is the world we live in – smoke and mirrors – as we have also seen too blatantly with our politicians and press – maybe that is another area to investigate as they have the power to stop these things and not actually encourage them !

There is a load of cheap garbage on Amazon from sellers with names that look like a random pick of scrabble tiles and several sellers with identical items where only the name is changed on the item. Too many of the 5 star reviews follow a similar theme, such as for security cameras that begin with “I have a dog”. Most often before buying anything, I check other websites such as Toolstation and Argos to see if they sell the same brand name and also look at the 1 star reviews which tells a more acceptable story. I was offered a replacement sports watch last year or a refund if I would improve my review. Needless to say, the review was not changed.

Amazon have become the Aliexpress of poor quality products. Amazon don’t give a dam all they want is profits to send back to America. If on-line shoppers here in the UK started to support UK Companies whom do pay a fair amounts of taxes these would be retained here in the UK.
WHICH Consumer Magazine have for years promoted Amazon at the demise of UK retailers.

I think Amazon for ALL their online products, SHOULD have a section CLEARLY displayed for each item, where customers can report bribes for fake review or ANY other relevant information about fake reviews! Because until Amazon gets to grips with this SERIOUS FAKE REVIEWS PROBLEM! Nothing is going to change! Amazon needs to start Policing its own website and gather evidence to sort the problem! They make vast amounts of money ( Some of which can be spent on Policing! ) TO PROTECT ITS CUSTOMERS, MANY OF WHICH ARE VERY LOYAL!

Agree that all Amazon is interested in (like most other big companies) is profit. To quote the old proverb “LOVE of money is the root of all evil.” A very old fashioned view I know, but probably never more relevant!

I’m starting to look elsewhere than Amazon for an increasingly large amount of my on-line shopping these days. Amazon is so top-heavy with cheap, unbranded, Chinese rubbish these days that it’s becoming impossible to do a meaningful search in a reasonable length of time (when you factor in all the time you have to spend to read all the low-starred reviews). Luckily I can afford to buy brand-named products most of the time (if I can find them with my search, and/or if I know the name of a decent brand or brands that make the product I’m after) but for most people they might as well print out all the pages of listings and stick a pin in them. When all the top listings don’t have a single brand that I’ve heard of amongst them, it sets an alarm bell ringing for me now. But I’m only wise to this sort of thing because I’ve been a Which subscriber since 1997… most of Joe Public simply won’t know the potential pitfalls.