Hi Everyone - We have run into an issue the last month or so. There is a seller that showed up on our listings in the last month or so selling under MSRP so we start trying to figure out who they are. In researching, they have some of the worst feedback I have ever seen. Over 100 1 star feedback out of less than 200 ratings with almost everything in the last 2 months. Most of the negative feedback is either that they cancelled an order or an item never arrived.
As we began to monitor this we noticed that there would be some 5 star reviews mixed in. One day we caught that 3 of the 5 star reviews were from the same person who also happened to have the same name as the person listed in the Detailed Seller Information. A few hours later, the name had been changed to something else. So it was obvious that this person was giving himself positive feedback, forgot to change his name in Amazon’s system and then realized a bit later. We also began to look through the other positive feedback and something very weird. We kept seeing from “different” people on feedback using a very, very common 2 word expression combined together into one word. Half of the 5 stars reviews do this exact same thing. We dig a little more, the seller has started responding to all of the negative feedback and we see this same very common 2 word expression used as one word in a couple of their responses. So it is very, very, very obvious they are either giving themselves positive feedback and/or having others do it and telling them what to say.
So we are positive at this point that this person is scamming customers. We have used the “Report an issue with this seller” twice at this point and still Amazon is leaving the account up. Is there anything else we can do or are we stuck losing sales to a scammer until Amazon decides to do something? Pretty shocking nothing has been done yet given the feedback.
It’s sad to see how some sellers game the system and how dumb amazon is about said obvious gaiming.
There is unfortunately very little you can do beyond what you are doing. Do not report a listing as a violation because we have seen amazon turn around and send the violation to the account who reported it!
Thanks for the responses. We did this although I didn’t see that in the dropdown when you go to report the seller from the product page so we reported it as “Seller is using unfair or deceptive business tactics” and then explained in the issue area that we suspect the seller is manipulating his feedback. That was probably a week ago and account is still up getting “item not received” feedbacks and posting his own fake 5 star feedback. Even the way Amazon sets up to report sellers is extremely weird where you have to list the name of the seller in the comments and not an automated part of the form. Is there another place you can report specifically on “suspected paid or inauthentic feedback”?
Maddening how sloppy this guy is being and Amazon has still done nothing. Leaving feedback from your own account then changing the name on the feedback especially from an account that is very obviously scamming people seems like something they should catch almost immediately.