Yahoo Finance Amazon found to be misleading shoppers with 'bundled' reviews
Amazon has been caught misleading customers about the quality of products listed on its website by “bundling” reviews.
A study by the Guardian has found poorly-rated items regularly appear alongside recommendations of better-quality products due to the website’s bundling policy, rendering ratings useless in effect.
Various editions of books have been combined to make badly-translated versions of classic novels look highly-rated, while poorly-received remakes of films appear alongside rave reviews of the original.
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The Guardian found badly-translated versions of Jane Austen’s Emma and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations appear to have 4.5-star ratings.
A 2017 straight-to-television remake of Dirty Dancing appears alongside 4.5-star reviews of the beloved original film, despite being critically panned.
Additionally, reviews of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights often appear under listings of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are also lumped together.
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In particular, the Guardian found a kindle version of Emma for £4.36 that appeared to have a high rating, but turned out to be a poor translation of the original.
In it, the protagonist refers to her mother as “mom” despite being English, while her love interest Mr Knightly uses the word “buddy” instead of friend.
One nonsensical passage reads: “She is surely very sorry to lose terrible Miss Taylor, and I am positive she can leave out her more than she thinks for.”
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A kindle version of Great Expectations retailing at 91p is implied to be rated 4.5 stars, but a closer look reveals one-star ratings.
One customer wrote: “Each page has a dozen errors. It reads as if it has been translated from a foreign language. ‘Dog’ in the original is ‘canine’ in this version; ‘file’ in the original has become ‘document’; ‘tremendous’ has become ‘maximum incredible’; ‘man’ has become ‘guy’.
“That is just a short summary of the errors in the first two pages. The whole thing is unreadable and a waste of money.”
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Ratings are combined for products in other departments too, such as electronics and garden equipment, the Guardian found.
Customer complaints about this issue date back to at least 2014, suggesting the problem has been on-going for many years and has not been resolved.
