#0003 – Let’s Save Amazon Reviews ft. Matt Hirschmann
Somewhat Frank
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Full episode transcript -

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you're listening somewhat frank with me. Frank River. After working in the corporate world for decade, I decide to blaze my own path co founding Tech cocktail, which helped catalyze local start up communities and eventually turned into Techo media site, which grew to millions of readers and was eventually acquired. Over the past decade, I've interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs thought leaders from some of the fastest growing, most successful companies in history, in a long way of amazing lessons from my experiences. So we're gonna talk about startups, tech innovation and your intersection with personal life and anything else on Frank Krueger's mind. So let's get started. Being somewhat frank, somewhere Frank is produced with the help of established my new company,

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Frank, Over here somewhere. Frank, we are. Do this live today from a pool because I'm out here in Key West Florida celebrating a birthday party with a friend of ours, and it's a good place Way had some conversations happening around some kind of around Amazon and be a good opportunity to bring my friend Matt Hershman from Lucid creative, and it's an agency out in D. C. And we were just chatting about Amazon and the reviews and of all, I mean, we all buy things on Amazon all the time, right? I mean, it's like we live, breathe Amazon, sending us packages, and we probably all look at those reviews heavily in that process where I do anyone or Matthew Matt here.

You look at those reviews, right? I felt her by, you know, stars. So I'm not even looking at anything with less than four stars. Then, of course, you know, over time you started to build a certain level of trust in the review system from the early days and you started, you know, basically using a shorthand system of making purchasing decisions by picking things that had five stars and 1200 reviews. And you just trusted it, even though it was some off brand he had never heard of. But she needed to make a quick choice, right,

So I'll look at it. We met. We measure off of that. But we realize that some of those things they're not necessarily true. Like there's people gaming that system in some ways, and actually, you kind of took you were took a long workday and turned into the adventure kind of tackling this problem, investigating what people are doing. So maybe share a little bit more about what you figured out when you're looking at the review system on Amazon, and then we're gonna talk about what what they could do to fix it and maybe even the potential opportunity. So I think I just don't remember what product it was that I'd bought that I was really disappointed with. And it was clearly a piece of junk. And I went back to maybe leave a review and but then got caught up in reading the other reviews because I was just confused that there weren't Maur complaints. And then I realized that the reviews were completely falsified. A TTE least 95% of them were copy and paste from other reviews. Some of them were duplicative,

so it would say, you know, some electronic product But it said something like Looks great in my bathroom, But it wasn't a bad through brother and then 20 reviews down. It's it looks great in my bathroom and then another review. So, like robots posting in some way copy and basting, and a lot of them did claim to be verified. Reviews but only, you know, maybe the top 2025% said verified. So these air verified purchases purchases. Basically meaning

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people have purchased that

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product you're talking about. Yeah, and then they leave a review, So that's interesting. So they actually bought the product rather than just leaving her view. Is heavier weight heavier by Amazon? Very much. Yeah. Those are the ones that you know. It started the top. And if you only go down to your first scroll or two, you only see that they're verified purchases. So you don't you assume Well, okay, they all are. But it turns out if you click three pages down, you'll start to see that balance are not verified purchases,

which is even crazier, that you've got thousands of people reviewing some product that they that they didn't theoretically by released, didn't buy on Amazon. But so then I hopped on a chat session with them and, you know, pointed this out to them, you know, sending the product link. And they're like, Nope, they're legitimate reviews because they're verify purchases. And I said no. They're saying that they look great in the bathroom. They can't be. So they offered me like a free month of of, you know,

Amazon Prime or something like, get me off the subject. But they really weren't particularly interested in hearing my concern. But what did you figure out its island? I looked in a little bit further. I came across a review by a guy who had, like, a star, You know, he was one of Amazon's top reviewers. So I googled his name, and I and I looked around for a while and I found a web site. So this is what you're doing in the middle of night when you can't sleep and you're thinking about this thing rather than all the other things you were working on? Yeah. I'll work till, like,

12 45 1 I realize that I'm starting to see double, and then I'll go on to some personal endeavor. You know, either you know, shopping for something that I want their dream of or whatever looking a real estate or whatever. Trying to uncover why people are getting all these reviews and they're not really Yeah. So anyway, I find this guy his name out there, and he has his own website, and I don't know exactly how he markets himself. But basically, if you read the fine print, he's asking people to pay Pal him a dollar amount and a name of a product on Amazon, and he will purchase it and review it. So you can hate a play basically. And so I studied.

All of it is reviews, and he's got tens of thousands of them and much more than 90% or five star. I mean, they're raving reviews, and they're pretty well written, you know? So they're convincing, you know, they say all the right things. Little phrases that resonate. So basically, he's gaming system Amazons probably aware of it because they are shut them down. But it's difficult because he's actually buying products, so it makes it hard. So

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what is it

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should they be doing Something is a question. So my first thought was, we need to get him to stop or they need to do something. I mean, I'm not even the developer, and I could write a you know, a script to fix this problem. It's really easy to spot. I should mention that you I have a background in product development and design any well as do I and, you know, product. And you understand the back inside to write. So the the sense I got from them that they were, they just didn't want to hear it. I mean, and, you know,

obviously I didn't go super far in the management structure, but it just didn't seem to want to hear it. So I looked into it. Oh, yes. The first thing that occurred to me was I want him to stop because I want to use this service and trust it. And I don't wanna have us believe Amazon for me, obviously. And I'm spending 30 extra minutes now making a buying decision. So if I want a little MP three player player that floats in the pool that used to take me three minutes and now I have got to spend half an hour 45 minutes. By the time I'm done, sometimes I just don't even buy something because I'm so tired. Yeah, and also 1 30 And sometimes you can't find any products without fake reviews. So now you really just lost the faith, you know?

So is leaving in your basket and come back later and hope that you find another thing that's similar and hope something else launches a new product. I need some time, and I'm buying products that I don't like because of this fake reviews. It's kind of yeah, So I figured, yes, that could be 1/3 party Web site out there that that somehow, you know, rear reviews the Amazon reviews. And you know, you could basically say, Is this products? You know? Five star review, Accurate or not, and you could pretty easily spot the system and a real real rating.

That's that's great. I love it. So is an opportunity somebody could come out, help Amazon improvement improve Amazon. Probably even use their AP eyes to figure this out. Stephen, there's some A p I. It's out there. The name is Ahn has could plug in and help them. So if anyone wants to do that, you should let us know. I'd love to hear about it. We're here at, uh, in Key West on Sunset Key. Podcasting from the pool.

That's kind of crazy. I never want to leave a podcast again sometime from the pulpit. Anyway, check this out somewhat, Frank. Someone Frank Gruber here, and, uh, we'll be sharing more insights and thoughts about opportunities out there in the world is there's an intersection between technology and personal life, and this just happened to come across in a conversation in the pool.

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That's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening. This is somewhat frank signing off Frank Gruber. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe online. ITunes, soundcloud, Android. Wherever he can find it somewhat. Frank Podcast back soon. Another upset. Thanks so much.

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