Friday 21 September 2018

Amazon's Review Policy

With its position of huge market dominance in the book industry, for both traditional publishers but even more so for the thriving independent and self publishing authors out there, Amazon can be the making or breaking of a book.

Central to this is the Amazon review system. Read a book and liked it? Rate it highly on Amazon and sales will increase. Rate it poorly and there will be a negative impact. Reviews are everything when buying books online, and until recently Amazon had a decent platform for doing this.

I review books all the time - lots of books, both ones I'm currently reading and ones I've read over the years. All freely and in my spare time because I enjoy books, promoting reading and supporting authors. And I post all of these reviews to as many places as I can - Goodreads is the primary resource but I copy the text out to Amazon UK, Amazon US, Waterstones, Kobo and Barnes and Noble sites (provided they carry the books). Spreading the word is the best way to boost book sales. My review ranking is pretty good and I have a lot of 'helpful' upvotes on my reviews.

But now things have changed. I live in the UK and so all of my transactions are naturally through the UK Amazon site, both for convenience and also because if I try to buy through the US site it encourages me to use the UK one. But now Amazon have decided that in order to post reviews to the US site, I need to have spent $50 on the US site in the last 12 months. But I can't because I'm in the UK.

So despite the fact that I can post my reviews quite happily in the UK, and I definitely spend more than $50 a year with Amazon as a company (as a Prime subscriber and other purchases), I can't post reviews to the US site any more. So that means that my opinion as a normal reader of a book isn't being seen by potential purchasers, which hurts both Amazon and of course the authors and publishers themselves.

So why have Amazon done this? I suspect there was some aspect of trying to curb fake reviews - either positive ones for poor products or damaging ones for those of a rival - and this approach no doubt won approval pretty quickly because there was also the added bonus of getting people to spend a little more.

However, it seems to me that this has done nothing to address that and indeed has probably made it worse. Sure you'll reduce the number of frivolous or spam reviews, but as the reviews are moderated anyway that's never been a big problem. But the biggest culprits of fake reviews is business, not individuals, and for most business $50 in order to post a few fake reviews to boost their sales (or remove sales from their competitors) would be money well spent. So they will still keep posting them.

Meanwhile the voices that really count, the average consumer, have now been reduced. Those who don't routinely buy from Amazon are now discarded, their opinion clearly worthless to Amazon when in fact their opinion is the one that counts the most. And for people like me who live in a different country and are just trying to help by posting honest reviews it hurts most of all because there's nothing we can do about it. Is my opinion to be discarded simply because I don't live in the US? That's protectionism to a whole new and unacceptable level.

So what Amazon has done is made their reviews less trustworthy at a stroke whilst also damaging their core business of books and publishing at the same time. Congratulations Amazon.

Why not count purchases made from Amazon as a whole? Why not look at people's review record to see if they are fake or not? Why not? Because Amazon don't care.

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