That's kinda a shame. I have an Aukey keyboard, and mpow headphones. Both vastly exceeded my expectations. I wonder why they are begging for reviews in the first place, that's behavior I would expect from shady junk peddlers.
Bummer, I always considered Aukey the poor man's Anker. Decent enough products at a lower price, roughly comparable to RAVpower in feature/quality at least for the power banks. The main thing you lose is their ability to support some of the high voltage charge standards.
I'd rather see Amazon patrol trademark infringing products that inflate ratings. I mistakenly bought a 'thermapro' instead of a 'thermapen' and while it initially worked ok it eventually disintegrated around a year later.
I came across a recommendation for Mpow on Twitter, and was wondering why they are so hard to find. I still ended up ordering them, just via Walmart.
https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1317125603972149254?lang=...
I read the article. Still unclear on what an "Amazon-native brand" is. Maybe a brand sold exclusively on Amazon?
Do they get special perks from Amazon for doing this?
The leaked database of a fake review marketplace might be to blame here.
> It is open to question why Amazon decided to act now;
Lol, because there is now public verifiable data that sellers do and get away with these shitty tactics on Amazon. Amazon UK still block reviews with pictures which show the seller included incentive to review.
I’m kind of surprised by this, I’ve bought mpow stuff and it’s decent value for money (and I’ll take a captcha to prove I’m real if necessary?). To me this indicates more that every competitor must be doing this rather than singling out a handful of bad actors.
This looks very much like Amazon creating a problem, Amazon nurturing the problem until the problem is basically 100% of their third party seller business and now trying to scape goat 3rd party vendors, who lets be honest, are getting in the way of Amazon’s white label products.
I had some Aukey stuff and I was satisfied.
But I guess the question to ask is -- what other brands did I not become acquainted with because I searched for 4-stars or better?
And what do you know I've gotten random items shipped to me that I never ordered from at least three of these brands, so they were using that method to boost their stats too.
I really hope Anker stays off this list. They always seemed to make quality products, but I can imagine they'd feel the pressure to give into shady tactics themselves if all their competitors were engaging in it.
I've ordered some things from Mpow and Aukey before and they seemed like pretty good quality as well. Not that I condone these practices at all, but I could sympathize with the argument that in a marketplace that relies on reviews and where your competitors are buying thousands of reviews, it could be almost impossible to survive without doing the same, even if your product is good.
Of course, that kind of marketplace only hurts the consumer, so I appreciate Amazon cracking down on it.