I wish I knew the true value of Amazon product reviews when I was a buyer before I became a seller. In fact, I am still a buyer. Recently I wanted to get a new printer and was put off by very low review ratings. I wanted to check the ratings for the printer I had for about 10 or more years and loved but that is now discontinued and was truly surprised how low the rating was.

Now, being a seller, I think I know why. Amazon should be aware of the fact that the way product reviews and ratings are submitted now, seriously compromises sales on their marketplace. Many products have ratings much lower than they deserve due to the following:

- sellers can't comment on reviews (yes, the negative ones). I understand this function existed, but is now gone due to some sellers responding in an abusive way. Well, Amazon is surely capable of monitoring that and removing such abusive responses, but in general sellers should be able to respond.

- buyers leaving ratings without a review makes no sense. It helps neither buyers nor sellers. A few days ago we had someone leave a 1-star rating to our best selling product. No review. It brought down our rating significantly. However, we don't have a clue what made that customer unhappy, nor do potential buyers. However many of them would consider an overall, not so great, rating and might be put off by it.

- reviews left for a different product should absolutely be removed. The product I refer to above has 2 one-star ratings. One without a review that I mentioned, the other is a review from a customer that bought a different product from us. His reviews on that product, being abusive, were removed by Amazon (in fact, he left 3 reviews on the same purchase, one worse than another). So what does that customer do? He finds our best selling product and leaves a 1-star review there. Yes, it doesn't state that the customer made a verified purchase, but that review and the 1-star rating without a review has brought the overall product rating from 4.8 to 4.2 based on the small overall amount of reviews (new product).

- reviews stating false facts about a product. Example: a customer keeps insisting that product is unfiltered and connects it to the short life of the product. Yes, when talking food items, unfiltered products last much less than filtered ones. Our product is NOT unfiltered. It doesn't say anywhere in the listing or on the product that it is unfiltered. Product has 9 months to its expiration date. However, the customer (or is it a customer?) bothered to leave 3 reviews on the same purchase making claims that the product is "unfiltered, rancid, has a short shelf life" supporting these totally false facts with statements that he "almost ended up in a hospital" and "almost died". Luckily that review was removed, then that same customer finds our other product and leaves a review warning buyers to stay away from our brand.

- bots misinterpreting reviews. We had a customer who wrote in October 2023 that the product tasted expired to them. Amazon bot picked that up and converted it to a claim that we are selling an expired product. The product expiration date is 6/15/2024. We wrote 3 responses to Amazon offering them to check any item of this ASIN in any of their FCs to see that the expiration date is indeed 6/15/2024. We sent product invoices, other documents, photos of the product from the batch currently at Amazon FCs with the expiration date on them. Nothing happened. Same copy and paste response "we don't have enough documentation"... No response to our question what documentation should be provided to remove the claim. Not until the case was escalated there was any resolution visible... Why we, as a seller, have to be spending hours of our time worth of much more productive action, to fight a customer's opinion turned into a malicious fact by Amazon? Who would want to buy an expired product (an edible)?? Why the review is still there??? Yes, the claim has been removed, but not the review! And this is ridiculous that Amazon CS is not capable to do anything about product reviews. They refer you to a group with an email address that never answers or does anything. At least, in our case.

We honestly believe that Amazon is losing top$$$$ in sales due to the current product review practices providing a happy ground for black hatters, competitors and buyers who, for whatever reason, simply provide false product facts (vs opinions) in their reviews.