AMAZON'S VARIATION SYSTEM HAS A MAJOR LOOPHOLE THAT ABUSING CONSUMERS BIG TIME THROUGH VARIATION FRAUD

 

Using the company's marketplace, fraudulent sellers on Amazon have abused the loopholes of variations on listings throughout the year 2016-2017 and in 2018 the issue of variation abuse is at its speak. Amazon hasn’t really owned up to this emerging scam or cared to update their procedures to find the abusers, leaving thousands of consumers to get fooled or literally scammed with irrelevant reviews. The scam has emerged at its heights ever since Amazon strengthened its customer review policy. 

Amazon allows sellers to add any variations to listings on Amazon with an open tool without any proper verifications or vetting. This allows sellers to commit variation fraud on Amazon.

Variation fraud is when sellers add irrelevant product listings as variations for a primary product listing. Fraudulent sellers do this to gain high ratings of the irrelevant listings and get it added onto their primary ASIN. This shadow or hides the low ratings that their primary product has. By fraudulently deceiving the consumers to believe their primary product is a highly rated product, these sellers are able to gain more sales fraudulently. 

Despite repeated complaints to listings-report@amazon.com, the team is very irresponsible and only offers an automated reply as such:

 “We investigated the issue and took responsible action.”

 However, the only thing Amazon’s associates really do is remove the incorrect variations from the primary listing. The abusive fraudulent sellers are very smart to add the irrelevant variations using their inactive seller accounts right back, making sure their primary seller account never gets involved with negative warnings by Amazon. 

My decision to share this to media has to do with amazon’s lack of interest on my repeated complaint which has made me share this article to change.org on February 20th 2018 and I am looking forward to medias response on publishing about this scam to create awareness for consumers and Amazon.

There are hundreds if not thousands of sellers committing this variation fraud and the list can go on forever however I wanted to bring certain sellers to change.org and Amazon’s attention as proof to strengthen the case.

 

SOLUTIONS FOR AMAZON TO CONSIDER IMPLEMENTING

-       As a seller on Amazon, I am disturbed by Amazon’s silence on this and Amazon needs to immediately enforce their procedure on manually checking ASIN variation and should approve or reject requests by seeing the connection between ASINs.

 -       This is the only way of making sure such abusive tactics do not emerge on Amazon market-place assuring trust on the marketplace as well as consumer confidence on customer reviews.

Variations Fraud

Currently there are over 3500-5000 ASINs on amazon committing this variation fraud. 

At the same time amazon can implement this policy where if an ASIN is reported for variation fraud it can be cleaned up and blocked for manual check-up when a seller requests re-adding on variation. This will help Amazon overall.

Now the abusive sellers shown above are just 2 of thousands of variation abuse sellers committing the fraud.

 I hope amazon will implement a structured policy upon this article being published.

 

SIGN THOS PETITION FOR CHANGE!!

 

LET'S ASK AMAZON IMPLEMENT A NEW POLICY ON VARIATIONS ABUSE WHERE EACH AND EVERY VARIATION A SELLER REQUESTS ON IT'S MARKET-PALCE IS VETTED BEFORE APPROVAL.