If you’re an author, you probably have your books on Amazon and you probably call or write to Amazon about some of their policies.
An Amazon policy that totally drives me batty is that, in Canada, we can’t phone Amazon, we have to write to them. Writing to them and getting an answer is not a timely process. Sometimes I need to know an answer to my question soon, not 2 – 3 days later. If it’s a matter of they don’t want to pay long distance charges, I’ll gladly pay just to speak with someone. Writing to them can sometimes be near blog length to get my question/point across. And then, their answers aren’t always clear in answering my initial question, soooooo, the writing-to-them process starts again.
My second big beef with Amazon is how they decide that a review should be removed. I’ve had several legitimate,verified reviews removed, questioned Amazon about it, and received vague answers that don’t really answer anything except that Amazon has a policy on the issue.
My latest please-answer-my-question-so-it-makes-sense question to Amazon was, how do they determine a books ranking. I explained to them the following: one of my books has 92 reviews; 81 five star reviews, 7 four star reviews, 2 three star reviews, 2 one star reviews.
Below is Amazon’s Review Ranking Graft of the book. Their math doesn’t add up.
By my calculations, 88% of my reviews are five stars, verified purchase reviews. The point being that when an author receives 87% five star reviews, their book rankings shows an overall five star ranking. At 86%, the book shows a 4.5 star overall ranking.
When I wrote to Amazon about their calculations, this was their answer:
| Hello, The overall star rating for a product is determined by a machine-learned model that considers factors such as the age of the review, helpful votes by customers, and whether the reviews are from verified purchasers. Similar machine-learned factors help determine a review’s ranking in the list of reviews. The system continues to learn which reviews are most helpful to customers and improves the experience over time. Any changes that customers may currently experience in the review ranking or star ratings is expected as we continue to fine-tune our algorithms. Thank you for doing business with us. Amazon.com |
Yep, it all makes sense to me now–we’re monitored by a machine-learned model in Amazon’s cyber space.
Any Amazon issues you want to talk about? Comment below.
