Sunday, March 31, 2019

Amazon Ups requirements for Customer Reviews

I just finished Alex Epstein's The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and I was going to write an Amazon review. When I clicked the "write a review" button, they hit me with a red box that said I didn't meet the minimum eligibility requirements.


My first thoughts on seeing this were that I'd probably made some transgression that they were cracking down on. I spend a lot of time on Amazon reviews, reading, writing and commenting, and I do like to push the limits of what I can do. I clicked to their guidelines page and found that they've added some new requirements:

Eligibility

To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free Prime trials do not qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, or create or modify Profile pages, Shopping Lists, Wish Lists or Registries.

The big change appears to be the "in the past 12 months", which was added in April 2018, which I found by browsing the Wayback Machine. I haven't spent over $50 with a credit card there for well over a decade. I do buy a lot of Kindle books, but I usually do it with Amazon gift cards. I have a hobby where I acquire a lot of them.

Well, it's their right to do it and I'm probably one of only a few people inconvenienced by this. This does bring up some issues about the times we live in. There's a lot of free stuff on the internet and it's easy to get a sense of entitlement. When I clicked the "write a review" button and saw the red box, I fired off a bunch of tweets to people I follow on Twitter, who might be authors who sell books on Amazon. I hastily thought this might be an impediment to struggling authors, and it might be. Of course all this internet content has to be paid for somehow. It's interesting that when Amazon started growing, it seems like they were always known for growing while losing money. Somehow, Jeff Bezos pulled it off and became the world's richest man.

Amazon actually started out selling only books and they've become very important to authors. Usually, any book link you find on the internet goes to its Amazon page, so its book reviews are an important forum, where I've had a lot of fun participating. They still allow me to comment.

When I searched Google to find out if anyone was as outraged as me, I found that they've been having problems with fake reviews. This might be why they don't include gift cards in their $50 spending requirement. They probably make it easier to be anonymous.

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