Lions mane 8:1 extract on amazon has an F on fakespot. Why?

Hey, Fakespot! Didn't expect that. I am going to forewarn you, this will be a long one. I am going to go into a lot of detail, and I am going to pepper sarcasm and criticism in along the way. Just be prepared (peppered?) for that. I'm also going to have to split it up into 3 comment because of the character limts. That's how you know you are in for one of my rants!

Obviously you are not going to divulge your algorithms, but you must know stuff like this is not an uncommon problem, right? There are tons of vendors like us reporting the same thing. It does seem to happen with vendors that have smaller amounts of reviews. That just seems to be people like me trying, albeit naively, to do things honestly without playing the review game. This is a widespread issue with your platform, though. It's not like this is a surprise to anyone that's been in this industry for any time.

As u/BurakBaba has posited, some of the elements of this listing are unnatural. That includes the fact that only 28% of the reviews are actual reviews (44/156) and the rest are ratings.

Okay, I am going to be real with you here. If I was going to pay for fake reviews and break Amazon's TOS, would I not pay for people to write actual reviews? Why would I try to push a metric that I know your site will see as suspicious? You must know the people actually breaking the rules know how to game your systems, right? Hell, just buy some of the top products on Amazon right now, and see what comes in the mail. It's cards offering free product for reviews. You know how they got around Amazon's ability to catch that? They put all their bottles/jars in boxes, so they could hide the free product for review cards inside them. This way Amazon doesn't see the cards when they are intaked for FBA. Some have even moved to putting stickers inside the caps of the products to hide the review cards. I can send you pictures if you would like. We buy all our competitor's product to test in our lab, and we also do it to learn how they are running their systems. We do an insane amount of analytics on the market to understand how all this shit works. Plus, we analytically test these products in our lab to show how shitty they are, so it serves a dual purpose. That's the entire reason I started this company: to advance the analytical standards of the industry. This is also why I am so pissed off on the Amazon thing. The top selling products on there are all GARBAGE. So many things fail our lab testing, but then they have fucking 42,000 reviews!!! I have empirical data showing the product is not as they state. I have hard evidence they are breaking Amazon's TOS and giving away free product for reviews. Then they get good ratings, or at least not bad ones, and we get Fs. I am sure you can see where my cynicism of your entire site stems from.

Let's start with a big one: BioSchwartz. They are by far the top selling "curcumin" on Amazon right now. They have 42,794 reviews on their product. That number alone is just asinine for anyone that has ever run an online business. You know how many units you would have to sell to get that number of reviews organically? The number is astronomical. It's basically impossible. So how do they do it? They give away free product for reviews like everyone else at the top of the Amazon rankings. Before I get into that, let's talk about the product itself. Well they are doing what all the other garbage Amazon brands are doing: label dressing. They are not selling 1,500mg of curcumin like their listing would make a consumer assume. They are selling 150mg of curcumin mixed with 1,350mg of cheap tumeric. Tumeric only contains 3% curcumin. They obfuscate this even more by calling it "Turmeric Curcumin with BioPerine 1500mg." I mean come on... Curcumin comes from tumeric, but most non-technical consumers don't know the difference. They know that, and they play into that ignorance. A good dose of curcumin when combined with piperine is 1,000mg. That's 1,000mg of actual curcumin. The BioSchwartz stuff only really contains about 190.5mg of curcumin. However, a consumer would not really realize that. They would see our actual 1,000mg of curcumin and piperine, and think it was less than their 1,500mg of "tumeric curcumin" and think it was a better deal. It's misleading and predatory. It's everything I am trying to fight in this industry! This is just curcumin, too. It's the same for ashwagandha, lion's mane, ginseng, magnesium, etc. You name it, and it is an issue we have found with the top selling products on Amazon. Basically, being the top selling product on Amazon is one of the biggest correlations to how shitty a product is. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. The biggest Ecommerce retailer/platform in the world, and the top selling supplement products are almost universally the worst. How on Earth could that happen? Review manipulation. You know it. Anyone in the industry knows it. It's undeniable when you look under the surface. Nobody wants to admit it, because it would completely erode consumer trust in the entire concept of online reviews and rankings. However, that doesn't make it any less true. The highest selling top-ranked products on the largest Ecommerce website in the world are all garbage propped up by manipulation and violations of the site's own terms of service. The only way to fix it is to scrub the whole thing and start over, but that will never happen. Now I know your site has no real way to assess product quality. It's about reviews, so why bring it up at all? Well review manipulation is entirely how shitty products can be at the top. So let's move to that.

So how does BioSchwartz get 42,794 reviews for a misleading low-quality product? Free product. This is is not a surprise to anyone in the industry. Everyone knows how they are doing it. I am sure you know how they are doing it, too. Let's go into the details, though. So BioSchwartz has boxes that they use to surround their bottles, as most of the top Amazon products do. They do this to hide cards inside that instruct customers how to get free product for reviews. Here is an example of the BioSchwartz one. That's literally posted in a 5 star review on Amazon... So they posted an image on an Amazon review showing TOS violations, yet Amazon does nothing about it, nor do they get an F from you guys for the obvious review manipulation going on. That instructs people to go to www.bioschwartz.com/free to get free product. This was their old card before they updated it. This is likely because they ran into issues with Amazon's policy team by instructing people to go to their main website. That's a big no-no on Amazon, since they want you to stay in the Amazon ecosystem. So Amazon treats that seriously, because that loses Amazon money. If customers buy from Amazon, then get a card telling them to go to the companies main site where they can buy it cheaper, Amazon loses sales. Amazon can't have that! It wasn't about the manipulated reviews. It was about revenue loss for Amazon. So what did BioSchwartz do? They made a new site for the review thing. This gets around Amazon's rule that you can't send customers to your main site where you sell the things, but still gives them the opportunity to ratfuck the reviews and rankings. Win/win for Amazon! They get to keep getting tons of manipulated reviews that helps to sell more product, and Amazon gets to keep getting their commission.

Now the site the new cards instruct you to go to is https://supplementgift.com/

Ohh, but they totally say "This offer is not dependent on leaving a review on any place nor the quality or manner of feedback that you provide." This is just after they state "To qualify participants agree to send us their experience with the previously purchased product that they have been actively taking for at least 15 days or more." So that is a sneaky weaselly way to get around the letter of the rule on Amazon. They are not giving you free product for a review of that product. They are giving you free product for review of a DIFFERENT product! Ahh, say no more. Totally not review manipulation. If they were giving free units of "tumeric curcumin" for reviews of that "tumeric curcumin" then that would totally be a violation of Amazon's TOS. They are just giving away free collagen or probiotics for a review of their "tumeric curcumin." Totally above board. So they got around the rule about not sending customers to their own site through cards in Amazon orders by creating a totally different site they send them to. Then they got around the rule about not giving away free product for reviews of that product by giving them free different product for reviews of the product. This is a universal strategy now. Most of the other top selling brands on Amazon have their own review websites, too. They also have chat bots on Facebook where they invite people to private Facebook pages for review harvesting. That's a big one now, too. The Genius Company does that a lot. They of course also do the review card/sticker/site game as well.

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