The bribery business is alive and well on Amazon. Customers are gaming Amazon for thousands of dollars worth of free stuff. How? People trade positive reviews for reimbursement (a workaround for Amazon’s ban on swapping free products for reviews). One woman profiled by BuzzFeed“purchased” $15k worth of products -- and was reimbursed for nearly all of them in addition to holding on to her loot. Sweet, sweet Honey… In case you missed it, PayPal bought the money-saving plug-in Honey for $4B. That’s surprising in several ways: Honey had raised only $55m, and it was apparently last valued at around $700m, which makes the $4B price tag borderline unbelievable. The deal was PayPal’s largest acquisition ever. Your shelves are about to be smarter than your intern. Amazon (who else) launched the Dash Smart Shelf, which uses a Wi-Fi-enabled scale to sense when supplies are low and reorder them automatically.
I bought a bunch of stuff, over 30 items off Amazon earlier in the year and I got a lot of money back because products were significantly mis-described. Maybe 3 grand in refunds of 7k in purchases. What I learned is if it says "Amazon's choice", there is probably something wrong. They are LOUSY with fake reviews and reviews given by people who got free stuff. I even found a review I did for a projector where I did not specify the model attached to a completely different one by another maker. Amazon are up to the same shenanigans as Yelp and other corporations with deceiving consumers through review trading/manipulation.