The Fault in Amazon’s Stars
By: Megan Preston Meyer
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Publishing, Data Science, Writing, Amazon

This was a star rating only, not a review, and those are anonymous, I was told.

Well, yes, ratings are anonymous, but I assumed that Amazon would at least know who did it. And I was very clear that I wasn’t asking who it was — I just wanted them to investigate whether it came from a suspicious account.

But it’s anonymous, my customer service rep reiterated. Evidently, nowhere in its vast AWS cloud cover does Amazon keep simple, transactional, small data like who gave what how many stars.

We had reached the limits of what my customer service rep could do, so she counseled me to email Seller Central or Author Central. I did so, and received — within seconds — the following response.

Please be informed that Amazon strives to cultivate a diversity of opinion on our products while staying within our guidelines. We allow our customers to air their honest thoughts on items they have received.

I get it, I really do. Ratings systems would be pretty worthless if people could have the bad ones removed. But, as I pointed out in my reply, this rating could not reflect an honest thought because no customers had received my item yet.

Shouldn’t a company as mature as Amazon have some sort of mechanism for separating out legitimate feedback from illegitimate? Probably. But why would they? You’re still going to buy stuff from them anyway.

Cutthroat Competition

The fact that someone can leave an anonymous one-star rating on a book that has never been sold, and that an algorithm displays it, is infuriating. The fact that you can’t access a human being at Amazon who has the ability or authority to do anything about it is even more infuriating. But perhaps the most infuriating of all is the fact that someone would do something like this in the first place.

I’m 99% sure that this single star is illegitimate, but I have to consider the possibility that it’s real. Even though no one had bought my book, there were at least eight people — all family and friends — that had read it.

One of them could, I guess, harbor such vitriol that they lied to my face and told me they loved it, only to run to their computer at the first opportunity to try to sabotage my dreams.

But the more likely explanation is that one of the 5,549 authors ranked ahead of me in Children’s Jobs & Careers Reference Books sees me as a threat. It’s a cutthroat category — I knew that going in — but I had no idea it would be this ruthless.

This is actually a thing — competitors leaving poor reviews on your product so that theirs looks better by comparison. It’s so prevalent that Amazon’s Community Guidelines specifically call it out, and give you at least the semblance of recourse.

Unfortunately, these guidelines are set up to govern reviews, not ratings. Reviews can be disputed, because there is something to dispute. There are words and patterns and indicators that mark a review as suspicious. Malicious reviewers write enough rope to hang themselves with, at least sometimes (although it sounds like the Report Abuse process is not particularly robust, either).

Since ratings are anonymous, you can’t prove that they came from a competitor. There isn’t even a dispute process. Which means that I’m stuck with a horrible rating that’s not legitimate but won’t be removed.

One Star is Better Than Zero

Every time I look at my product page, my stomach hurts. I have a visceral reaction to the injustice; the one-star rating will always be there, bringing my average down. It impacts my ranking and visibility, and might very well affect someone’s decision to buy my book or not.

But Amazon doesn’t get to determine my self-worth.

I choose to look at my one-star rating as a badge of honor. The hardest leap is from zero to one — just ask Peter Thiel. I used to have zero stars, because I used to have zero books…but now I’m at least in the game.

My book is on Amazon². It’s a real, tangible thing, born of my intellect and hard work. It may never be a bestseller, but it might make a difference to a couple of people — and that’s enough.