u/avskotl

This is a new one on me. Got an ok iPhone watch strap from AI a couple of weeks ago and wrote a 4 star review for it, but called out that you can't charge it on a desktop stand.

Just noticed that it's marked as "Return Received" in old-fashioned-Amazon, despite me never requesting a return (of course), not returning it and not receiving any messages whatsoever.

Of course, this means my review has been removed (not "unapproved", but completely removed).

Seems a new trick by an underhand seller?

Note that the image is from my own reviews tracker - it's not a publicly available app or plugin (sorry!)

I finally got round to trying to make sense of the quality scores that Amazon is slapping on our reviews, and thought this would be of interest to others. Note that I'm not tracking which reviews have images (might do that in the future) so can't offer any info on correlation of images to Excellents, other than my current eval period has 32% evals-with-media (and 100% Excellent ratings). Edit: I went and added reviews-with-images, see later reply.

My takeaways (other opinions are available)

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First, the dominant signal is that Vine quality score seems to reward depth much more than it rewards star rating. Stars barely separate the buckets: Poor is still about 4.3, Fair about 4.6, Excellent about 4.4, and Good is 5.0 but on only 2 items. By contrast, review length separates them dramatically: Poor averages 39 words, Fair 58, Excellent 167. That suggests the quality score is probably reacting more to completeness, coverage, or detail than to positivity.

Second, the system appears heavily top-coded toward Excellent once a review clears some implicit threshold. Over 90% of scored items are Excellent, with very little in the middle. That makes me think this is not a finely graded editorial scale in practice. It behaves more like:

• too thin -> Poor / Fair
• detailed enough -> Excellent
• Good is either rare or unstable as a category

Third, sentence count reinforces that this is about structure, not just filler length. Excellent is not only longer in words, it has far more sentences on average (7.9 versus 2.8 / 3.3). That hints the score may favour reviews that cover multiple points rather than just being verbose.

Fourth, price may matter, but seems to be secondary. Higher-priced items skew more Excellent, but I suspect that may partly be because they naturally invite longer, more detailed reviews. In other words, price might be correlated with score through review depth rather than being independently rewarded.

Fifth, the data is telling us more about the scoring rubric than about product quality. This page is not really saying “better products get better quality scores.” It’s saying “reviews that look more substantial get better quality scores.”

In summary:

• the score looks weakly related to stars
• strongly related to review depth/structure
• probably threshold-based rather than nuanced

Not entirely surprising but useful to see the figures!

Hate to imagine what the ingredients are