The previous sentence says the exact opposite:
If you’re that into the tiny details, maybe contact Amazon for clarification? Sheesh man.
Or maybe Amazon could switch to a review system that actually requires customers to buy the products they want to review through Amazon, instead of bandaid solutions like “must spend a minimum amount of money to leave reviews at all” or “can only leave a certain number of non-verified reviews a week.”
Amazon does mark reviews indicating who purchased, already.
Surely you know this? I mean, browse Amazon a bit and see for yourself rather than speculating?
The verified review system itself is a bandaid, and a particularly crappy one. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from loading up some Amazon pages for whatever young-adult fiction writer the Internet is hating on right now and leaving a one-star review for as many of their books as I’m allowed weekly under the non-verified review system, or pulling up the page for some video game I’ll never play and leaving a one-star review there because of some manufactured controversy on 4chan. Those reviews still count toward the overall rating and still show up on the review list, and very few customers are savvy enough to distinguish between verified and non-verified reviews, even with the former labeled as such. As already established with Steam, most people aren’t even going to scroll to the reviews themselves - they’ll just look at the star rating at the top of the page or in the search results - so I don’t even have to put much effort into this!
I think (I hope!) that you are underestimating the intelligence of most Amazon shoppers.
If people really do just go by the star rating at the top of the page, and don’t bother to even just read the most helpful review at the very least, then I don’t feel bad for them. A little bit of research - a little bit of reading - is not that hard to do, and should be something that everyone does, even if they’re just buying a cheap paperback or Kindle book.
And I think that pretty much everyone has figured out the difference between a Verified and non-verified review. Have some faith in your fellow humans. :)
And yet we’re over 300 posts into a thread about the exact same concept applied to Steam reviews.
So of you wanted to write a legit review of a product you received as a gift, where would you go?