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A Message From Amazon

I just got this with the subject line of "Top Reviewer Notification: Non-Verified Purchase Reviews Policy Change." Right there, you know that Amazon is fiddling with the review program again and it won’t be anything good. They write:

"Hello!

As a frequent reviewer of products on Amazon, we want you to be among the first to know about our review policy changes. Shoppers consistently tell us that they value reviews from other shoppers who they know have purchased the product on Amazon. As a result, we are introducing a policy change around customer reviews. Customers can now only submit a limited number of non-Amazon Verified Purchase reviews each week. The count is calculated each week from Sunday at 12:00am UTC through Saturday 11:59pm UTC. Your ability to submit Amazon Verified Purchase reviews will not be impacted. This policy also does not apply to Vine reviews or reviews on digital and physical books, music, and video.

What is an Amazon Verified Purchase review?

•              When an Amazon Verified Purchase badge appears next to a review, it means we have verified that the person writing the review purchased the product at Amazon and represents a typical customer experience with the product.

•              Reviews that are not marked “Amazon Verified Purchase” are valuable as well, but we either can’t confirm that the product was purchased at Amazon or the customer did not pay a price available to most Amazon shoppers.

For more details, please see our Community Guidelines at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201929730.

                                       

We're always innovating on behalf of our customers, and we'd love any feedback or ideas you have for how we can improve. You can contact us directly at community-help@amazon.com.

Regards,

Your Amazon Community Team"

Of course they don’t just tell you what the limited number is…you have to go looking for it. Eventually one discovers that they have decided, in their Borg like wisdom, the magical number to cap submissions at is FIVE. Yes, no matter whether you write quality reviews like I do or one and two sentence garbage “reviews” like many folks do, everyone is equally capped at five. This is not innovation---this is flat out stupid.

Not only is it an unnecessary hassle for me as I often submit a number of reviews over a couple of hours and clean the decks here, it does nothing to improve the quality of reviews at Amazon. Many shoppers complain about the worthlessness of the reviews at the site and this change does nothing to improve anything.