I’m mad right now. Actually, so mad that I should change the title of this post from “discussion” to “rant” or “aggressive complaints”. But something tells me that not quite as many people will enjoy that title, so I might as well at least let them click on the article and get to the first line before they go find another blog. Wait.. Wait… all of you who are walking away right now… come back… I promise I’ll start the verbal abuse discussion soon. (for the rest of you, i’m in a weird mood so bare with me)

Anyways, I had a little extra time today and so was going to move all of my reviews to amazon, or at least a few that I feel strongly about, but promptly found out that I could not. I received this error message:

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For those of you that can’t read the photo, Amazon informed me that in order to submit reviews, I needed to make a “minimum amount of valid debit or credit card purchases”. I have purchased things on Amazon in the past, but aside from a few cents of rollover change, it has always been purchased with a gift card, which makes sense for me especially considering the fact that for most of my book-buying life, I didn’t have a credit card.

Amazon makes it impossible for me to write reviews, because I don’t use Amazon as my primary source of purchasing. That means that I, and other people who use gift cards to make purchases, will never be allowed to share their opinions on books and other products which they buy. In fact, it almost completely outlaws people under the age of 17 from even thinking about reviewing.

In my opinion, that’s blatantly wrong. I mean, I understand that there needs to be some precautions in place to make sure that bots don’t come in and write hundreds of fake reviews, but does it really have to ban everyone who uses gift cards, or buys things from alternative retailers? Since Amazon doesn’t have its own merchandise, it just sells everyone else’s, it would make sense to leave reviews even if you don’t buy anything from there.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious that all of you will point out to prove that Amazon is actually super justified in their decision to block me from the amazon review depth, but until then I’m going to be pissed. Plus, just by posting this i’ll probably have people stop asking me to review their books, since other people will give it more publicity on amazon. Or I guess I could use this as an excuse to buy something for myself! (although i have tons of gift cards so that would be a little unhelpful)

but yeah. thus concludes my rant on the issues of Amazon’s review system.

let's talk

What are your opinions on Amazon’s review system?  Have you run into this issue before? Am I overlooking something that makes this all make sense?

joce-sign-off

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