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Another mind boggling aspect of Amazon’s review system is that it categorises multiple products / variations under one. So if you want to buy products X with variations X1, X2 and X3- the review page for product X1 will also show X2, X3 ratings bundled together. You don’t quite know the rating of X1 individually. You can filter reviews out by the overall rating is the aggregated view. I can’t believe how this is helpful for customers.


I was trying to buy a copy of the Iliad and found that they combined the reviews of EVERY TRANSLATION AND EVERY EDITION - I found people talking about 30+ versions on the same listing!

Reviews for Fagles's Iliad were combined with Pope's Iliad and Lattimore's Iliad and so on and so forth.

Navigation is also borked for books with many different versions - if you play around with the 'hardback', 'paperback', 'audiobook' buttons at the top of the page you'll find there's no consistency about what edition they lead you to.


You were expecting a review to overturn the standard Fagles for the Iliad, and Lattimore for the Odyssey?


Also the variations are often not just cosmetic things like colour. Sometimes they are entirely different products.


Maybe that's to combat the strategy where sellers add an irrelevant category or hyper specific one, in order to get the "Best Seller" stamp on their thumbnail.




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