Twice now I have bought items on Amazon after reading seemingly positive reviews that actually turned out to be for different versions of the products. I'll detail the two separately:
I owned a pair of JVC HAFX1X since April 2012, but after a year and a half one of the earbuds died (as tends to be the case with earphones). Nonetheless, I'd liked their quality so hopped on Amazon to buy a new pair, and noticed a new version, the JVC HA-FX3X, which on Amazon UK has 5 reviews as of writing this, as opposed to the 2,193 reviews on the original model. Call me skeptical, but I like to read a lot of positive reviews before buying an item as frankly I don't want to deal with the hassle of returning inferior or faulty products. So, I went over to Amazon US (rather than UK), and noticed 1,863 reviews for the newer JVC HA-FX3X. After reading many reviews, I purchased the HA-FX3X over on Amazon UK. Then, I decided to read some more reviews on Amazon US, and noticed on page 2 a one star review that said it was for the HA-FX3X. I thought this odd, as I'd assumed they all were. Then I looked closer at the other reviews, and they turned out to be for the HAFX1X. To conclude, the few reviews that actually were for the HA-FX3X said they're worse than the original model.
Next up is the 4TB Seagate external HDD, which appears to have 941 reviews and holds 4 1/2 stars, as you can see here:
I bought it, because I am in desperate need of backup storage because my 3TB internal drive sounds like it's going to die soon. Hopefully it won't, because after reading reviews that were actually about the 4TB model it seems it'll be a gamble between DOA or dead in two months. But wait, weren't there 941 reviews for the 4TB one? Surely I read the reviews before buying. Yes, I did read the reviews. Sorted by 'most helpful', the majority of the review were positive. This time, I did notice that most weren't actually for the 4TB model, but I hoped there couldn't be much of a difference so went ahead and made the purchase as I needed the emergency backup space ASAP. Turns out there is a difference though. Out of the first hundred, yes, hundred, most helpful reviews, only six were for the 4TB model. Pardon me, but that just doesn't seem right. To make it worse, of the six reviews, two were one star, three were two stars, and two were five stars, with the failings of the HDDs sounding pretty dire and even the most positive reviews complain about an incredibly cheap, noisy, and potentially dangerous power supply.
What I'd like to know, how is this acceptable? On Google, I expect to see adverts and misplaced promotion as I'm not paying them. On Amazon, I'm not only paying them directly for Prime membership (which on a side-note I highly recommend), they're also taking a cut from sales. I accept this, because that's the way they make money. What I don't accept is them misleadingly placing reviews under different products. Yes, there's a tiny search box to the side, which on typing "4TB" came up with 20 reviews. if that's the total number of reviews for the 4TB model, a 2.1% chance of review relevance if fairly abysmal. Sure, Amazon probably want to make it look like products are more popular and reliable than they are, and maybe the manufacturers are asking them to, but you simply can't do that with most, if not all, goods. Two models of earphones are going to have different performance, four different HDD capacities are going to have varying reliability, two types of pen may write completely differently, and two types of boxset for the same TV show have different contents, yet all the reviews are combined so you have no idea which is for which variation.