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I assume they're fishing for data and active email accounts. If someone replies with a review, they know it's an active, monitored email address and can sell it for a better price.
Block and delete.
No, the sellers already have the email address, that's how they ask for reviews. It is simply the way the current internet works: reviews are king, but if the bought thing works as expected most people don't leave a review, while people with problems are much more likely to leave a bad review. So sending an email asking for reviews is cheap as hell and one of the easiest way to boost their reviews, because if even only every 10th person leaves an "everything is fine", that boosts their numbers immensely. And after 1 or 2 weeks, chances are that the big draw backs and failures didn't manifest yet. So also increasing the good to bad review ratio.
Fair, but I still think an email address they got a response from is of higher value for them to sell than an unmonitored junk email address as well.
That's a good point, though maybe a better way for retailers to deal with that would be to use the percentage of sold items that are associated by a review as an input into a ranking. I mean, maybe "no reviews, lots of items sold" should be used to indicate that an item is favorable rather than neutral.
Interesting idea, never thought about it. But I don't think the sellers would like to put that information out into the public. Many things, for example also tax related, doesn't incentives sellers to openly report such information. Except if it is a publicly traded company, than they must report it in their reports.
Yeah, there's some value to sales information.
considers
Amazon does provide some information.
goes to Amazon, picks a random product
https://www.amazon.com/HANPOSH-Military-Stopwatch-Waterproof-Chronograph/dp/B0CGX3SBJF
That's a bit limited, but camelcamelcamel already scrapes Amazon for price history, and so even if they aren't already grabbing sales volume history, my guess is that Amazon exposing this is probably already functionally exposing a fair bit of information about sales history.
checks camelcamelcamel
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CGX3SBJF
Nothing about sales volume, so if they are scraping that as well, they aren't currently exposing it to users. But I imagine that they could. It may be that competitors or various manufacturers in the industry already look at this to get some idea of what consumer demand is like.
And just the quantity of reviews will expose some data about sales volume. I mean, if an item has 15k reviews, then they're going to have sold more than 1000 units.