Amazon is not the only one selling products. Amazon sells half of its products from third-party sellers. Amazon claims it is merely a conduit between buyers and sellers and does not bear any responsibility for defective products (although recent court cases have challenged this assertion).Amazon customers are not supposed to be able email third-party sellers from outside the platform. However, a Wall Street Journal report shows that sellers may still be able to contact buyers with negative reviews. Some businesses also offer email extraction services to buyers.Instead of paying people for positive reviews, which Amazon has banned since 2016, third-party sellers now go after negative product reviews and offer payment to remove or change them (which is also against Amazon's rules). Nicole Nguyen wrote in the WSJ about Katherine Scott who purchased an oil spray bottle for cooking that didn't work as promised. She left a negative feedback. One week later, she received an email from the customer service representative of the oil sprayer company. It offered a refund if she removed the review.Ms. Scott requested a refund, but did not want to delete her review. Ms. Scott was contacted again the next day by another representative, who declined to issue her a refund. We can't accept a bad review. Read the email. Can you please help me delete this review? To express my gratitude, I would like to send $20 back to you. She received another email plea from the same address a few hours later.Amazon stated to the WSJ that it does not share customers' email addresses with third parties and that it has removed more than 200 million fake reviews in one year. Nguyen says that third-party vendors are still finding ways to contact customers. This excellent report contains advice on how to protect your email address against Amazon sellers who don't need it.
