Zemic umbrella scam in Amazon
Recently I bought a Zemic umbrella (which was my third). The quality was really bad so that it broke within 2 weeks. So I went to Amazon to give a review of the umbrella. I went to my order history and searched for "umbrella" to find the product. And to my surprise, all 3 distinct Zemic umbrellas I had purchased were now delisted on Amazon. Means those products don't exist on Amazon anymore so you can't go to it's page and give a review or even see the product details.
Searching for umbrella in my Amazon orders
When I click on one of the product listing without images:
Product doesn't exist on Amazon
But when I just searched for "zemic umbrella" in Amazon, I can still find many listings of Zemic umbrellas:
Fake reviews
So I looked a little closer into these "highly rated" umbrellas. The first listing has an average rating of 5 stars! Out of the 663 ratings, 98% are 5 star ratings and the remaining 2% are 4 star ratings. And all the 663 ratings are within 2 months between January 30, 2025 and today, March 16, 2025 - so within 45 days. Those who has sold on Amazon knows how difficult it is to get people to write positive reviews.
I checked the profiles of random reviewers and almost all of them have only given 5 star reviews. Are people really this nice or are they paid?
Reviewer profile of an average Zemic umbrella reviewer.
In my next life at least I want to be born as someone who's 5 star happy with all his purchases.
What are they doing?
My speculation here is that they are pumping up fake positive reviews for the products, get a lot of sales, and then delete the product listing by the time people catch up and start putting negative reviews. And repeating the same process again with new listings.
Why did I buy three umbrella's if the quality was so bad?
Because my first umbrella was stolen by someone a couple of weeks after purchase and the second one a relative took from me so I ordered a third one as the replacement for that. I went for the umbrella solely because of its high ratings.
Fakespot didn't help
I did use fakespot.com extension to check if the reviews are fake but they didn't flag anything.
Please be wary of products even if they have lots of good reviews. Don't underestimate the power of fake reviews.
Disclaimer
Of course all of these are my assumptions and maybe 100% (minus me) of the people who bought Zemic umbrellas are actually happy with them.
Also, I found this older post from someone flagging zemic umbrella's suspicious ratings https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/zcad4e/why_is_this_doll_sold_along_with_umbrella_in/