Amazon Product Reviews

I have been doing a lot of reading on Amazon ghost accounts and people paying for reviews. I am fairly new to selling on Amazon but I know that they can and will shut you down in a heartbeat. My questions to the group are:

1. Is feedback on Amazon linked to the sellers account or to the product? A friend of mine who sells on Amazon told me that if multiple people sell the same product Amazon will use the best product description and image from the account that has sold the most and use it for all sellers. That seems very unfair and could really hurt me if I have custom product photography. Anybody with any experience here?

2. The other question I have relates to the actual product itself. I have heard that a lot of people sell the product under their own UPC/ASIN and not the one from the manufacturer, thus eliminating the product from being shared. Anybody have any experience with this?

Yes lot of people prefer to write reviews about their products on Amazon and for this purpose they hire people to write reviews but amazon only allows those people to write reviews who have accounts on Amazon and buy a product at Amazon.

Any big difference between verified reviews and non? I would assume verified reviews would strengthen your marketability?

Indeed, buyers trust more the content of the verified reviews. But, most of the people are looking at the total number of reviews first. Then, they check the overall rating (which is said to be around 4.5). After that they check the type of reviews a product has. However, if there are hundreds od reviews on a specific product, people will not scroll through all of them in order to see how many of them are verified. So, at some point, unverified reviews have the same weight as the verified ones.

So do you have to have purchased the item through Amazon to leave a review or can anyone leave one?

This brings up my other inquiry about the reviews being linked to the product or the seller who sells it?

Its unfortunately become a norm to get fake reviews these days, ideally from different users as opposed to trying to create multiple accounts yourself with the purpose of writing your own reviews.

I have heard from several friends that getting these fake reviews to actually stick is become harder and harder due to Amazon finding ways to link them between certain people.