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E-commerce Sites Edit Customer Reviews
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Online retailers have a wide range of approaches to customer product reviews, with some struggling to balance candor with the desire to sell product. The Wall Street Journal Online has an overview of sites' policies. Newegg 'says it has a team of eight people who monitor reviews and reject submissions if they are too vague, mention competitors or criticize a brand without specific product insight, among other reasons. From July 1 to Aug. 2, the site received 18,188 reviews and rejected 15% of them, according to a Newegg spokesman.' Meanwhile, Overstock recently changed its policy: 'The Web retailer had been relying on its merchandising group -- the employees responsible for deciding which products to sell on the site -- to monitor reviews submitted by customers, but found that the group tended to approve only positive reviews. In January, the Salt Lake City-based company changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team. The company now says it posts both positive and negative comments, as long as they are constructive.'"
Once you know, you never Newegg.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I once wrote something to the effect of: "I can't recommend this laptop backpack for anyone who travels a lot," and the site neatly editted out the "can't". Never filling out one of those things again.
The company now says it posts both positive and negative comments, as long as they are constructive.'"
Nothing's easier than saying "Sorry, I won't do it again" and pulling up your pants after getting caught. It doesn't change the fact you WERE caught and you DID do what you were caught doing.I also in no way guarantees that this behavior will not resurface at a later date.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
This really shouldn't come as a suprise at all. The fact is, companies are out to sell product. I'm not saying they should delete all of the negative reviews, but don't be surprised if a lot of them do get deleted.
When you watch any type of commercial, you're not going to hear a negative review mentioned, correct? Why should the web be any different?
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Isn't there a difference between editing a review, and rejecting a review? Maybe I didn't RTFA close enough, but I didn't read anything about editing any of the reviews.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Seems to me that this is just filtering. While that's still not good, it's a lot more understandable and acceptable than editing what people say. Yet another misleading Slashdot headline, I guess.
"Astroturfing" certainly isn't something new, and neither is the practice of manipulating articles. Advertising slime certainly *would* stoop to that level to promote a product.
Heck, even movie reviews are total garbage. Sony just got busted for publishing "reviews" penned by someone that didn't even exist.
I don't trust *any* online review, be it on newegg, epinions.com, or amazon. Best reviews are still the ones you get from friends.
I don't think this should really be much of a surprise. It is impossible to trust the reviews that you read. The only person who benefits from truth is the consumer. Everyone else benefits from praise, false or not. The fact that Amazon had a great many reviews of their books posted by the authors or people related to the authors/publishers should give some insight into whether or not "customer reviews" are a good way of judging a product's merits.
Fry's Electronics owns Outpost, and I know someone who works at Fry's... At the penalty of losing their job, they're not allowed to say ANYTHING negative about any product whatsoever. They can't specifically say one product is better than another either. I wonder if this policy will change now as well?
I knew that many people couldn't have liked the DVD Night at the Roxbury!
Amazon does this all the time. I've frequently left reviews for products on Amazon, and if the review is anything but glowing adoration for the product, they tend to not post the review at all. Or, they'll simply edit the review so it doesn't say anything at all helpful.
The WSJ article only mentions Amazon in passing (it no longer allows anonymous reviews), but they have the strongest review censorship I've seen yet.
Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.
There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.
(And we can't forget the time that Amazon.com accidentally slipped and published the identities of every reviewer, so that it became obvious which were editorial, publisher, or even authorial! shills.)
On the other hand, Amazon does occasionally allow wonderful things, like hundreds of reviews of Bil Keane's work that are mostly interested in the ontological existence of being. But these are rare and hard to find.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Right, or how your wife never looks better than she does at the wedding. That's why so many men cry at their own wedding--they know its all downhill from that point on.
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This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. They are under no obligation to enable you to exercise your freedom of speech on their site. You're more than welcome to publish your own site, tell your friends or hand out flyers on the street corner.
All your talk of "free speech" and "censorship" is rather ridiculous.
I've been on both sides. I ran the message board for a (small-signal) radio station for a while, and fought with management over posts about competing stations. Hint: don't admin a board unless you and the management are completely clear on such issues! Especially if you have something of an emotional investment in the subject.
But sometimes it just gets out of hand. The message boards for Woot.com are full of spam postings, whining, and just plain crap. But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.
The best compromise would be have a clear policy about what will be deleted, and stick to it. That way, you can field complaints from management for letting opposing viewpoints through, and you can also get flamed by whiners wanting to crapflood. If you're catching hell from both sides, you know you're doing something right.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I think product review comments should be moderated just like discussion forums. When posts are edited, they should be clearly marked as edited with an explanation.
I wrote a review on TireRack that got silently rejected last winter. The thing is, I wrote the review specifically to warn people that a particular set of "All-Season" tires was dangerously inadequate on even a light dusting of snow, despite the manufacturer's claims. Unfortunately, I suppose when you get up in the $250/tire range, sales trump safety.
There is nothing in that article to suggest the reviews are being edited. Rather, the article states that reviews are simply being approved or rejected which, regardless of perspective, is an entirely different thing.
Editing someone elses words would be far worse than simply applying some editorial control as to what is posted on their own site. Slashdot does the same sort of thing in the form of moderation. Moderators can affect what is seen by readers but they can't change individual posts.
Thanks,
David
# Hack the planet, it's important.
This is an abiding flaw of a non-transparent system in which an anonymous editor employed by the company chooses from anonymous reviews. They have tried to remedy this a bit with Real Name, but the fundamental problem remains: one or two dedicated shills or critics can easily manipulate the system.
As another example, some of you may remember the fake Amazon reviews of Bil Keane's Family Circus books during the heyday of spinnwebe's Dysfunctional Family Circus.
Evil sig is livE.
The only true independent reviewer that I know of is Consumer Reports. Of course, there is the problem that they don't necessarily review the types of products that New Egg sells.
False advertising is illegal. There are laws regarding what types of claims you can make, and how much you have to back them up. You can say "our product is great" but you cannot say "the President loves our product" (unless of course he publicly said that, or you've arranged a contract with him, etc.). Similarly, you couldn't say "we have conducted an independant scientific survey, and determined that 99% of people love our product" if that isn't true. Of course there are cases where companies commision "independant" reviews, or distort stats to their favor. But laws exist to constrain advertising, and prevent out-and-out lying.
... that would be misleading. Similarly, you cannot label them as "user reviews" if they have been edited.
When it comes to online user reviews, the situation gets a bit sticky. The reviews are hosted on the company's site... but something that claims to be "user reviews" implicitly indicates that these are the comments from all the users who cared to enter a comment. To modify or distort the comments is to change the implicit nature of the commenting system. So the company needs to clearly state "these reviews have been filtered and edited by our staff" or else they have to let the comments stand, consistent with a reasonable person's expectation of what is meant by "user reviews." To do otherwise is to purposefully mislead the customer. You cannot say "this medication is approved by doctors" if by "doctors" you mean some English professors who have Ph.D.s
(Note: a certain amount of filtering to remove blatantly inflamatory or irrelevant reviews is of course okay, since this doesn't contradict a normal expectation of what a "user review" is.)
It's kind of funny that you mention Sony .
New Egg is great. I've ordered from them multiple times. Only once have I had a defective part (I purchased a refurbished motherboard) and they replaced it promptly, shipping me a replacement before they received the defective part back from me.
You should *NEVER* trust a review on a commerce site. That goes without saying. Always go to an independant source that doesn't have a bias. That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window. Stupid.
-everphilski-
Obviously they need a scoring system!
Would that be -- oh, shall we say -- "insightful"?
It doesn't matter what website you're talking about. "Customer" reviews can't be trusted at face value, because you can never tell when one's a shill.
(Wanna see an industry that has a 1:billions signal-to-noise ratio on reviews? Try finding legitimate reviews of web hosting services.)
In Newegg's case, they've always done a fine job when I've ordered from them, even though that free pen they sent me ran out of ink really quickly.
I have a hard time finding fair, accurate reviews regardless of whether the reviews are written by staff or by consumers. There is a very real conflict of interest for sites that depend on manufactures for advertising dollars and testing samples. On the by-consumer side, you have to filter out shills and zealots (pick your favorite site and check out the consumer reviews of Quicken and Microsoft Money... it's like a holy war).
That said, I've been very happy with consumer reports. They only review items that they purchase themselves (i.e. no 'freebies' or higher-quality items specifically earmarked for product reviews). Furthermore, they accept no advertising and get all their revenue from subscriptions. These two factors take away much of the conflict of interest and/or bias issues that can plague other review sites.
Downsides? Cost (not necessarily expensive imho, but still a tough sell to people who expect everything online to be free). It's also doesnt work with early adopters because they wont review items before they available for purchase. Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon.
What I'd really like to see is a site (or magazine) that can does a decent video game review. They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
You're forgetting something though. These people aren't waving a massive flag around saying "THIS STORE SUCKS" they're saying "this specific product on the shelf is not worth your time, try this one over here". It's the same store, just a single product in the store is being targetted though.
:)
It's much like the same thing big biz does with radio, pay the radio stations big bucks to only play their songs (eerily similar to communist propoganda) and either totally filter out, or only allow mild critisism about those few they do play.
This I believe is one of the reasons why Howard Stern is so crazy popular, because he doesn't blindly follow his sponsers and tends to piss in quite a few people's cups. He states it like it is and allows boths sides of an object to be seen. If more stores/businesses took this into practice, then maybe they would actually learn what the users REALLY want and they wouldn't have to worry about stupid shit like hiring 8 editors to only approve the good little snippets for the companies that pay for their product to be "featured".
Do what you're there to do, sell a product and make money, but for baby Jesus' sake, don't sell out in the process.
Maybe they're trying to cut down on redundancy and save a little bandwidth. Who knows.
When I buy from newegg (or hardware purchse), I usually have already researched my buy, but I always scan the reviews for the negative ones. Especially to find those little gotchas like you mentioned.
I'd hate to blindly buy something that won't work, only to go check the reviews and see 10 people saying that it wouldn't work with the same hardware that I have.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
Um, if you'd have done just a smidgeon of research, you'd realize that Newegg didn't let you down - your state government let you down. Newegg didn't have a choice in charging tax in NJ. Their HQ's in NJ, NJ statutes REQUIRE mail-order/catalogue businesses with physical presences in NJ to collect sales tax on all purchases made by NJ residents. Same for Tennessee - Newegg has a distribution warehouse here in Memphis and is required by state law to collect TN sales tax for all sales to TN residents. So don't blame NewEgg - blame the politicians who passed the statute. But hey, don't let anything like the LAW get in the way of a good slam, eh?
Very true, but do your outside research also.
If you click on the "Help & Info" tab at the top of newegg it'll take you to a page loaded with some partial and some impartial sites for reviewing products.
Anandtech has an awesome forum that'll help you figure out if something is good and if it's right for you.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
Sometimes I have second thoughts too. But have you considered other sites where people post ratings? 99% of all eBay reviews read like they were written by a speed addict thanking his/her dealer. The average eBay review contains a series of ++++++ with an A+ in there somewhere. So it is entirely possible this is how people like to post.
;)
It's a common human behavior to express positive things with catch-phrases and certain words. Further, the Internet has proven to me that many many people like being fans of companies. Perhaps this "utility" they recieve from being a fan is attached their ability to proclaim it, just like sports fans receive their utility by cheering. Oh yes, and some are borderline illiterate
I would assume normal human behavior before I move on to "editorial conspiracy." I mean, it is also possible that people (such as myself) are satisfied with Newegg. I say, "good" and some people say "Newegg Rock0z" or whatever. We could mean roughly the same thing.
It's time to turn every one of these articles into a debate on creationism vs. evolution.
Gosh... it sure is a pity these guys are monkeying with the reviews.
FLAMEBAIT!
There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.
I doubt Amazon is really able to pull off that sort of thing consciously, but we'd have to know more about how their process works to say for sure. From my limited experience -- okay, mod me an embarrassed loser, but over several years I've posted a bunch of Amazon reviews -- things seem much less calculated than that.
I've never had a review disappear entirely, and really most of the "editorial" changes to my reviews have seemed like arbitrary, almost nonsensical elisions made by rigid formula. Two easy examples I can think of:
So, okay, I can see a simple filter catching the bad words, but when did "The Love Boat" become a bad word? Did they think it was a copyright problem? Or what?
Most of my negative reviews are left as-is, but you know, I tend not to post "This SUX."
The overall effect might be to push products, in sort of the same sense that the overall effect of our court system can be racist. I don't think individual decisions within either system are rational enough to amount to a conspiracy, though. You'd have to look at how the process works to figure out why that happens.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
At Zappos.com we're pretty straight with reviews. We reject anything that is irrelevant or vulgar, but let through positive, negative, even weird reviews. Because of this they're one of the most popular features of the site.
Vaguely related: there's been a huge increase in review spamming for online casinos recently... they never get through, but that bot just keeps on trying.
Cheers.
Lately I've been loving the way C-Net reviews items. They seem to be in contrast with retailers in the way they accept everything.
Whenever I want to review something I first go to the negative comments. Through those I can find out what the downsides of a certain product are. If none of those qualities will impair my ability to use/enjoy it then I consider it a good purchase.
Positive reviews only tell me that a large percantage of folks don't have problems with stuff they buy.
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I had a person experience with this. It's probably a bit boring, but here goes.
I purchased about a year ago a LeadTek Geforce 6800 GT from Newegg.com After getting it and doing some benchmarks, i realized that somehow they had sent me some sort of wierd card...it was actually the equivalant of a 6800 GTS (it had memory running at a much lower clock speed than it should have been, and clearly didn't run at 'stock' GT speeds). I contacted newegg, they were very cool about it, and they refunded my money after I mailed it back to them.
I later wrote a review of the product along with the description of the problems that I had in the hopes that it could alert some people who may have been inadvertantly mis-sold a product like myself (Newegg had no idea how I had gotten this card) along with a actually glowing review of newegg for their customer service, but it was never added to the website. I tried a different version later, and it was also not added.
I can understand it to some extent, but I felt that in a way it's also just protecting their behind, and I felt like there should have been a way for me to warn other customers. After all, isn't that why we read reviews? Not just to look for the "5 STARS OMG IT RULES" reviews, but also the problems that people have? I know that's why I look at them. It is I think, a marginal business practice that I don't really agree with.
You can pick your nodes, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nodes