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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.'"
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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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.
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.
Every review is a rave, and even the worst products have an average of three out of five stars (or golden eggs or whatever, it doesn't matter).
That said, Newegg is a great place, but just know what you're buying before you go there; don't pay too much attention to the reviews.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
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.
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.)
The last time I went to Newegg, they had a big red disclaimer above reviews saying something like "Don't base your purchasing decision solely on these reviews." At least they're being honest about random reviews not being a good sign.
For more information, click here.
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"?
I bought a MSI K8N Neo board, and the PS2 keyboard didn't work. Not only that it was a known defect and MSI refused to do anything about it. Newegg rejected every attemp to post this bit of information. I started using competitors and ignoring the newegg reviews ever since.
They changed the review comment also. Here it is from the old site:
Newegg.com is not a forum for product reviews. For product reviews, we recommend sites such as www.cnet.com, www.anandtech.com, and www.tomshardware.com. Newegg.com is a private site that conducts the business of selling computer hardware and as such, any specifications and information posted by Newegg.com regarding products for sale must be factual. However, customer comments in regards to their experience with said products are the opinions of the user. The customer opinion reviews are used at the discretion of Newegg.com as a marketing device for positive and constructive ways to share the benefit of the product. It is not used as a source for negative commentary as we cannot endorse the validity of any negative comment. Therefore, the Newegg.com site is moderated to remove any unproven biased negative comments. It is not the intention of Newegg.com to mislead any customer and therefore
all purchase decisions should not be solely based on the customer review.