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California Tells Businesses: Stop Trying To Ban Consumer Reviews
ericgoldman writes Some businesses are so paranoid about negative consumer reviews that they have contractually banned their customers from writing reviews or imposed fines on consumers who bash them. California has told businesses to stop it. AB 2365--signed by Governor Brown yesterday, and the first law of its kind in the nation--says any contract provisions restricting consumer reviews are void, and simply including an anti-review clause in the contract can trigger penalties of $2,500.
There is one sure way to reduce negative reviews: Make sure your product and/or service is good quality.
Nothing can entirely eliminate negative reviews, because sometimes people just get a lemon product, or the person giving them service was having a bad day, or they're just ornery people who can't be satisfied. But if you do your job right, monitor your employees to make sure they're not slacking off or mistreating your customers—and, of course, the best way to do this is to make sure they're satisfied with their jobs in the first place—and don't skimp monetarily on the quality of your product, service, or employees, then you're likely to get more good reviews than bad.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I don't care how many 1-star reviews a place get. You know what matters? How they respond to them.
I'd rather go to a place that replies politely to every negative review than one that ignores them entirely. And if they are genuinely fake, things such as "We have no record of your stay, but we're sorry that you had trouble" speak a thousand times more to what's actually happening then any amount of ignorance.
Everywhere gets bad reviews. You cannot have perfection. What matters is how you deal with when you fuck up.
Reviews are like a box of chocolate.
The person with the loose filling always gets the caramel instead of the strawberry truffle they were expecting.
We need more penalties just for trying to include illegal terms in a non-negotiable contract. It's not enough to simply say "well, the courts will toss it out if they try to enforce it" - because that relies on people being able to fight a legal battle that they shouldn't have needed to fight to begin with.
Well I am not anonymous, and yes it is annoying. I am not sure why you think its a good idea to split up your comment like that. Do you write the first few words of your email in the subject line too? Do you write the first few words on the envelope of the letter? Honestly I don't get the point. Perhaps you can sway my opinion.
What you're saying is, every small business has to do business with Yelp. They're the 1000 lb gorilla in this case, and Yelp itself has earned plenty of bad reviews from businesses forced to deal with them.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I own a tiny one person business. In order for me to reply to comments on Yelp! I have to pay them a monthly fee. Last time I looked one patient gave me a glowing review. Before that I was "invisible." After that I got 30 calls from people working for Yelp! trying to get to to 'join.'
Meanwhile, other business review websites have popped up, giving me 4/5 stars. Basically, they quote the Yelp! review, but knock it down one star. For low number of reviews? For?
For me fortunately it probably makes no difference. But at the same time if I'm looking for a plumber it is so easy to go with the guy with good reviews.
A shill posting a fake review is still committing defamation. A company whose purpose is to commit crimes is committing racketeering. This law covers fines for bad reviews from customers not negative reviews from non customers.
My dad pretty much does this. He says sometimes there are customers not worth having. They bitch and moan, saying everything is wrong even though the product is 100% fine. He would not have been in business 40 years if it wasn't, with almost all of his customers being repeat clients. These people just trying to get a massive discount on a product . So my dad just tells them to go to his competitor because he no longer wants their business.
It's like the people in a restaurant who eat 80% of their food then say they don't like it and ask for refund.
I worked at a small independent grocery store where sometimes we had loss leaders. Well there was this one lady who owned a local restaurant and would come in and load up her cart full of the sale item. We told her she couldn't do that and was meant for families. So we started putting limit signs. She would then start sending in her kids to get more. After so much hassle and constantly running out of product annoying others customers, the owner banned her and her family from the store
This law applies specifically to consumer goods. How many consumer goods require an NDA to purchase?
Many EULAs contain something that is NDA-like.
Some consumer products even forbid you from publishing performance metrics or the results of comparative performance testing.... if I recall correctly, VMware used to be known for this, specifically.
You don't get to opt-out of being the subject of other people's freedom of speech.
Unless you're Kim Jong Un.