I want to start telling all these companies to leave me the f*** alone. I bought their product and I didn’t complain I didn’t return it. Isn’t that good enough for them??
I work for a large home appliance warranty company. Many of you in the States probably have one, they are very popular.
My boss just had a meeting with them, and the only thing they care about is five star reviews. That is it. How many we get, how high the average looks.
Here is the problem: nobody is going to pat me on the head and say “good job” because I fixed their dryer. That is just the basic function of my job. You do not leave reviews for the Kroger checkout lady just because she scanned your produce correctly. On the other hand, if I mess up even a little, I get slammed with a one star.
I service seven orders a day, five days a week, plus six on Saturday. Statistically, that means at least one job a day is going to turn into a one star review, not because I did something wrong, but because someone is unhappy for some reason. And the truth is, people rarely go out of their way to leave a five star review, but they will absolutely make time to leave a one star.
The home warranty company does not care about that reality. If our average rating drops below 4.0, we get significantly less work. The higher ups do not deal with customers or field service, all they see are the numbers on a spreadsheet. From their perspective, the companies with the most five stars get the most jobs, period.
Bottom line the five star rating means absolutely nothing it’s not a measure or metric for anything it’s completely false.
Reviews are one of the things that online storefront platforms consider in their algorithms. More reviews means their algorithm pushes my listings in front of a few more faces, and I get to make a little more money.
I don’t ask for reviews myself. The people who do are trying to game their platform’s algorithms.
Shareholder metrics.
feed them to AI to filter keywords and then ignore your feedback and just focus on maximizing shareholders profit
Sounds about right!
People are more motivated to leave reviews when they aren’t happy because that’s how they get even, so the company is trying to convince everyone else to also leave reviews.
I see how that makes sense.
how do you buy stuff online? do you read reviews on the big shopping platforms?
back in the day reviews were a good and honest way to find out if a product is usable. the idea was that normal people do honest reviews and other people can use that as a guidance.
this was probably true for some years, until the system got rigged: users were payed to take bad reviews offline, or users are payed to post good reviews. simple products with good reviews got exchanged with cheap complex products, so the reviews seemed to be for that product.
what you see is one part of this system: a seller is asking you to do free advertisement for them.
Also why tf are phone numbers required for every online order now?
What if i don’t want to have a phone number? These forms refuse VoIP numbers as well.
I don’t know for other people but in my area the delivery person almost always calls me before dripping the package to check if I’m home and ready to receive the package.
Wow, that’s an awesome delivery driver!
I would appreciate that so much as it both mitigates the package theft risk and is very courteous of the driver
wow, that sounds like a horrible USPS experience
Because at some point someone said “if we have multiple ways to get in contact with our customer, we’ll be able to tell them about problems with their order faster.” And then it became industry standard, and everyone upstream of the order also wants a phone number, and so if you don’t put a mandatory phone number field in your form anymore, all the other ecommerce developers will laugh at you and call you mean names.
Lucky you, I get asked to leave a review before delivery on the regular. One company called me after leaving a negative review, asking why I would do that when the goods weren’t even delivered.
LOL so why did you leave a negative review before you even received your order?
Because at the time of ordering, delivery was estimated 1-3 work days. After ordering (and paying), I got an email stating delivery time was 3 weeks. At the same time I got a request for a review.
Can’t speak for that person, but sometimes if a company asks me too many times to leave a review after I repeatedly decline, I’ll leave a negative review out of spite.
I assume they’re fishing for data and active email accounts. If someone replies with a review, they know it’s an active, monitored email address and can sell it for a better price.
Block and delete.
No, the sellers already have the email address, that’s how they ask for reviews. It is simply the way the current internet works: reviews are king, but if the bought thing works as expected most people don’t leave a review, while people with problems are much more likely to leave a bad review. So sending an email asking for reviews is cheap as hell and one of the easiest way to boost their reviews, because if even only every 10th person leaves an “everything is fine”, that boosts their numbers immensely. And after 1 or 2 weeks, chances are that the big draw backs and failures didn’t manifest yet. So also increasing the good to bad review ratio.
Fair, but I still think an email address they got a response from is of higher value for them to sell than an unmonitored junk email address as well.
if the bought thing works as expected most people don’t leave a review, while people with problems are much more likely to leave a bad review
That’s a good point, though maybe a better way for retailers to deal with that would be to use the percentage of sold items that are associated by a review as an input into a ranking. I mean, maybe “no reviews, lots of items sold” should be used to indicate that an item is favorable rather than neutral.
Interesting idea, never thought about it. But I don’t think the sellers would like to put that information out into the public. Many things, for example also tax related, doesn’t incentives sellers to openly report such information. Except if it is a publicly traded company, than they must report it in their reports.
Yeah, there’s some value to sales information.
considers
Amazon does provide some information.
goes to Amazon, picks a random product
https://www.amazon.com/HANPOSH-Military-Stopwatch-Waterproof-Chronograph/dp/B0CGX3SBJF
3K+ bought in past month
That’s a bit limited, but camelcamelcamel already scrapes Amazon for price history, and so even if they aren’t already grabbing sales volume history, my guess is that Amazon exposing this is probably already functionally exposing a fair bit of information about sales history.
checks camelcamelcamel
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CGX3SBJF
Nothing about sales volume, so if they are scraping that as well, they aren’t currently exposing it to users. But I imagine that they could. It may be that competitors or various manufacturers in the industry already look at this to get some idea of what consumer demand is like.
And just the quantity of reviews will expose some data about sales volume. I mean, if an item has 15k reviews, then they’re going to have sold more than 1000 units.
Set up an email filter that removes emails that contain “leave a review”.
Good user reviews simulate word of mouth advertising which is the most valuable sort. They want free labour from you to help with that. This would be a great application for a spam filter.
Is leaving a review really free labor? I view it more as community building. Nobody has reviews shoved down their throat without asking, they are sought out and helpful for the consumer. And so sellers like reviews because consumers like reviews and it makes them more likely to patronize their business.
I enjoy leaving good reviews. Helps my fellow humans find quality things that I enjoyed and helps the business I like make more things I like. It’s a win win win situation. This is especially true for small business, many of which live or die on reviews.
It’s definitely free labour. Even if you don’t mind doing it, it’s still that. As for the rest, I’m sympathetic to your point of view. I have used reviews and occasionally left reviews on products I liked particularly. However, online reviews are so gamed at this point that I don’t think anyone ought to feel pressured to leave a review like they try to do with the emails OP is receiving. It’s one thing to like a product so much you are moved to leave a review. It’s another to be asked for it every time you purchase something.
The market is saturated with crap that doesn’t sell under its own merits. In theory a review signals that not only did that product sell, but somebody actually cared enough to leave a review.
An online market is especially tricky for consumers because you can’t really look at the product to judge it for yourself. You have to make do with a product description, specifications, or photos. All of which might be incomplete, poorly translated, or photoshopped / AI-generated.
So reviews tell you what other people thought. It’s their first line of marketing after SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Of course, unethical companies are out there using paid and fake reviews, so it’s not like a savvy shopper can even use the reviews to judge quality.
Anyway, as someone else said, don’t engage with these emails. You’ll just end up with more emails if you do.
Why are you giving away your email? Use a throwaway.
Or even better: an alias. Been using addy.io (formerly anonaddy.io) for years now and it has revolutionised my email experience!
get an email address just for spam, which you can mostly/fully ignore, and use your main email only for more important things.
alternatively, if giving them your email is completely unnecessary, use a throwaway like one of those “10 minute email” things.
i haven't tested the functionality below:
i think some services support writing your email as
username+<text goes here>@provider.urlso you can dousername+spam@provider.urland the mail will appear in a separate folder in your email client.If they want reviews on any service that relies on an algorithm it is to improve their rating and therefore visibility. Advertising essentially.
