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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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!
If they want reviews on any service that relies on an algorithm it is to improve their rating and therefore visibility. Advertising essentially.
They pick and choose the good reviews and mix in a few medium reviews to sell more products
I never trust reviews on first-party sites. However, reviews on other sites can be very helpful. Maybe not yelp lol.
I still find ratings/reviews on Amazon to be at least somewhat useful. A horrible product generally won’t have a 4.8-5.0 rating
By “first-party” here, I mean sites that make the product they’re selling. Like I wouldn’t trust the reviews on Samsung’s website for a Samsung phone. Amazon is separate enough that the conflict of interest isn’t really there, but Amazon reviews are so targeted by illegitimate reviews that they’re not S-tier trustworthy.
Ah, makes sense then. I was considering Amazon as first party but now I see that I am wrong because this concept of buying directly from the producer was a bit alien to me
There’s a lot of dodgy happenings with Amazon reviews, but they’re trustworthy enough for small things
Its called continuous development. Or data driven business strategy. Its all about getting mass amounts of data for a range of products seeing what people like and don’t like and refining/improving to make it better. That’s just the way to stay ahead of the Darwinian marketplace of consumerism.
Its a loop of make, get feedback, refine, remake, repeat. Forever cos line must go up.
It’s also probably some Product Manager’s OKR to get some engagement metric every quarter.
Very well then. But I really doubt actual real humans are reading ALL those millions of reviews(?) and care about all the repetitive same feedback over and over. Does anybody know anyone whose job it is to read reviews all day long 8 hours a day 40 hours a week? Ugh
Nobody reads them all. U run some advanced data analysis on it. Many reviews helps that.
