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.'"

Re:Newegg rev 01

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.

Re:Newegg rev 01

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.

Re:Newegg rev 01

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.

NewEgg is fine

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-

Some edits can be insidious.

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.

Heh...

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.

Re:Heh...

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.

They had a problem... people would post useless reviews "it's good", "I hated it", "Buy me an Ipod", etc. and this was detrimental to the customers who were trying to figure out whether or not they wanted the product. So they tried a solution... to have the product team screen the reviews to make sure they were accurate based on what the product teams new about the products. A good idea, in that who is better to validate a review than the people who manage the product. Of course, the unforseen consequence was that the product team didn't want to look like they were buying crappy products and not doing their job (or they just though they had the best products) so they biased the screening process. The marketing team has in theory less bias (and less knowlege of the product perhaps), and in theory should do a better job with the screening process this time. The point is that the company is interested in providing the customers with valueable meaningful reviews and in order to do that they are willing to continuously improve their process.

As long as they keep working to make it better for the customers and then that is a good thing.

I hope this isn't surprising to anyone

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?

False advertising, plain and simple

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.

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 ... that would be misleading. Similarly, you cannot label them as "user reviews" if they have been edited.

(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.)

Edit or filter?

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.

Who pays attention to online reviews anyway?

"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.

Fry's

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?

Amazon.com is notorious for this

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 [amazon.com] that are mostly interested in the ontological existence of being. But these are rare and hard to find.

My own examples were more arbitrary than that

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.

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 [amazon.com] -- 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:

• I compared the (godawfully calculating and soulless chick flick) movie "Love Actually" to a well-produced episode of "The Love Boat." The Amazon editors removed the name of the series, but left in the names of the characters - Julie, Doc, Gopher, and Captain Steubing.
• For one history book I said something about how people wanted "bastardized" history. They removed the bad word and stuck in a "..." for it. That's happened a few times, in places where my use of the language was not at all offensive.

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.

Sometimes, I wish they would

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 [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.

Tire Rack does this too

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.

Misleading headline...

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

Amazon shill reviews

In March 2004, Amazon purged 34 negative reviews of a controversial book overnight, which drove the book's overall rating up from two to three stars and eliminated a number of reviews by well-known commentators. One of their Top 500 Reviewers had to try three or four times before they would not subsequently delete his negative reviews of this eugenics-based screed on sight.

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.

Simple solution

Obviously they need a scoring system!

Would that be -- oh, shall we say -- "insightful"?

Consumer Reports

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 [consumerreports.org]. 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??

At my place

At Zappos.com [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.

C-Net Reviews

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.

Re:Freedom of Speech

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.