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.'"

Amazon does this too

[Oostertoaster]

Amazon does this all the time. I've frequently left reviews for products on Amazon, and if the review is anything but glowing adoration for the product, they tend to not post the review at all. Or, they'll simply edit the review so it doesn't say anything at all helpful.

Amazon.com is notorious for this

[AEton]

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.

Sometimes, I wish they would

[RobertB-DC]

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

[Stone Cold Troll]

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.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[generic-man]

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:Product review site

[lucabrasi999]

Sony

It's kind of funny that you mention Sony [yahoo.com].

Re:Newegg rev 01

[idontgno]

You may be getting fooled by the fact that the item summary page displays the a few reviews, and pretty often they'll be raves because most customers wind up happy with their product (or give a pass to a marginal one). Even if the item you're looking at has 94 reviews, the item's catalog page may only display 3-5 of them, and odds are pretty good that the reviews will be positive. (The psychology of amateur reviewers and all.)

There will also be a link saying "Read more reviews", and by looking at 100 reviews per page you can scan for less-than-glowing ones if you want to rather quickly. Also, the "Average rating" value on the item catalog page might give you a hint that there may have been a few bad reviews.

I don't see much signs of an editorial conspiracy, since a few of the reviews I've seen are definitely in the realm of "very angry constructive criticism". I didn't see any obvious trollage (the kinds of stuff that gets modded to -1 here), which is the kind of stuff you sort of hope editors will remove. Unless you're the kind of person who reads here at -1, which is to say, easily amused.

Re:Newegg rev 01

[GoodNicsTken]

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.

Re:I used to Love Newegg

[critter42b]

Um, if you'd have done just a smidgeon of research, you'd realize that Newegg didn't let you down - your state government let you down. Newegg didn't have a choice in charging tax in NJ. Their HQ's in NJ, NJ statutes REQUIRE mail-order/catalogue businesses with physical presences in NJ to collect sales tax on all purchases made by NJ residents. Same for Tennessee - Newegg has a distribution warehouse here in Memphis and is required by state law to collect TN sales tax for all sales to TN residents. So don't blame NewEgg - blame the politicians who passed the statute. But hey, don't let anything like the LAW get in the way of a good slam, eh?

At my place

[localman]

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.