I wrote them back and said I would not take money, but if they shipped me the product again for free and it was good, I would update my review to reflect this.
They said
Sorry, we only provide refund service.
I am sorry that there is a problem with the quality of our products. If you are willing to delete your review, we are willing to refund you $ 45 as an apology.
By the way, this is a bullshit excuse, in my opinion. Generally, the customer doesn’t know nor care who actually manufactured the product. They expect the seller to choose a manufacturer that is able to make a quality product, and to verify that the quality doesn’t slip over time.
I don’t really buy stuff off Amazon (I don’t need more things to eventually fill a landfill) so I’m not sure what this review would be targeting.
If the review is of the product, then no. If you got a shitty product, it deserves a shitty review.
If the review is of the seller, then yes. They were willing to give you more than your money back in order to compensate you for your troubles, and don’t deserve negative seller feedback because of that.
I was going to suggest exactly this. I’m a sucker for struggling small businesses, and even though I suspected that story was bullshit, I would’ve wanted to give them the chance to prove they really did change suppliers. The response you got proves to my satisfaction that leaving up your negative review is the right thing to do.
On Amazon, it is possible to leave “seller feedback” for third-party sellers, but that’s not what I did. I wrote a product review. However, the product is not independent of the seller; you can see who the seller is for that product if you click on the product link. But a product review does not get aggregated into a seller profile in any way I can see.
If they actually fixed the issue, then I would remove or edit the review. Not for the money, but because they fixed it. I am a top ranked Amazon reviewer, and I have doen this a couple of times.
It’s one of those items that’s generic. If you did not have a link, and searched “charged for Samsung Galaxy S10” you would get probably 100 or so hits for chargers that kind of look alike but all have different packaging and are probably all made by different after-market manufacturers. So the same but not the same. It’s not like when you buy branded merchandise.
Me too. In the re-review, I’d mention all the original issues, and then further mention that they bribed me to remove my bad review and that people shouldn’t trust the percentage of good reviews because they were clearly trying to manipulate things.
I consider it more ethical to honestly warn others about a company with bad products and shady practices than to accept kickbacks to remain silent. Ethics is much broader than “a deal is a deal.”