And I can also take their money to punish them for trying to get me to lie. There’s nothing unethical about ripping off crooks.
actually, there is, and it is technically illegal.
Well, the ethical thing might be to fairly tell the truth yourself. A follow-up review saying “The seller says he is now shipping a better product, and I accept him at his word, since he has many favorable reviews. He has kindly offered me an adjustment, which I declined”
When you’ve taken a bribe, is it more ethical to stay bribed? Doesn’t seem like it is to me.
I think we all agree that turning down the bribe and also letting others know that it was offered is the most ethical course.
But DrDeth seems to be arguing that taking the bribe and being complicit is more ethical than taking the bribe and putting the sleazy company on blast. Strong disagree.
I was offered a 10 year extended warranty on the oven I bought if I would take down my negative review of the installer. Of course I refused. How can you trust a company, either the review site or the seller, once you know for certain that negative reviews are taken down?
In no way shape or form am I arguing that. What you should do is turn down the offer.
Taking the money and narcing them out is not ethical. Nor is taking the money and going along with it.
In case anyone is interested, I just quit responding to their emails. I thought the most reasonable course was to accept a free product (which would have cost them less than the $45 cash they were offering) and change the review if it was a better product. The fact they were not willing to do that had sleaze written all over it so I just ignored them. They sent a few more emails then it looks like they gave up.
Perhaps I misinterpreted this post. If so, I apologize.
When you said “I have done this a couple of times”, what exactly is it that you have done? Removed a review when a company said that they fixed something? Removed a review when offered money (but without taking it)? Removed a review when given a refund for the original purchase?
Removed a review when a company showed that they fixed something.
In one case, they added a sizing guide (their sizes were very small and no sizing guide), in another they sent the revised product, in a third they removed language which was possibly deceptive and made things much more clear on the listing.
I actually edited my review and gave a better rating in one case.
That would be fair.
How is accepting a free product to change a review more ethical than accepting cash to do so?
Because the company said the bad product was a one-off from a supplier they’ve since changed. If they provide a good product now, that’s relevant information to potential customers.
If they replace the damaged one that you paid for with a working one and you change your review to indicate that they replaced with a working product, sure.
But the context here is that they refunded the original purchase and then if they had offered a free replacement, then you’d change the review: That’s just a bribe to change your review, which we all agreed wasn’t ethical, right?
I don’t see it that way. I think OP’s ethical obligation is to his fellow customers, rather than the company. It would be unethical to extort free product from the company by posting false information, but OP didn’t do that.
I don’t think he owes it to the company to pay full price for the item and take down the review that says they didn’t get it right the first time. First, it doesn’t cost the company as much to give away the item as it would to give away the selling price of the item in cash. Second, the item may not have the same value to the customer now–maybe it was for a special occasion which has passed, or maybe the customer bought it elsewhere in the meantime. You may be looking at this as “customer pays $10 for a widget, gets a widget, and then also gets $10 cash,” but that’s not really accurate. A better way to look at it is “customer pays $10 for a widget, company delivers a faulty widget, customer exercises his right to rescind the contract and share his experience. Company wishes to win back this customer, along with other lost customers who have heard of his experience, and so gives him a free widget (at a cost of maybe $5 to themselves) to prove their widgets aren’t all faulty.”
I also think it’s fair that the company give some consideration for the inconvenience they caused you in sending a defective product which you had to return. Even a minimum wage employee’s time is worth $12 an hour where I live; mine is worth a lot more than that. The company not only wasted OP’s time, they’re asking him to spend more time corresponding with them and taking down his review. It would be one thing if the item in question were something really expensive, but it’s not. A freebie seems about right.
The cash they were offering, in excess of the purchase price, does not. If their story about changing suppliers were true, they could maybe afford to send free widgets to those customers they’d had to refund from the bad batch, in order to keep their business going long-term. But this situation seems to be a company selling shoddy crap and hoping to silence the few who take the time to warn everyone. By taking their money and taking down your review, you’d be helping them do that. By accepting a new widget and reviewing it honestly, you’re not.
Not at all. It’s an opportunity for them to get a true and accurate review of today’s version of the product. If today’s product is good, it benefits nobody for an old negative review to stay up. If the product were still a piece of shit then the review would stand. Thousands of people are given free products to write reviews, and they are not coerced for it to be a favorable review. I believe that Amazon’s policy is that this must be disclosed in the review.
Actually, not any more. Amazons new policy is that you cant accept anything in return for a review. (you can still get a review copy of a book, of course).
So, no you cant get “free products to write reviews” on Amazon, not for like two years or so.
Thanks, I am not up to date on this. However, how is getting a book to write a review different than getting any other product to write a review?
For good reason. There is both an obvious conflict of interest and selection bias in getting free stuff in exchange for writing reviews.
It’s the reason professional reviewers like Consumer Reports buy all their own stuff at retail and that food critics don’t tell the restaurants when they’re coming.
If you wrote a bad review and the company said “Oh, you got a defective one, let me send you a good one”, and you change your review, you don’t actually know if they fixed the problem. All you know is that they did better quality control on the hand-selected thing they sent you.
I don’t totally disagree with this. Obviously, there’s a grey area here. I’ve certainly complained to a company before about bad service and been given small freebies or a discount to make up for it.
But as soon as the company says “I’ll give you this thing for free if you change/delete your review”, it’s a bribe. That’s not about winning me back as a customer or making up for the hassle. It’s about hiding the truth from other customers.
Because the concept of being sent free books for review goes back decades. IIRC the NYT reviewer once said he got like hundreds a day.
And a review copy of a book has little value. As opposed to say a computer tablet.
I’m quite grateful to the OP of this thread. It restores my initial thoughts that these “on line reviews” were nothing but a bunch of rubbish and to be even more wary of something that has virtually no negative reviews.