I have attempted to leave reviews for tool products with little success. They insist on combining all of the reviews for “Big Ass Tool Company”, instead of leaving the reviews product by product. So if you’re looking for specific reviews of the BATC left handed widget maker, it’s impossible to separate them from the other 10,000 products they sell on Amazon.
I hate this review “feature”. Other online sites do the same or similar things like Home Depot. I want to see the reviews for this particular product/size.
Amazon “customer support” just sent me a notice of “first warning” because “one or more” of my reviews supposedly “violate community guidelines”. There is no indication of what review(s) they object to.
Did I favorably review a product that somebody else is spamming positive reviews for (note: I rarely give a product five stars)? Did the author(s) of a cretinously bad* novel or pseudoscience book get in a dither over a negative review?
What arbitrary dumbassery, Amazon.
*I’ve never actually used the word “cretinous” to describe a book, but that hardly should be a disqualifier anyway.
And you’ll never find out. Definitely dumbassery.
It’s crap like this that was the final straw in my decision to drop Prime.
I think I found what Amazon objected to. Back in July I posted a review of “The Measles Book: Thirty-Five Secrets the Government and the Media Aren’t Telling You about Measles and the Measles Vaccine” (author(s) anonymous, released by RFK Jr.'s Children’s Health Defense). The book explains that measles is basically a harmless rash but that vaccination against measles causes all kinds of horrid things. In other words, typical antivax nonsense. I now see that at some point the review was deleted (with no notification to me) so that may have been what got Amazon in a dither.
There was nothing false, defamatory or personally denigrating in the review. It was focused on the book’s disinformation spewings. I didn’t even mention rejection of RFK Jr.'s antivax rhetoric by sane family members, or his cozying up to far-right wing extremists in his crusade against public health.
Fortunately there are other book review sites that don’t behave in arbitrary and secretive ways. Goodreads is one.
If a book like that is featured on a site called “Goodreads,” I have to suspect that I don’t quite “get” the name of the site.
I have not had a product review rejected but I have had book reviews.
I don’t write many reviews for products or books (looking about 60 in past 5 years) but I did have a stint where several book reviews would not post. I did not receive any notification…just that they did not post.
When I did inquire I was informed that 3 of my book reviews were for the same person and were negative so that they were blocked because of possible ‘harassment’ of particular authors.
This could actually be a good thing and I was not annoyed and even somewhat pleased that they did this. I assume they didn’t do it automatically but that the author noticed and complained. Hey, at least they took action.
I agree with this. My wife and I were looking at having something done for the house and we looked at reviews. We selected a small company and, while working on it, he asked why I chose him.
I told him his reviews were pretty good, there was no consistent negative ‘theme’, many consistent positive ‘themes’ and he had some bad reviews.
He was puzzled at the last one because he did have 2 absolutely HORRID reviews (out of like 1000). I told him that a certain % of the population are horrid people with way too high expectations and are just generally jerks (especially with home improvement)…and they should be present in his reviews. If they are not, it indicates that a possible ‘scrubbing/cleansing’ of the reviews may be going on. A couple of his competitors only had glowing reviews and so I distrusted them.
He looked at me, stunned, and said "You mean I got your business partly BECAUSE OF those reviews??? Yup. I could tell it kinda made his day,
This past week I stopped by to pick up an order at a store that does virtually all of its business through online sales (they made an exception for me because I’m a local).
Someone (probably the owner) decided to get customer feedback and inquired of me in a slightly aggressive tone, “So why do you buy your ___ from us?”
I replied, “Because I don’t know any better.”
He took that response in good humor. Later I realized that the remark could be viewed in an entirely complimentary way.
Of course it’s insane to block a book review because the reviewer disliked multiple books by the author, but at least in this case Amazon condescended to respond to an inquiry. I never heard back as to why my book review was removed.*
*I subsequently posted another review of the book which was accepted and remains posted. In neither instance did I suggest that the author had unnatural relations with barnyard animals.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
When I look at reviews I skim through the 5-star ones then look closer at the 1-star. I find a large chunk of them to be from clueless boobs* but sometimes there will be a consistent theme running through them. Those products I am cautious about.
*Example: I was looking to buy a measuring cup. A plastic one had a 1-star review complaining that when they used it to scoop their dog’s food, the handle snapped off. If you want to scoop food you will find a food scoop better designed for the task.
Yes. We were shopping for a new printer, and there was one that got overall excellent reviews, that I wanted to buy. But I read the 1 and 2 star reviews, as well as a professional review. And they all commented on difficulty getting it to talk to a Mac over wifi. Um… yeah, we both use macs. that’s a deal breaker. Too bad, as it was probably a great printer for PCs.
Most of the one star reviews that I see for otherwise excellently reviewed products are for things like the UPS guy left the box in the mud.
I had a review rejected because I was bitching about how the vendor sent me the wrong item and would not replace it. They said that product review was not the right place for service rants. They were right but it still pissed me off that I had spent so much time writing this long review only to see it disappear into the aether. The big lesson being that if you are going to write any kind of long review, do it in a word processing app and cut and paste it from there. That way, you can post it in the right place later with ease.
Just like the Dope in 2002. 
Reviews like that sometimes make me wish it was possible to reply to reviews. I was once looking at reviews for a stainless steel pan, in other words not a nonstick pan. Someone gave it a one star review because food sticks to it.