perplexed by some customer reviews.....

[Constance Peregrine]

IE saw it....must be something I did with Chrome settings, as I have this ancestral memory trace that I did see them before...and I do tend to fiddle with settings and then forget what I did...oh well...thx-))

eta: yea, I added this addblock plus chrome extension a bit back, disabled it for this site, now I can proceed with g+'ing folx...lol

[Catya Smith]

Ilan, as I said last night, I am done with this issue. I can see how totally pointless it is to even make a point in here, as it will be turned around or skipped and made into something else. Don't worry, I will not post in, or read the forums anymore!

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Catya,

I don't want to force you to do anything you don't want to but I don't think you should refrain from posting if you have something to say. I want to hear your input on things. If you prefer, send it to me via PM or email.

[jim milton]

The above post about the perplexed by some customer reviews is quite informative and one can access good knowledge about the same. One must go through the same for sure.

[oopsee joseppe]

Hmm, lot's of drama and emotion here and is completely understandable. I have no star ratings or feedback on any of my items on MP so I don't have any emotion but still feel the pain of others who do. If I am God this is what I would do - REMOVE THE STARS, REMOVE THE BIAS ASSOCIATED IN THE SEARCH FROM THESE STARS - the star system is too easy to be gamed and manipulated no need to explain how.
Do leave the reviews, four good reviews and one bad is far more objective than one person with issues leaving a less than 5 star rating and trashing the rest of the good news not to mention the resulting impact of the search page. People will find the quality without the stars, they can read any reviews given and make an objective decision from peoples actual comments than their subjective feeling of what a star is worth. As I read all these prior posts one thing is clear, no one agrees on the value of what a star is worth anyway. It is far fetched to educate MP buyers and sellers with star categories (one is bad, 3 means fair, 4 is above average and 5 is excellence), besides our personal bias on what a star weighs will interfere with any given instructions on how to use them.
If this is Vegas my money is the stars and associated search bias will continue, merchants will continue to grovel with less than deserving customers who are not reasonable in vying for that fifth star, management will still get grief and long explanations will continue of what other systems have decided to implement.
However I'll deal with it and look forward to a less than perfect rating system continuing than I would prefer...I give "zero stars" for the system of stars, thumbs up or any other qualifier of quality other than written testimonial from an actual customer. I give written review testimonials 5 stars,

[oopsee joseppe]

Here is a thought...what if...the stars were replaced by a tick box for "would you rate your comment as "neutral", "positive" or "negative" - then a person looking at the overall could see what people rated their comments as, can then go to the comments and read them? Products can be searched and listed by "most positive comments, neutral or negative". This would be similar to stars only the criteria would be clear. After all it is a rating that can be used as a stat for searches.. Just thinking out loud

[Paislee Myrtle]

Here is a thought...what if...the stars were replaced by a tick box for "would you rate your comment as "neutral", "positive" or "negative" - then a person looking at the overall could see what people rated their comments as, can then go to the comments and read them? Products can be searched and listed by "most positive comments, neutral or negative". This would be similar to stars only the criteria would be clear. After all it is a rating that can be used as a stat for searches.. Just thinking out loud

Oopsee's suggestion makes perfect sense from the buyer's point of view; at least this buyer's. Often I don't leave a review because the star system is rather ambiguous and impacts the seller in ways people don't anticipate. Positive, neutral, or negative refines the categories, making it impossible to misinterpret the purchaser's opinion of the purchased product.

It's simple, fair, and user friendly. If it were in my power, I'd ditch the Stars and go with oopsee's suggestion.

[Sierra Jakob]

I much prefer oopsee's original idea of dropping the star system all together.

The three level rating system is much like the star system. It is a "summary" of how the customer feels about the product. Anything that causes the browsing customer to skip over some products rather than open it up and actually read the details of the reviews, is a disservice to the merchant.

It would be different if each product had hundreds of customer reviews--in that case no one customer--neither one of ill intent, poor knowledge, low skills, unusual tastes, or "I don't care about this type of product" attitude- can have too much power over a merchants many hours of hard work and thought.

But there will never be hundreds of customer reviews per product here. Any system that "summarizes" the quality of a product will be perceived by browsing customers as having far more authority and power than it should possibly be granted, and very few customers--given the choice of a higher rated product or even an unrated product--will even stop to read the actual reviews on a middling rated product, much less consider buying it. In fact, that middling rated product is instantly doomed to almost certainly rarely sell again.

Oopsee's 3 level system sounded quite nice to me at first, but as I considered it further I realized it's just a star rating in disguise. And especially that "neutral" rating will be doomed to wreck many a hard hour of merchant work--whether intentionally or unintentionally--just as the "star" system does now.

[oopsee joseppe]

The idea of a buyer categorizing his/her comment is just a compromise to those who feel some kind of "seemingly helpful buyer" machinery is necessary.
The rating systems are lazy ways of collecting data for organization and categorization. Since a bot cannot decipher a positive comment from a negative or shades of grey "they" (the people who actually control the system) must force the reviewer to give some kind of rating (can not leave a review without being FORCED to leave a rating (star) to get the data. Unfortunately this "forced" stat collecting and further arbitrary weighting by algorithms do un-level (not a word I know) the playing field skewing searches to find those products with hmmmm most stars and ditching those with hmmmm no stars.
It is possible that a product with no stars be superior to one with 5 however it is excluded and relegated to the furthest outpost in ranked listings (gee that's fair huh?). It is possible that a products rating has been gamed, now who would do that? :O. This only pushes those "rated" products higher (resulting in higher sales and ranking) and ignores others that can be of a better quality and value! In this instance it is a disservice to both buyers and sellers! Talk about bias, gezzzz!!!
Let the reviews speak for themselves and stop forcing rating and most sold data collection (both are hand in hand). Don't need a tally either. LET THE BUYERS DO THEIR HOMEWORK and the allow both buyers and sellers a level playing field. Rather than FORCED RATINGS maybe FORCE the buyer to do their homework instead?

[Ozwell Wayfarer]