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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

Will echo others regarding China imports, but one last hope to bring me back to their marketplace is a revamp of the review system.

After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back.

Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.

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They used to email prompt you for reviews, or prompt you for reviews whenever you signed in. Now they don’t do either, and even if I manually check the backlog of orders, the review time windows have all expired. So I never review anything anymore.

Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers or sellers.

Forgot they used to do that. The receipt emails also fail to mention the time limit policy, causing many more people to miss their chance. For one-off handmade products, reviews are more important than most other marketplaces.

The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.

> The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.

Which may be the actual intended consequence.

I wanted to leave a review after owning an item for a few months, to get an impression for how well it held up and how I liked it. Finally, I was happy with it, and went to leave a review only to be told I couldn't?!? Why on Earth do they have that policy?

It's beneficial for the sellers. Usually if you go back after some time, it's to leave a negative review.

Is it less true that if you go back immediately, it's also likely to be a negative review?

I think good review and ratings systems for online marketplaces are possibly one of the hardest things to get right. I'm not sure it's ever been done really well before, or even if it can be done well. As a spouse of someone with a successful Etsy shop, let me tell you that the sellers aren't always exactly happy with the system either.

You have to basically keep it at perfect feedback in some goods marketplaces or you're considered a fuckup, and while that's easier than it sounds because people don't know how to rate effectively so almost all feedback is perfect, you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered (tracking shows USPS lost he package for a week or two in delivery, or shows it delivered to correct address but customer did not receive it).

> you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered

I gain a little bit of hope for humanity whenever I see a low-star review like "arrived 2 days late" or "wouldn't accept my visa card but I just bought gas with it yesterday and it worked fine" followed by "0 of 19 people found this review helpful".

"Best" review I ever saw (on a book):

3 stars

"I haven't read it yet but looks interesting. I'll try to get to it this summer."

This was the worst review of the book.

In part that may be down to review procurement.

Amazon's product questions are like that. It seems people get the emailed question and think a person has reached out to them, they respond "sorry i haven't used it yet", or whatever, and that fits in with the other 20 useless answers.

They don't appear to have user rating on answers, only on reviews?

Similarly I bought some gifts there and it was weeks before I gave the gifts, not much chance I'm writing a review for something I haven't even given yet.

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