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Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? It's really annoying to sift through comments like "Amazon gave me the wrong produc

Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? It's really annoying to sift through comments like "Amazon gave me the wrong product" or "the UPS driver kicked the box through my window" as if that has anything to do with the product I'm looking at. Those comments should absolutely get deleted.

part1of2 6y ago
0/5 stars : "delivery was late." are the reviews that really annoys me.
- acwan93 6y ago
  Those are as useful as Yelp reviews for how <dish> in <city A> isn't as good as the one in <city B>.
  - abakker 6y ago
    Or my personal favorites about the wait staff... Story time: I once read a one star review on a restaurant in Boston which boiled down to "waiter was black". I flagged the review and yelp got back to me that "they tried to include all relevant opinions." This was about a decade ago, but the experience has always left me with the opinion that review sites could do more to keep reviews topical by promoting ratings of the separate parts of an item. Also, they should allow you to flag racism.
    - tempestn 6y ago
      Yelp doesn't care at all. I contacted them about a scam online car "dealership" that was just stealing money from people for fake cars, and despite ample evidence they wouldn't do anything about it, and wouldn't even allow me to leave a warning review since I had admitted to them that I hadn't bought anything from or personally visited this business. (Which obviously I couldn't, since it was fake.)
  - function_seven 6y ago
    My favorite 1-star Yelp review was for a restaurant with outdoor seating. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: > Burger was good, but it was 100 degrees out and windy! I can't enjoy a meal in that kind of weather. I'm sure the manager stepped up their weather control after getting that scathing critique. If I'm being charitable, I suppose that would be useful for an out-of-towner who was unaware that the area is hot and often windy. But to mark it 1 star as a result is useless.
    - georgeecollins 6y ago
      This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food. Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.
      - city41 6y ago
        This seems to be the only approach that works anymore. Are all the negative reviews petty or entitled? Then probably the thing in question is fine.
        shric 6y ago
        Next trick: solicit a flood of one star reviews for your business that all have trivial complaints beyond your control.
      - nicolas_t 6y ago
        Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful. And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.
- anuila 6y ago
  I’m not completely familiar with Amazon reviews, but if I remember correctly it’s not super clear that you’re reviewing the product and not the seller, and how to review the seller specifically. This difference is irrelevant when the seller is Amazon, but very relevant when it’s not. We all know how Amazon blurs this line, so the confusion is understandable. That said, I hate it too, and it’s Amazon’s fault.
- stordoff 6y ago
  Or the equally useful: > 4/5 stars : Price was good, hope it arrives soon! Which I've seen a few times.
bluGill 6y ago
Because delivery is part of the experience. If you make a great widget but you build it to order 6 months latter, I'm fine with that only if I know up front how long until I get my widget (this is a common thing to happen with just in time manufacturing - but everyone knows when the delivery is expected).
- makecheck 6y ago
  Delivery tracking can be extremely misleading. For instance, a sender can “create a shipping label”, and suddenly it has a tracking number and looks ready to ship soon. In reality, it may literally not even be in a box yet, much less anywhere near a shipping warehouse! Things can stay in these limbo states for weeks and claim to be “shipping” or whatever else. Not to name names but ReserveBar did this to me and I’m still bitter about it (ended up cancelling an order after being lied to about its true state of shipment for over a month).
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    Conversely, I once ordered an item that never cleared the initial "shipping" status even though I received it a few days later. I forgot about it, and a few months later Amazon refunded the purchase on their own.
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    I used to ship ups back in the day. They gave us software that was connected to them. We could request a shipping label and provide an address. This makes it trackable. We print out the label and put it on the box of the computer we were to build before shipping. Sometimes we had to wait on hard drives or CPU’s because we were out. Then we would qa it for 24 hours before putting the sticker on the box and giving it to ups at 5:15. A week your label was traceable but in reality it wasn’t going anywhere. Once ups picked it up you had regular updates. I recently went to work for a drop ship company and ups and fedex labels still have a preship phase. This company we had labels printed while we waited for merch to arrive 3 weeks later!
    - 6y ago
throwaway201103 6y ago
> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? Because Amazon doesn't give you the option to rate the delivery experience separately from the product?
- beervirus 6y ago
  They do now. I get emails asking me to rate the delivery experience.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Is the outcome of these emails publicly available for potential buyers?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway314158 6y ago
      If it's an Amazon Marketplace listing, yes, in the form of a seller review. If it's sold and shipped by Amazon, then no.
beervirus 6y ago
It didn’t sound like that’s what the commenter is actually doing.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Precisely. S/he wrote about reviewing related to "damaged products, wrong products, overtly used ..." but not missing deliveries, that was an "incidentally... " other paragraph.
mdoms 6y ago
> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? Is this a serious question? If a seller fails to get my package to me then of course I'm going to leave a bad review - that's literally what I'm paying for! If they have problems with their shipping vendor it's their problem, not mine.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  Amazon product listings are shared across all vendors. The review is for the item itself. Say you buy a product listed as "Cool WebCam HD". You might deal with "xXCoolSellerXx" while I would deal with "GadgetSeller51". By leaving a bad review unrelated to the item, you are drowning the actual bad reviews and hurting quality sellers. Upon purchasing a product on Amazon you will receive a link to review the seller. That is where you are to put your review about the way the seller dealt with you.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    That's not even remotely my problem. If I pay for something and don't receive it then I'm leaving a bad review.
    - meragrin_ 6y ago
      Sure, leave a bad review on the seller NOT THE PRODUCT. You can leave feedback about sellers separate from the product.
    - thelean12 6y ago
      How is it remotely useful for the next person if you leave a 1 star review on a product on Amazon because it got lost in the mail? That has nothing to do with the product.
      - bosswipe 6y ago
        It's extremely useful. The next person should know that they might get scammed.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
If its a third party seller and they dont ship the product, this seems appropriate.
- OJFord 6y ago
  There is a separate review/feedback system (that's admittedly much less visible) for this though. I don't care about your delivery experience when I'm looking at a product (sorry) because we might be buying from different sellers, and almost certainly have somebody different delivering it, but are in theory receiving the same product.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    I get that, but I believe amazon's third party listings have segregated reviews.
jonnycomputer 6y ago
there are product reviews and seller reviews. but people get these mixed up a lot, or don't even know about it.
stronglikedan 6y ago
My (perhaps too) honest answer: Because I'm reviewing the purchasing experience, not just the product. Same as when I review a restaurant, I'm reviewing the service and food, not just the food. Even now that I've learned there's a separate area to review the seller, I can barely be bothered to leave one review, so I'm likely not going to take the time to leave two. Honestly, they're lucky I'm even leaving one honest review, since I'm under no obligation to do so. And like others, I've had my critical reviews get deleted, and I've even received emails from Amazon with vague threats about them, so they really don't encourage me to care much.
- thelean12 6y ago
  Imagine leaving a bad review for a restaurant because it was raining outside or your Uber took you to the wrong restaurant. That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon. Everyone on earth knows that it might rain during your dinner, just like everyone on earth knows that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV. It's not useful or fair to the product's company or restaurant to leave these kind of reviews.
  - stronglikedan 6y ago
    > That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon. No, it's not. > that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV. I would never leave a bad review for those types of things, since they're not in the sellers control. I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion.
    - thelean12 6y ago
      > I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion. That's the point! You don't knock a star off a product because they didn't ship the product in time. You knock stars off the SELLER. There's literally a whole system in place to review the seller. And if the seller is Amazon, it's even worse. Why would I care about whether or not Amazon was able to ship your product in time 3 months ago?

part1of2 6y ago

0/5 stars : "delivery was late." are the reviews that really annoys me.

acwan93 6y ago
Those are as useful as Yelp reviews for how <dish> in <city A> isn't as good as the one in <city B>.
- abakker 6y ago
  Or my personal favorites about the wait staff... Story time: I once read a one star review on a restaurant in Boston which boiled down to "waiter was black". I flagged the review and yelp got back to me that "they tried to include all relevant opinions." This was about a decade ago, but the experience has always left me with the opinion that review sites could do more to keep reviews topical by promoting ratings of the separate parts of an item. Also, they should allow you to flag racism.
  - tempestn 6y ago
    Yelp doesn't care at all. I contacted them about a scam online car "dealership" that was just stealing money from people for fake cars, and despite ample evidence they wouldn't do anything about it, and wouldn't even allow me to leave a warning review since I had admitted to them that I hadn't bought anything from or personally visited this business. (Which obviously I couldn't, since it was fake.)
- function_seven 6y ago
  My favorite 1-star Yelp review was for a restaurant with outdoor seating. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: > Burger was good, but it was 100 degrees out and windy! I can't enjoy a meal in that kind of weather. I'm sure the manager stepped up their weather control after getting that scathing critique. If I'm being charitable, I suppose that would be useful for an out-of-towner who was unaware that the area is hot and often windy. But to mark it 1 star as a result is useless.
  - georgeecollins 6y ago
    This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food. Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.
    - city41 6y ago
      This seems to be the only approach that works anymore. Are all the negative reviews petty or entitled? Then probably the thing in question is fine.
      - shric 6y ago
        Next trick: solicit a flood of one star reviews for your business that all have trivial complaints beyond your control.
    - nicolas_t 6y ago
      Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful. And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.
anuila 6y ago
I’m not completely familiar with Amazon reviews, but if I remember correctly it’s not super clear that you’re reviewing the product and not the seller, and how to review the seller specifically. This difference is irrelevant when the seller is Amazon, but very relevant when it’s not. We all know how Amazon blurs this line, so the confusion is understandable. That said, I hate it too, and it’s Amazon’s fault.
stordoff 6y ago
Or the equally useful: > 4/5 stars : Price was good, hope it arrives soon! Which I've seen a few times.

bluGill 6y ago

Because delivery is part of the experience. If you make a great widget but you build it to order 6 months latter, I'm fine with that only if I know up front how long until I get my widget (this is a common thing to happen with just in time manufacturing - but everyone knows when the delivery is expected).

makecheck 6y ago
Delivery tracking can be extremely misleading. For instance, a sender can “create a shipping label”, and suddenly it has a tracking number and looks ready to ship soon. In reality, it may literally not even be in a box yet, much less anywhere near a shipping warehouse! Things can stay in these limbo states for weeks and claim to be “shipping” or whatever else. Not to name names but ReserveBar did this to me and I’m still bitter about it (ended up cancelling an order after being lied to about its true state of shipment for over a month).
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Conversely, I once ordered an item that never cleared the initial "shipping" status even though I received it a few days later. I forgot about it, and a few months later Amazon refunded the purchase on their own.
- o-__-o 6y ago
  I used to ship ups back in the day. They gave us software that was connected to them. We could request a shipping label and provide an address. This makes it trackable. We print out the label and put it on the box of the computer we were to build before shipping. Sometimes we had to wait on hard drives or CPU’s because we were out. Then we would qa it for 24 hours before putting the sticker on the box and giving it to ups at 5:15. A week your label was traceable but in reality it wasn’t going anywhere. Once ups picked it up you had regular updates. I recently went to work for a drop ship company and ups and fedex labels still have a preship phase. This company we had labels printed while we waited for merch to arrive 3 weeks later!
  - 6y ago

throwaway201103 6y ago

> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? Because Amazon doesn't give you the option to rate the delivery experience separately from the product?

beervirus 6y ago
They do now. I get emails asking me to rate the delivery experience.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Is the outcome of these emails publicly available for potential buyers?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway314158 6y ago
    If it's an Amazon Marketplace listing, yes, in the form of a seller review. If it's sold and shipped by Amazon, then no.

beervirus 6y ago

It didn’t sound like that’s what the commenter is actually doing.

cutemonster 6y ago
Precisely. S/he wrote about reviewing related to "damaged products, wrong products, overtly used ..." but not missing deliveries, that was an "incidentally... " other paragraph.

mdoms 6y ago

> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive? Is this a serious question? If a seller fails to get my package to me then of course I'm going to leave a bad review - that's literally what I'm paying for! If they have problems with their shipping vendor it's their problem, not mine.

Raphmedia 6y ago
Amazon product listings are shared across all vendors. The review is for the item itself. Say you buy a product listed as "Cool WebCam HD". You might deal with "xXCoolSellerXx" while I would deal with "GadgetSeller51". By leaving a bad review unrelated to the item, you are drowning the actual bad reviews and hurting quality sellers. Upon purchasing a product on Amazon you will receive a link to review the seller. That is where you are to put your review about the way the seller dealt with you.
- mdoms 6y ago
  That's not even remotely my problem. If I pay for something and don't receive it then I'm leaving a bad review.
  - meragrin_ 6y ago
    Sure, leave a bad review on the seller NOT THE PRODUCT. You can leave feedback about sellers separate from the product.
  - thelean12 6y ago
    How is it remotely useful for the next person if you leave a 1 star review on a product on Amazon because it got lost in the mail? That has nothing to do with the product.
    - bosswipe 6y ago
      It's extremely useful. The next person should know that they might get scammed.

Enginerrrd 6y ago

If its a third party seller and they dont ship the product, this seems appropriate.

OJFord 6y ago
There is a separate review/feedback system (that's admittedly much less visible) for this though. I don't care about your delivery experience when I'm looking at a product (sorry) because we might be buying from different sellers, and almost certainly have somebody different delivering it, but are in theory receiving the same product.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I get that, but I believe amazon's third party listings have segregated reviews.

jonnycomputer 6y ago

there are product reviews and seller reviews. but people get these mixed up a lot, or don't even know about it.

stronglikedan 6y ago

My (perhaps too) honest answer: Because I'm reviewing the purchasing experience, not just the product. Same as when I review a restaurant, I'm reviewing the service and food, not just the food. Even now that I've learned there's a separate area to review the seller, I can barely be bothered to leave one review, so I'm likely not going to take the time to leave two. Honestly, they're lucky I'm even leaving one honest review, since I'm under no obligation to do so. And like others, I've had my critical reviews get deleted, and I've even received emails from Amazon with vague threats about them, so they really don't encourage me to care much.

thelean12 6y ago
Imagine leaving a bad review for a restaurant because it was raining outside or your Uber took you to the wrong restaurant. That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon. Everyone on earth knows that it might rain during your dinner, just like everyone on earth knows that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV. It's not useful or fair to the product's company or restaurant to leave these kind of reviews.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  > That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon. No, it's not. > that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV. I would never leave a bad review for those types of things, since they're not in the sellers control. I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion.
  - thelean12 6y ago
    > I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion. That's the point! You don't knock a star off a product because they didn't ship the product in time. You knock stars off the SELLER. There's literally a whole system in place to review the seller. And if the seller is Amazon, it's even worse. Why would I care about whether or not Amazon was able to ship your product in time 3 months ago?