The world of reviews is a fraught place at times.  I wanted to explain a little about our experience of reviews and the vagaries that can go with it as a product producer.

We added Google Reviews to many of our social media elements a while back to allow customers to give us feedback. Now, we know most people are too busy to spend time helping us with reviews, which gives us some social proof that we have a good product, but it can help others decide. 

But and it is important, the reviews space is littered with problems, too...and many you just would not come across unless you sell online like us. Google reviews were a start—we began to get both positive and negative reviews from genuine customers. We accept that things can go wrong and people can get annoyed about stuff from time to time, but we started to see something more sinister in reviews, too.

About once a week we would get a person saying something along the lines if "Give me a discount or we will write a crappy review of you!" Blackmailing a small family business.  We always rejected these and sure enough some people wrote scathing reviews.  We complained to Google and showed them what was happening, and they said they would review it, but then we never heard back from them. The reviews remained in place, and the blackmailer won. So, we switched off Google Reviews.

Next, we go to other sites like Trust Pilot, which cost a fortune for a small business. Most of the time, we are not allowed to respond to fake reviews or angry customers who didn't get the resolution they wanted unless we pay for certain services. Again, we lost faith in the system.

Now, we have re-entered the reviews realm with Judge.Me, a service built for Shopify websites like ours. If you want to write a review, feel free to do so; we really appreciate it. But equally, if we end up where we are with other review services, we will need to revisit it. .

Reviews are important to product producers but not at any cost, and the nature of the online world these days is tainted by a few nasty people intent on gaming the review system.

We learn from bad reviews, and we take pride in good ones; both have value for us. Whatever your experience do share.