Asking to leave 5 stars for free product

Just found an item on Envato. Instead of item description, main text says - The next buyer of this article who can give a 5 stars rating will get a free product by mail from my portfolio here at ENVATO — Thanks for your support

Proof - https://s17.postimg.org/imko8ub1b/envato.png

And then author provides a screenshot with detailed instructions where buyer should go and what exactly he should click to leave 5 stars rating for his item.

Is such a practice really OK?

1 Like

:laughing::laughing:
Ninja Technique to get positive review haha.

Such kind of practice do make envato polluted so envato should clean such kind of garbage :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Pharid

And despite such a strategy, product’s overall rating is 3.5

1 Like

haha

so shame

:relaxed::relaxed:

Definitely not allowed and will be removed.

Can you let support know https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thanks

1 Like

Thanks for the explanation. Submitted this to helpdesk.

Update: just checked author’s portfolio. He has 17 items and every single item displays this advertisement at the top of item description.

Yeah that’s not okay. Thanks for opening a ticket about it.

It looks Envato contacted author, but I’m slightly disappointed about the outcome. Author simply removed these advertisements from all descriptions of this items, and… this is it. All those 100+ paid/sponsored reviews for all his 17 products are still there, which I don’t think is fair.

In other words, it means any author can promote something for free in exchange for 5 stars rating, and if someone reports it, he can remove advertisement and get away with it. So such an author gets more sales (because he offers another product as free bonus) and fake 5 star reviews, which leads other buyers to think all his products are great. And no penalty at all. I think this is a huge hole in Envato system…