Envato, please disallow the customers with expired support to rate our items! we are getting a lot of bad feedbacks when the buyer asks for support, but we don’t provide it.
This is a big issue, and a good number of buyers will start to threat you if you don’t support them!
Why Envato allow buyers to rate our items after 6 months or when the support is finished?
We are losing money when the buyer asks for support, we don’t provide, we got a bad rating or a refund request. This is not fair!
A buyer should still be able to rate the item’s quality and design after 6 months, in my opinion.
However, if they’re leaving a bad review because you declined to offer free support when their support term expired, contact support and they’ll remove the review.
They shouldn’t be able to rate your support, or lack of support due to an expired subscription… after 6 months. But they should be able to rate your item whenever they like.
Even thou, the buyers know that, so they will rate it on 1 star saying “Bad item” for example, they won’t mention that the rate is for support rejection.
So whenever you reach Envato reporting a rate, as usual, you’ll get the “This is buyer feedback” respond.
I strongly agree that such “blackmail reviews” might hurt authors. In other hand, if buyer discovers some bad stuff, I think he should be able to leave a review and share his opinion.
Imagine, that you buy a brand new car and own it for a few years. After warranty expires, something gets broken (or you discover a major problem), but you can’t share your feedback because your warranty is expired. That wouldn’t be fair, right? Therefore, the same principles should apply here.
As a buyer, I want to be able to leave my review at any time if I purchased some item. Real-life example: bought a plugin from CodeCanyon, downloaded and installed it, but didn’t really test its features because I placed my project on hold. 8 months later, I was ready to restart the project, and discovered a huge security flaw in plugin. All its security features can be bypassed by adding some strings at the end of URL. I believe I have the right to let everyone know that the plugin is absolutely worthless?
@phpmillion, if the warranty of the car expired, client should pay for parts or mechanics.
So customers should do the same with authors, and authors can, or should help, but also should have their own rates, because this is extra support time.
I totally agree with @DoughouzForest on this!
I don’t think that’s the issue authors have at all - the issue is finding a way to balance valuable feedback while preventing some buyers (speaking as a power one) from rating badly based purely on expired support post the intial 6 months.
If there is a wider genuine issue with the item then I doubt most authors would have a problem. What they struggle with is when some buyers exploit bad rating unfairly.
