I just received a notification about a negative rating left by a buyer (who, incidentally, never submitted a support request and just went straight on with a bad rating). When I tried to open his profile to see if I could contact him, I got a “page not found” message.
Is that a new sort of “hit an run” technique? Also, isn’t it absurd that there is no way to get in touch with a customer after they leave a feedback?
Sorry bud but reviews have and will probably always be a pain point here. I get a good number of hit-and-runs like you mentioned, but there’s nothing you can do about it. 
I have the impression that these “hit and run” can be used to damage authors on purpose, knowing that the currently rating system (and not only that) is beyond ridiculous and doesn’t allow to reply to a rating.
This is one of the many reasons why I do not sell my products on Envato.
The buyer probably requested a charge back from PayPal, which results in account closure. Contact support and they should be able to give you a bit more insight into what happened here. Hopefully the review system gets an overhaul once all the tax dev work is completed.
If the buyer did this does it not make sense then that the rating is invalid, due to the purchase being invalid, and should be removed if requested?
That makes the whole thing even more moronic, since I give a money back guarantee with all purchases, without having to go through the hassle of a chargeback.
In my opinion, the rating is invalid because it doesn’t make sense, and it’s openly offensive, regardless of the existence of customer’s profile.
It’s nonsense to allow buyers to leave a feedback that gets set in stone, without any possibility to reply to it, flag it or contact the writer. It would be fairly easy for a malicious user to damage multiple authors using fake accounts, then get the money back with a chargeback request.
My advice; move on… Any high volume seller will tell you the same thing, it’s regular occurrence and Envato has no interest in fixing up the review system. It happens to us from time to time as well. If the review uses actual offensive language (from an objective point of view), you can contact support and they will remove the rating+review.
Twice as bad, I would say, as it’s an obviously broken system. Envato’s score gets lower by the day. Besides, I’m against high volume sales. My business strategy is actually the opposite, a low volume of high profile customers (another reason why my products are elsewhere).
Anyway, I’m not too concerned about the rating, I was simply surprised by the sudden “disappearance” of the troublemaker.