Most ridiculous reviews and envato can't do nothing.

Envato Authors Author Hangout
1

So.

First i want to tell why the reviews are so important to us (smaller authors). I know the bestsellers don’t care about reviews when theme is sold in more than 2000 sales per month. But we care because thanks to this our themes can be in top rated so can be more visible. It’s ridiculous that envato don’t care about all the unfair reviews we got.

As you can see before the review we got sales about 10-14 per day:

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And after this review our sale is now 3-6 sale. About 70% less sales because of one supid review without any reason.
70% less money.

And now the review.

4 days ago we got this:

…what has cheesed me off is the email sent to see if I could get a refund
was ignored and emails regarding updates continued despite telling them
I didnt like or want it!

Of course we answered to this review:

We don’t have any e-mails from you. Nothing about help and nothig about
refund. Zero e-mails from you. I belive you used contact form in our
support tab. I just sent e-mail to envato to ask if you really send any
e-mail to us to be sure about it.

And this customer also answered to this respone vie e-mail.

Thanks for the response.
I replied to the order confirmation email on 2 Dec 2015 but no response.
I have now deleted the software and moved on to something else.
Regards
John

So. As you can see he send e-mail by replying to order confirmation. Like i can guess all his e-mails was sent to do-not-reply@envato.com.

Of course i contacted Envato in this case and the answer from envato support team was:

Here’s some personal advice I took from the forums that basically focuses more on doing what you can do yourself to be in control of the situation, knowing that “unjust” ratings will always exist:

  • Don’t take reviews personally.
  • Understand that people, and opinions, will vary. Some people describe Shakespeare as “boring”. Go figure!
  • Politely, professionally, publicly respond. It will show other customers that you are the “real deal”.
  • Similarly, kill them with kindness.
  • Learn/know that most customers (existing and potential) are savvy enough to know/determine if an online review is genuine/just or not.
  • Have a plan ready when things like this happen. This keeps you in control of any situation, saves time, and will make you more proactive rather than reactive.
  • Know that these things happens across all industries (movie/book/music etc… reviews), all the time, across the entire internet. Research how those other industries teach how to handle negative reviews. Here’s Etsy’s2 for example.
  • Go the extra mile. There’s a time and a place to do this and it’s most often conducive and beneficial right at the start of the dialogue with your customer. i.e. in your situation here about slow upload speeds, could you have volunteered to upload the files for the customer? Again, not saying this is required, necessary, or even justified, but I think changing our perspective sometimes and going the extra mile for a customer, although not guaranteed, can often help.

Perfect solution. So, when you get 100% shitty review and because of this your sale will drop about 70%, what you can do? Smile and eat your own … because you just spend 5 month to create really awesome theme and now one customer without reason destroyed all your sales and rating :slightly_smiling:

5 Likes
2

Well, that buyer is an ignorant a**hole, no doubt about that and his review should be deleted, I agree, but I don’t believe it had any effect on your sales. I mean reviews are not visible so no other potential buyers could see it and all of your items have 5 to 4.5 stars which is great.

You are level 8 author and you’ve been here for over six years, do you really haven’t experienced weird sales drops through your Envato career? Because if not, then call yourself a lucky guy. For example I’ve made only single sale on Monday 18th but the very next day I’ve made 11! So blaming single silly review for a bad sales really doesn’t make sense to me (at least not in your case).

3

The problem is that our theme (fastor) was here in top 3 before this rating:


Now it’s not even on the first page.

Yes, i’m lvl 8 author and i know some days themes don’t sell. And sales drop day by day after few months. In this case it’s different. Belive me. But what’s more i’m not talking here only about me. There is hundreds of authors with the same problem and still nobody can’t do anything.

4

Unfortunately this is just how “top rated” search works.

An item with 3 x 5 star ratings is always going to beat an item with 20 x 5 star ratings and 1 x 4 star rating.

5

I think envato should:

  • Let author hide ratings when they’re less than 10
  • Or increase minimum 3 ratings to 10
  • Or force buyers to rate items
    I mean, more ratings, more true
6

Ok, I get it now. But as @dtbaker said, top rated search is ridiculous. It is like time bomb, someone will rate less than 5* and you are out. BTW were your pageviews affected as well?

@leafcolor the funny thing is that many buyers don’t even know how to rate! Allowing to rate only under Downloads is IMHO silly. Let allow buyers to add ratings directly on item page and I am sure we will see increase in it.

2 Likes
7

Yes. And it’a a little bit unfair. I sam many themes where was 3 sales and 3 ratings. You know it’s not possible in envato with just a customer sale :slightly_smiling:

I think reviews should be taken more responsible from envato side. Now anybody can post the bad review without any reason. Just because he had bad day.

1 Like
8

Yep every time you get a happy customer in support, just follow up with them to rate, send them something like:

"If you liked my support please leave a quick rating here: http://themeforest.net/downloads "

2 Likes
9

Same thing happend with us.

Customer never contact us & didn’t even reply to our message!

We have only 2 items and one of them get bad rating out of nowhere!!!