Hi @andrewfreeman,
I can understand why you’re not concerned. These changes affect only authors sales.
At least show some worry about OUR concerns, please. See my previous reply to understand my frustration with Envato these last 2 years.
Regards
I’ve just got my first 1 star on my theme Skyline because of support renewal.
Only two reviews visable, thankfully the one underneath is a great review but those who have the only open review visable be a negative one really sucks.
@andrewfreeman Hi Andrew. Could you please respond to our concerns and suggestions? Thank you.
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Hi BonfireThemes,
A big reason why we can’t display historical reviews is because we specifically told customers leaving a review that we were only sending their review to the author. Hiding their username is not an option because they could have included private details within the comments (review) field e.g. their username, their URL, their name, etc. However unlikely this is, we cannot afford to take the risk.
It should be made clear that this has in no way affected customer behaviour regarding their use of ratings. The number of ratings and average score you have built up will still be available to customers in their search results and on their item details page. The two places they are most concerned when considering your item.
Having the Reviews tab displayed after the item was launched, is similar to launching your item now. It will take time to build up your reviews. Some will be good and some not so good but if your item is of good quality (lets say 4 out of 5 stars) then statistically speaking the item will have 4 good reviews and 1 bad review in some order.
My point about not being too concerned (different to no concern) was because only 2% of customers are currently using the Reviews tab. That means 98% of customers are assessing your item by the exact same means they were prior to launching public reviews and therefore public reviews (currently) has very, very little influence on your items overall likelihood to be successful.
The other point I’d like to make is that (at least for now), Reviews are relevant to the current quality/standards of the item. Therefore if an author started of with a lower quality product but improved it over time, their potential customers have a better representation of the product they are thinking of buying. This is something that has been raised with me by numerous authors because they don’t want to be penalised for previous issues with their item. The App Store for example ties ratings to the current version of the product (while making the historical view available upon request). I don’t necessarily think that would work in our case but it’s an example of how customers and sellers can both benefit from recent/relevant reviews.
Authors do have an opportunity to be proactive here and try and increase the number of overall reviews you are getting. For example, after you provide support to a customer, ask them to review your item. Successful authors are very good at increasing their review/sale ratio. I’ll also investigate ways to do it more broadly (onsite/email/etc).
CC: @themac @htmgarcia
P.S. It’s worth noting that I’m on leave next week.
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that’s why I suggested 19 days ago to [quote=“themac, post:85, topic:48695”]
hide/blur usernames and their comment
[/quote]
and 7 days again [quote=“themac, post:101, topic:48695”]
what’s the great problem to show anonymized old reviews without their probalbly given comments
[/quote]
when hiding comments, how the mentioned content in the comments regarding _private details within the comments (review) field e.g. their username, their URL, their name, etc. can be visible???
this would be the same like the small tab on the side - ut with dates and categories - really no one can be concernced about displaying just stars, date and the optional category (like support…)
Hi Mac,
It’s something we considered but we ended up deciding that there was not a lot of value showing customers one month of recent reviews (with usernames and comments) followed by years of anonymous star ratings. They can get the same information from the aggregate view at the top of the page or in the ratings module on the right hand side (as you mentioned).
We’ve recently made a change to require all customers to provide a reason (from the drop-down) but before that it was only required for <4 star ratings so the majority of positive reviews wont actually have any further information to help customers.
But you find ok to display one or two ratings with comments and hide years of star ratings? Confusing… confusing…
May I ask what kind of value you expected of showing the ratings in tab?
Every possible thing is made to protect buyers but what about authors. You need to change your terms and conditions since now is made in the way so if only a literally bad review is posted you will remove it. Extortions are made on support and review stated differently and when we send the proof we got that they cannot do anything as review reflects clients experience with the item???!!!
And another example for which i am beyond angry is that we got a 1 star review “missing style css” which is now one of 2 visible the second one being 5 star. And support just does not want to remove it again stating it reflects the clients experience. And we all know what that means and themeforest itself is full of warnings about that issue.
So tell me what measures are you taking to prevent this kind of things, as i am battling this with support to the very end, since it destroyed our rising sales on that item which we spent a lot of time developing the major update to be then ridiculously hammered by a unknowledgeable client!
Thank you
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@andrewfreeman Noticed something: when not logged in and clicking on the timestamp of a rating in the “Reviews” tab, it takes the user to the front page and not the individual rating page (which is the behavior for logged in users).
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We must need some kind of protection abut bad ratting. Some people just do not use the plugin or module correctly. They install and give bad ratting and gone. They do not reply our email to show them it work and we are 100% confident our product work. So what you think about this two ratting from two different customer.
one customer - 1 star
I tried to use it. NO CHANCE. The webstores i tried to use it in were becoming very very slow.
Second Customer - 5 start
I have bought this item more than 7 months ago and I am using it as part of my prestashop since then, wouldn’t like to miss it anymore.
If you need to manage plenty of content inside prestashop there is no better way to fill it.
The visual composer in combination with the addon “ultimate addons” (which is form same developer) makes it so easy to build appealing content in very short time, providing you with a super easy way to implent any kind of effect with minimum knowledge of coding.
It offers the possibillity to build, for example, amazing landinpages inside your prestashop installation with just some mouseclicks.
The results can easyly look similliar to complex standalone wordpress landinpages sold on themeforest as single templates.
Now with the latest Version of Visual Composer smartdatasoft team has added some important improvements to the code, such as the possibility to use custom hooks, an alt-text manamagent for pictures, and for me even very important, they have made a big performance imporvement.
The sites composed with visual composer load very fast.
With the first version of VC there was a small, but acceptable loss of speed on sites generated with visual composer and ultimate addons, since these add a lot of code, but with the latest version 4.3.20 I am actually using, the page speed even of sites build with VC and UA isn’t not any millisecond slower than any other page of the shop.
I do have page load times (all prestashop caches enabled) from average 1,5 seconds on complex sites with a lot of effects/visual content, and less than 1 second with pages that have average content.
Thats absolutly fantastic. Thanks very much to the smartdatasoft team, for your worthful work.
So who is wrong, We, 1 customer or 2 second customer ?
smartdatasoft - In answer to your question, “who is wrong?” … no one is wrong, at least from a consumer perspective. If I were looking at this particular product I would give more weight to the second customer who provided more details. But, I would not ignore the first customer. I have to assume that the first customer is not someone who is intentionally trying to harm your business … it looks like they had a different expectation than the second customer. I did notice that you did not share a response to the first customer. Again, as a consumer, I would be very interested in your response to the first customer.
In this particular scenario it would be difficult to make a confident purchase. I may purchase the product, but I’m certainly going to be focused on any performance related issues. I would look at your overall presence on Themeforest and may look at reviews from other products you sell.
If you produce a good product, provide good support and resolve complaints quickly … then you should be rewarded with more purchases and more positive reviews (as opposed to just two). Personally, I may purchase a product that has all sorts of issues … but if I get good responsive help from the support department, I will either not rate the product or I’ll give the product 3 stars but be very specific in my review of why the product did not meet my needs. I would be much more inclined to purchase a low rating product if the reviews showed that there was an attempt for the seller to resolve issues (e.g., fix bugs or refund purchase).
You say you need some kind of protection from a bad rating … but I honestly cannot think of way to protect you from a bad rating without doing a disservice to me, the customer. I certainly don’t want you to be able to delete bad reviews, although I’ve seen that happen on Themeforest. You lose credibility and run the risk of doing more harm to your company than you would if you just allowed the review to stay but respond to it in a professional respectful manner.
Separate yourself from the companies that are churning out low-quality products with little or no support. They’re looking only at the bottom line, profit. Be honest, mature, respectful and professional … people will notice and want to do business with you.
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You may not got my point of view. Just share a true story yesterday happen. I woke up from sleep and saw 1 start rattting and customer complained theme do not work. I reply him in ratting.
Then look the support ticket he replied , i was unable to reply as at that time i was in sleep. I reply him and after couple of reply he understand that he made mistake. He even complain about our documentation is wrong. This happen because the need a wordpress theme and he purchase Prestashop theme. So how he will find the folder structure of wordpress in prestashop theme. He told i have purchase many theme but never happen this. After many message i success to show him that he is wrong , he need wordpress. So he asked refund from us and change the ratting.
This time it is not a problem as they do not want to use the Prestashop theme and take refund. Some buyer made wrong purchase and do not contact support and just put 1 start ratting and gone.
I have talk about those senario. So when a buyer put 1 ratting he need to prove where is the problem. If there is problem in product they have right to give ratting 1. But if they made mistake by wrong purchase , they do not have right to put 1 start ratting to any author due to there fault.
This is what i try to say 
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I understand your point. You want all reviews to be a fair and accurate representation of your product. This is not a realistic expectation. Ensuring that every single rating is “accurate” would require resources that simply are not available … like a court system that allowed both you and the customer to represent your views … and then an impartial 3rd party (judge) would decide on an appropriate rating. And I’m certain that, even then, not all parties would be satisfied with the ratings results.
The key is … and I say this from a significant amount of ecommerce and seo work … is to dilute the 1 star ratings as much as possible. I had a furniture store that had two reviews on Google … one was very bad and the other was very good. The store hired me with the expectation that I would remove the bad rating … I can’t do that (from a technical and ethical perspective) … but we started a campaign that included encouraging every customer to please rank us on Google, especially if you’ve had a positive experience. Within 2 months the bad review was pushed to the bottom by several 5 star ratings. They make good furniture and they’re a great company to work with … and people were more than happy to support that company.
I do agree that a responsible person should put details as to what made them give a bad rating … or good rating. I always question those 5 star ratings that say “great product” … really, why?
There are also some nuances in Themeforest that could making rating easily skewed one way or the other; A single person does not buy from Themeforest every day … say, like Amazon. So instead of getting 50 reviews from people that have made several purchases from Themeforest … you get 5 reviews from people that have either made their first purchase or a few purchases. That makes every customer a potential reviewer … an opportunity for more sales … show them why you deserve 5 stars.
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I have reported this issue to the support, but support team says it does not violated anything to their review policy. The bad review is now always on top of the page, customer leaves 1 star review everyday. What should I do at this point?
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