Replying to reviews

Hi All,

Before I worked at Envato I was an author for a brief period and one of the things that annoyed me in particular was poor ratings/reviews where I could help the buyer given the opportunity. So during this Hack-Fort I put together a small team to work on improving author - buyer communications.

I know there are a lots of improvements we could make to the ratings system, but this is the area we wanted to focus on during Hack-Fort so we built the functionality to allow authors to reply to reviews. Hack-Fort is over now so we haven’t really got time to make any enhancements but please let me know if you find any bugs.

##How it works:

When an author receives a review from a buyer of their item, they will now have the opportunity to reply to the buyer. Authors can reply from the Review tab on either the Item page or My Account.

Replying to a review will email the buyer. The reply is between the author and the buyer so no other buyers will be able to see it. Authors are only allowed to reply once and the reply is recorded in their account. At no time will the author see the buyer’s email address.

Buyers will then have the opportunity to continue the conversation (should they wish to) off platform by replying to the email. If the author has a support email address it will go to that, if not it will default to the account email address.

Authors will only be able to reply to reviews left after the deployment and none of the replies will be visible to other buyers.

##Some screenshots to illustrate:

Buyer leaves a review and sees a message below informing them that the author can reply to their review

Author receives a review and has an opportunity to reply

Buyer receives the reply and has an opportunity to continue the conversation over email

33 Likes

Fantastic feature! I’m sure this is going to help out some of the unluckier authors around here who have copped bad ratings based on issues that could be fixed by communicating with the buyer! Very good. :slight_smile:

Good step finally :slight_smile:

But, why author replies and reviews cannot be made public? This is not going to completely solve this negative rating issue. But, still a good step forward. Thanks.

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Awesome!

I wish every week at Envato is a Hack Week… So that we get the features we wanted! Excellent work…

btw, Is it already live? I don’t see any Reply button in the ratings tab.

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@createdbypete

This is nice feature but making it available only for the reviews made after implementing this feature is ridiculous. You allow support package retroactively but you do not allow for us to reply on older reviews?

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Wohoo!! Prayers have been listened [feature request] Ability to reply to buyer reviews and no mo’ stalking buyers :smile:

Thanks @createdbypete @andrewfreeman !!

PS: would’ve been so funny if the reply for MrBuyer was: Oh MrBuyer, it’s ‘there’ not ‘their’ :sweat_smile:

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Glad you asked. We did it this way because we felt it was important for buyers to know that authors could reply before they submitted the review.

Haha glad you’re paying attention @hogash and spotted the definitely intentional typo.

You win an internet :star2:

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Yayyy! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: very well thought out implementation, genius even! loving it, thank you very much.
well done guys :clap: :clap: :clap:

that’s wonderful to see that the voices of numerous guys have been heard and i assume that should sounds great for envato too to have a good feedback and authors happy when then deliver good features that help guys out here …

Everything that helps communicating in a better way with buyers is a good thing !
Good experiment and maybe later it can be extended…

Thanks for the kind words everyone. Reading your comments has made my day :smile:

image

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Cool… Something is better than nothing… :wink:

Is that a compliment or a sarcastic comment? :stuck_out_tongue:

Whatever makes you feel good. :slight_smile:

Truely a great tool for authors! I was very excited to see this!

Just a small suggestion; I accidentally send an empty reply, perhaps you could check if the reply is not empty before sending. Other then that, great!

Hey Pete,

Hmm, haven’t paid full attention and didn’t noticed that.
In my opinion, as long as we don’t have access to the buyer’s info, unless he replies back, i really don’t see the problem for previous reviews (or any privacy breach).
Try seeing things from both buyer and author perspective, this should help overall customer satisfaction and trust for both buyers and Envato. I really think it should be enabled for all reviews, a few reasons being:

  1. The majority of reviews are left with the buyer’s idea that they’re public. They mostly sound they’re addressed to other buyers. It’s not necessarily feedback for authors. With or without them knowing they might get a reply, it’s the same thing. I know i can’t prove without any collected data, but it simply is what it is.
  2. I want to improve my rating, let them know updates have been released. Or fixes have been added. Or any other reason why their review isn’t “valid” any more (or never was).
  3. Nothing prevents me for googling their usernames and getting in touch with them.
  4. Most of the time, the only reason why a buyer will re-rate/re-review again is for leaving an unsatisfied review, not to give back 5 stars. The cases when he switches the review to say 5stars is when he’ll be found by author, helped and with his problem solved. Unfortunately i can’t back this up with data, however any author (or even buyer) can confirm this.
  5. As long as it’s enabled automatically in the future, why not in the past too? However you’re putting it, some abuses will be made by some unprofessional authors. It’s just the way it is on all major platforms.
  6. To simply say “Thank you!”.

Anyway, it’s a good step ahead for us authors, i really, really appreciate the hard work and “ears on community”, however i feel it’s a bit halfway done. Also there’s the lazy part of me knowing i still have to google tens of usernames (my own Hack-Fort :smiley: to improve rating ), and hopefully identify them :sweat_smile: :dancers: .

Thanks again guys! :+1:

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Well that’s not right. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll take a look at that this morning.

Just had a customer who rated 1 star because of stylesheet is missing, replied to the review with the detailed explanation and the customer changed the rating to 5 star. Finally we have a chance to get in touch with the customers who rate our products. Thanks to Envato Team.

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