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 havenât 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 buyerâs 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
Fantastic feature! Iâm 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.
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.
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?
thatâs 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 âŚ
Hmm, havenât paid full attention and didnât noticed that.
In my opinion, as long as we donât have access to the buyerâs info, unless he replies back, i really donât 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:
The majority of reviews are left with the buyerâs idea that theyâre public. They mostly sound theyâre addressed to other buyers. Itâs not necessarily feedback for authors. With or without them knowing they might get a reply, itâs the same thing. I know i canât prove without any collected data, but it simply is what it is.
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 isnât âvalidâ any more (or never was).
Nothing prevents me for googling their usernames and getting in touch with them.
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 heâll be found by author, helped and with his problem solved. Unfortunately i canât back this up with data, however any author (or even buyer) can confirm this.
As long as itâs enabled automatically in the future, why not in the past too? However youâre putting it, some abuses will be made by some unprofessional authors. Itâs just the way it is on all major platforms.
To simply say âThank you!â.
Anyway, itâs a good step ahead for us authors, i really, really appreciate the hard work and âears on communityâ, however i feel itâs a bit halfway done. Also thereâs the lazy part of me knowing i still have to google tens of usernames (my own Hack-Fort to improve rating ), and hopefully identify them .
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.
to improve rating ), and hopefully identify them 
.