I have always made decisions on what I buy in the themes and codecanyon sections in part by looking at the number of sales and star reviews. As a general rule less than 100 sales or less than 4 stars i wont buy unless it is the only option or a trusted developer who has just released a product.
Today I guess i wasn’t as busy as normal and took a little time to read the actual reviews on a product (does not matter which one) and what i saw was a majority of the 5 star reviews were by people with 1 - 4 years membership and only 1 or 2 purchases. I myself have made over 100.
So my conclusion is there must be people buying 5 star reviews.If that is the case surely envato could restrict people from making reviews until they have at least 10 - 20 items in their collections.
Please don’t take it personally, that’s just my general opinion.
The thing with customers is that when they’re happy, they rarely leave any feedback. On the other hand a percentage of bad feedbacks are made by people that didn’t undestand the description, thought that the item will do more than advertised out of the box, or didn’t expect that more functions need some (paid) work to be implemented.
My conclusion is - if you need to rely on stars, at least spend few minutes to check what they were given for. I’ve seen great items rated with 1-2 stars, just because authors were unlucky to deal with the type of customers described above.
I was after opinions so no i haven’t taken your comments personally. I also read the comments before making decisions on purchases.
I see what you mean about one or two bad reviews, as a lot of bad comments i read are generally what i call Id10T errors. Always read the instructions.
I also have taken on board what you said about happy customers not leaving reviews. I would give 95% of my purchases 5 stars but rarely take the time. I need to change that habit.
And there’s a lot of people who only ever make a few purchases. Only possible to tell from those who use the forums, so it’s far from exact, but there are 30,000 people who have made less than ten purchases and only 10,000 people who have made ten to twenty purchases… and it tails off rapidly after that.
I’ve made over 500 purchases (along with 176 other people), but I think the majority of people rarely reach double figures.