Negative reviews and moderation requests: here's how it works
Every webshop has to deal with it: negative reviews. After all, we are all human. Everyone can make mistakes, overlook things and everyone's experience is different. Where some of these reviews are justified, you also have to deal with unjustified negative reviews. You can submit a moderation request for those at ValuedShops.
What is a moderation request?
A moderation request means that you as a member of ValuedShops report an unjustified negative review within your dashboard. So that one of our support experts gets a notification and can check whether it should rightly be removed or not. We created this process because we previously received many emails requesting the removal of negative reviews. At the time, we had to manually check each email to see if the request was justified or not. Eventually we decided to regulate this process and that became the moderation request.
How it works in practice
At ValuedShops you get a notification of every review received. Reviews of 3 stars or lower we mark internally as a negative review. Suppose one day you get a notification as a merchant that you received a negative review. Ai! Always annoying. You immediately dive into your dashboard, see the review and are convinced that it is unjustified and does not meet our code of conduct. Before you can report the review to us, we ask you to leave a comment below the review. This will put you in contact with the customer and often you can already solve the problem between you and the customer. The customer can change their review at any time via a special link. The reaction that you put as a merchant can be either public or private.
Responding privately to a negative review.
When you click 'Post', the customer receives an email with your response. Through the email, the customer can respond in turn. Another advantage with sending a private message is that you automatically send a link with which the customer can change his or her negative review immediately. If the customer does not want to cooperate or you do not hear from the customer anymore, you have "played open" the option to submit a moderation request. The button for submitting a moderation request is next to the review in question within your dashboard.
Conditions for moderation request
As you have read above, we only remove unjustified negative reviews. We have therefore set up conditions that your request must meet. For example, the review in question may not be older than 14 days and you must initially place a comment under the review within your dashboard. In addition, we like to receive proof of why a review does not meet our terms of use. That list of conditions can be found here. Simply put, if you have no or insufficient evidence to substantiate your claim that the review is inaccurate, your request will be denied.
Filing a moderation request
And even then, it's not that simple. Does a customer claim that he did not receive a product? Then you can prove with for example a track & trace code that the product was delivered. But if the customer claims that he did not receive the product on time because you promised a delivery time of 2 days and the customer only receives it on day 4, then a track and trace code is insufficient and there is a chance that your request will be rejected. Then you will have to prove that the customer knew that the product would arrive later (think of e-mail exchange etc.).
Request rejected: what now?
We note that sometimes webshop owners panic slightly when a request is rejected. After all, they have put their heart and soul into the webshop and therefore often cannot empathize with the customer's negative experience. However, don't panic and use this opportunity to turn it around to something positive. If your request is rejected, the first thing we recommend is to respond publicly to the negative review. This will kill two birds with one stone. You show new customers that your customer service is active, that your customer service does 'everything' to help the customer as honestly as possible and that negative reviews also have space on your member page. After all, nobody believes a company with only 10s, right? So see a negative review as a kind of profit! The best way to respond to negative reviews is here. How do you deal with negative review? Let us know in the comments below!