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Our online store does not have the functionality to leave comments or reviews. You don’t even need an account for anything, though it can be useful if you’re a repeat customer.

You might be wondering: why?

This is, indeed, a downside for our marketing and visibility. Many people use reviews or ratings to make decisions. Without them, people will be unsure if they can trust our store or whether the product is worth the money. Having no reviews or interaction from real customers makes the store slightly harder to find and trust, makes it look less “alive” even.

Then why did we choose this?

The first reason is a bit technical, but we wanted to get it out of the way. Adding this functionality is costly and presents extra problems. The cheap way out, which is what many websites use, is also one that has privacy and data issues. (We would basically hand over all your data to another entity outside of our control. We don’t like that.) At this point in time, the costs and disadvantages are simply too great.

The bigger reason, though, is that we want people to stop treating reviews like gospel ;)

Most of the “real reviews” you read are fake. This is not hearsay or secret. You can go online right now and buy one thousand positive reviews for yourself, in a number of places. Almost all the big and succesful brands have made this a major part of their “marketing strategy”. Buy reviews, generate fake hype on social media, manipulate the algorithm that determines what people get to see at all. The advent of AI tools makes it easy to include human-looking text and images too.

But sure, some of them are real! Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear what they have to say? Most of the time, the answer is no.

  • In general, only a tiny percentage of people leave reviews. (It’s really really tiny.)
  • Those people are usually those with a very positive or negative experience. That’s how you get a 1-star review because someone just had a bad day, or a 5-star review because someone had a good day. (We allowed reviews on some of our older work, and we often received these glowing reviews that made us feel weird because our product was simply not that good.)
  • Most of them only leave a rating, but never write any text. (Or it’s just something quick like “It’s fine” or “No issues”.)
  • They might like or dislike the product for a reason completely unrelated to you. (They might give 1 star because the product is only available in English and they mistakenly assumed it would be available in their native language. If you are English, then this is irrelevant to you, isn’t it?)
  • We (mostly) sell digital products. They get updated all the time, for free, automatically. The reviews about some mistakes in version 1 might be completely irrelevant for the current version 4.

So now we’re looking at a tiny fraction of people who are actual real customers, leaving a review that most likely says nothing about the quality of the product.

It’s a plague, it really is. These platforms (such as Fiverr, Uber, etcetera) that demand you have a rating of 4.5 stars or higher, otherwise you will simply never be shown to users or considered again. Of course such a system will invite people to buy and manipulate reviews any way they can.

We’ve all loved a certain product (movie, game, book, food) and only discovered later that it had a terrible rating. And that bad rating caused the movie to flop, or the game to go extinct, or the author to stop writing. (And it’s even more infuriating if you look at the reviews and see no actual arguments or solid reasons as to why this thing deserves a 1 star review.)

We’ve all experienced people reading reviews and making an “informed decision” to buy the one with the best reviews. Only to get an inferior product that doesn’t do what they actually want. Because they didn’t look at the product and their own needs, they looked at a few stars left by internet strangers.

As stated, older work of ours had comments and reviews. We were learning how to build websites, and this is one of those fun little things you can build to get social interaction and confirmation. The results were so pointless that we stopped doing this. As stated, this goes both ways. People burning something to the ground and ruining the review score for no reason, but also people leaving 5-star reviews that we honestly did not earn (those people were either secretly friends and family, or someone who was having a REALLY good day).

It’s just pointless. It’s a bad metric. It introduces chaos and negativity and nonsense without actually aiding purchasing decisions. We would love it if people stopped judging everything by an aggregate review score.

Liked a product of ours? Really disliked it? Found some issues or improvements?

You can let us know! You can email us! (You can stop buying from us and hit us in our wallets! That sends a strong signal too!) You can find us in many different places.

We try our best to create good resources and to listen to feedback.

An open system of reviews, comments, or similar does not achieve that goal!