Ethical question on internet review

Our website has product reviews. They're held for moderation before publishing because spammers are a pain in the ass. This has the happy byproduct that I get to read every single one, so if there's a problem we know about it right away. All legitimate ones (ie, not for boner pills) get published, even if they're negative. They are almost overwhelmingly positive, however.

One just came in for a $5400 turbo system. 2 out of 5 stars, text is "Bought this turbo kit and blew my motor a few day later lol start with a fresh engine". The summary is "Good kit for good motor" and it's signed Asmil.

We have no idea who this is - we can't match the handle to any orders. It's a variant of the system that is actually fairly low volume so we can go through them one by one. It's really hard to blow your motor with it. Nobody at the shop has spoken to anyone about this. Basically, we can't verify it at all. Because of the low volume of this variant, it's actually the only review of the product so far.

Should I publish it? Publish it with a note - which will only work if people read the review instead of just looking at the stars? Declare it fraudulent and delete it? I don't want to censor our reviews, but I do want them to be legitimate. Given the positivity of most of the reviews, it may look like the outside like I AM picking and choosing what to publish but I'm not.

What would you want to see on a store that you frequent?

Can you email back the sender? There must be some trail.

Have you sold any of them lately?

Id be tempted not to publish, although its censorship, if you cant get ahold of them anyway.

The note option may be the best bet if your not comfortable censoring it.

I'd contact all of the purchases of the product from the last 18 months and inquire how it meets their liking, how they found the install, the tuning and of course the overall performance post install. If you don't here back from someone with a similar tale of what occurred to Asmil, then don't publish it. They may have gotten it second hand where it may have been either incomplete, or not your product, but being passed off as it.

I want to see reviews from verified purchasers/owners of the product.
I don't want false/fluff input from sellers posing as buyers and I don't want to see damning statements from unverified buyers/owners.

Hold and continue to attempt to verify.

Unfortunately, an email address is not required to post a review. So all I have is the product and "Asmil".

However, I did go back through past orders based on Mr Amy's suggestion and found someone who bought one, then bought engine rebuild (and upgrade) parts six months later. It's been nearly a year so it's an odd delay to the review submission, but I've sent him an email to see if I have found Asmil and to get the full story.

Nope, not Asmil. Our rebuilder is chasing power. I'll start working backwards.

Agreed, hold it until verified. Maybe put in a system where you have to verify your purchase when reviewing. Include an order confirmation number or something. On Amazon, some reviews will be labeled "Verified Purchase". Those are the only ones I care about.

I can set it up so you have to be logged in to post a review - that would give me loads of info. I have that turned off because I wanted to remove as many barriers as possible. Most people (190 out of 314) post without being logged in, and I don't want to discourage them. This is the first one that's made me think it was not legitimate.

I agree about the "Verified purchase" tag on Amazon, we simply don't have the time (manpower, budget, take your pick) to implement something like that at the moment. As far as I can tell, every review on our site is a verified purchaser. There is an advantage to having a human read every one of them.

I would change your review thing to require an email, if you can, so these things don't happen again.

Yeah, work backwards, hold till verified. I think that is reasonable. It is possible that he bought it from someone that bought it from you and didn't install it.

Hold til verified.

This reminds me of Amazon reviews that say "This widget didn't fit in the space I wanted it to go. One star"

i would say its not a relevant review since nothing that you sold him actually blew up/failed. its easy to slap a turbo kit on any car and blow it up without supporting mods/tuning, but that is in no way related to the turbo kit itself that you supplied.

that would be like saying that i put nitrous system on my engine and it snapped an axle, not relevant to the nitrous system at all

I just googled "asmil Miata" and came up with nothing

JohnRW1621 wrote: I want to see reviews from verified purchasers/owners of the product. I don't want false/fluff input from sellers posing as buyers and I don't want to see damning statements from unverified buyers/owners. Hold and continue to attempt to verify.

I wouldn't even bother to post it. I admire the fact that you are attempting to verify it but after half a day I'd have given up. Reviews like that add nothing of value to you, your engineering team, your quality control team or other prospective buyers. Anyone who does 15 minutes of research before buying a high end turbo kit should understand what needs to be in place before you bolt it on. If they overboosted on startup that's one thing but if they were driving around for several months it's likely user error.

If it was a technical problem, say the BPV was frozen, I'd sure as E36 M3 call you guys to find out why it was like that, even if I didn't do my due diligence and check to make sure it was free before installing. Since FM seems to be highly competent with customer support there's very little to lose even if the answer was it's my fault.

Verified reviews made from the users order history page would help a lot in this regard.

Lol-I think I would post the question on Miata heavy forums to get ahead of the internet's tendency to witch hunt if someone feels wronged.

Keith Tanner wrote: Most people (190 out of 314) post without being logged in, and I don't want to discourage them. This is the first one that's made me think it was not legitimate.

Most people currently post without being logged in because they can. Change the rule/setting so you must be logged in to post, and I doubt it would hurt your feedback volumes significantly.

It may have been a second hand purchase, too.

Keith, I really, really like reviews on websites. It can, and usually does, make my final decision for me. That being said, I usually toss out the highest and lowest rated reviews. So in this case, Asmil wouldn't impact me at all.
I would, if I were you, require an e-mail address. In answer to this specific issue, I'd publish it with the note. As a consumer, that would impress me that you don't censor your reviews, and that you read every review. That shows you are unbiased, and concerned about your customers satisfaction, and your own reputation.
If I were you, I'd also ask a random (or not so random) guy from Fenton Michigan if he would like to test out one of your completed cars for a few years to see how well they hold up. Just an idea....

I'd probably post it with a note at the front of the review.

State that it is a unverified purchase. State that you would like contact with the reviewer for research purposes.

Don't include the star count, if possible, in the item description until you can verify the purchase.

Not posting it could cause you a lot of grief. Posting it as unverified and no stars will at least give you a chance to contact the reviewer and prove that you don't censor reviews but will verify them when necessary.

I agree on the hold until verified stance. It's the most ethical balance here. It's Unethical on (the reviewer's part) to post a bogus review. If you highly suspect this to be a bogus review (due to low volume etc. as you stated) then you will be culpable to the posting of bogus review.

DrBoost wrote: If I were you, I'd also ask a random (or not so random) guy from Fenton Michigan if he would like to test out one of your completed cars for a few years to see how well they hold up. Just an idea....

You spelled Temple TX wrong...

As much as I would love to require email addresses, changing the system is not currently going to happen. I can turn on "must be logged in" with a click. I'll do that if we have more problems. Right now we're at about 0.3% questionable reviews.

I cannot publish without stars, otherwise I wouldn't have this concern. If there were other reviews of that product, I'd also be less concerned. But for the only review of this product to be a 2-star, that's not something I'm comfortable with unless it's 100% legitimate.

Looking at the orders, I'm assuming the guys who have gone on to pour more money into the car have not popped their engine I've contacted a few, no luck in finding our Asmil. I can't believe that someone would have blown an engine with a full FM II system and I wouldn't have heard of it either directly or via the grapevine. The fact that he uses "lol" as punctuation also makes me think he's a bit outside the usual demographic for this particular kit. Since we have a much stricter definitio of an FM II at our shop than some of the forums do (a full system using our own standalone engine management, vs "a turbo kit that has some FM parts in it") I suspect this was a DIYer who bought a few parts from us and notably did NOT buy the engine management. Buying a used kit is another possibility, as all sorts of stuff can happen via multiple owners and a decade or two of time.

If not posting it causes any grief, then I'll know who Asmil is and I can address things head-on. Meanwhile, I'll keep poking around and trying to track him down.

Nick (Bo) Comstock wrote:

DrBoost wrote: If I were you, I'd also ask a random (or not so random) guy from Fenton Michigan if he would like to test out one of your completed cars for a few years to see how well they hold up. Just an idea....

You spelled Temple TX wrong...

Nope. I just googled it. I got it right the first time

Am I missing something?

It's not even a review of your product. Here's what I heard, "I bought this great kit, and put it on my crappy motor. I popped the motor, but that wasn't the kit's fault. And somewhere back in first grade I missed the lesson on how to count stars, so 2 is all I understand".

You don't have any obligation to publish crap like that, and it offers no service to your readers. In fact, it is a DISSERVICE to your readers (because it fails to review the product).

I don't even think I would call that censorship (but that's another discussion). The site exists to sell your product. It's not a public library. Choosing to not publish a worthless review is no different from Margie choosing to not want political discussion on her website.

It's not a review of your product. Don't publish it.

And then we have Asmil's very handle: Phonetically "ass mill." I don't know what that is, but I'm pretty sure this guy is being one.

I don't think you're ethically bound to post that review. You have spent enough time trying to find this person to verify the purchase to no avail. You're not cranking this product out at high volumes. He didn't spend any time giving you a review, he gave you a comment. There is no depth to what he said. Most likely a troll with nothing better to do.

If you feel the need to post that review, I would definitely put an asterisk and say that it is an unverified purchase. That way anyone looking at the product, can decide to take the "review" for what it's worth and hopefully that person will have enough cells in their brain to realize that it's not even helpful towards their decision in the product.