Let's talk for a few minutes about ratings

Hello,

In my travels recently, I've been coming across more and more discussions among vendors about ratings. Bad ratings can be a bit of a sore subject among vendors, because less than perfect can often mean a significant loss of sales. I wanted to take just a few minutes to talk about this with the community as a whole.

Here's how ratings are supposed to work:

1 - very unsatisfied

2 - unsatisfied

3 - neither satisfied nor unsatisfied

4 - satisfied

5 - very satisfied.

It's a great system, and if people would rate and interpret ratings this way, everything would be fine. The problem is that nobody interprets ratings this way on any DNM, or any online vending site in general. Here's how people actually rate and/or interpret ratings:

1 - I want this vendor and everyone (s)he loves to die in a fire

2 - I want this vendor and maybe a few of his/her loved ones to be maimed in a fire

3 - I am very unsatisfied

4 - I am slightly less than very unsatisfied

5 - ranges from "I am satisfied" to "I am very satisfied" depending on comments

Basically, a 5 is how buyers communicate that they're satisfied, and anything below that is the degree to which their experience sucked. The problem is that you get a few rogues who think they can go off script and use ratings the way they should be instead of how they are. A recent example from my own profile, is a user who purchased a digital book(the Satanic Bible, which I might add is a fascinating read if you have the time) which I delivered within 15 minutes(I just happened to be online when he ordered), he then rated the transaction a 3 out of 5 because he'd only ordered the book as a joke and thought it was weird. To recap: he received precisely what he ordered in an excellent time frame, and rated the transaction a 3 because it was a joke to him.

Another unnamed vendor whose profile I was browsing(I gotta do something to kill the time when I'm in between orders) received a 1 of 5 because a package had taken a week to arrive. That's 5 business days. Don't get me wrong, slow ship times can be cause for dissatisfaction, but vendors don't control the postal service. Now, if the package arrived and it was discovered to be postmarked 3 days after the vendor claimed to have shipped it, or something like that then there may be cause for indignation; but don't order something and expect it at your door in 3 days, I've seen priority mail take 9 days to arrive before. Three day ship times happen, but it's not very common especially when you drop something in a blue box. I generally tell my customers not to expect it for 4-5 days, and not to ask for a re(fund/ship) until at least 2 weeks have passed. Double all those numbers if you're ordering internationally

Imagine for a moment that you are working in a retail environment, say a boutique or convenience store; and every single one of your customers is expected and/or required to complete a brief survey regarding their transaction with you as they were paying. Now imagine that every time you received less than a 5 out of 5, your pay we cut to anywhere from 3/4 down to 1/2 of what it was previously depending on their rating. How would you feel to find customers completing the survey with things like "3 out of 5, bought a bag of chips ironically but found they don't satisfy me like they did when I was a child" or "1 out of 5, credit card machine took 30% longer than it usually does to accept my payment." To vendors, a single bad rating can cut deeply into their income, sometimes cutting it in half for months, and while this fact is becoming less true now that there are so many markets out there, it is still relevant and should be taken into consideration. Your neighborhood DNM drug dealers have had a really nasty habit lately of being human beings with hopes, dreams, bills, jobs, hobbies, and lives outside of being drug vending machines; and sometimes that's easy to forget when ordering from them.

I'm not suggesting that there are no reasons for rating a transaction poorly, but I suggest doing so for reasons that are within the vendors control. If (s)he ships out your package in a timely manner but the postal service takes forever to deliver it, that's not the vendors fault. If the vendor is upfront about the purity and/or you receive exactly what you were told you would receive, don't rate the vendor lower because you had a bad experience due to your own circumstances; and unless you received research chemicals instead of what you really ordered YOU and the environment you tripped in are the most likely cause of your bad trip, not the drugs themselves...but even if it was the drugs, you got what you ordered.

Addendum: I'd also like to ask buyers to STOP leaving the following feedbacks and any which are synonymous with them: "5 out of 5, never received order and got not refund," "any out of 5 - FE, will update when arrives"(this goes doubly so on a market in which it's impossible to update feedback) "anything less than 5 out of 5 - leave feedback here"(explain your bad feedback, damnit).

I can tell that I'm starting to ramble now, so the TL;DR version of this: anything less than a 5 out of 5 is a bad review, and you should explain why you're leaving a bad review; if you can't read your review out loud using a valley girl accent without it sounding like a joke, then your complaint is probably not a very good one and you should leave a 5 out of 5.

Respectfully,

The Black Hand


Comments


[6 Points] eatmybreadpudding:

Funny, I feel the opposite. It's so difficult to separate the great vendors from the OK ones because 5/5 is the standard. Tired of seeing reviews like "3/5 never arrived" or "5/5 no stealth, but mailman didn't care anyway."

For vendors with more than 50 transactions, it seems like 5.0 = Vendor is probably forcing customers to give perfect reviews, 4.97 to 4.99 = Probably a great vendor but be careful and read reviews, 4.94 to 4.96 = OK vendor if you're cool with things like mediocre stealth (e.g. no MBB for weed), 4.90 to 4.93 = Maybe OK depending on reviews but expect poor communication, mediocre stealth, and slow processing, 4.85 to 4.89 = Probably not a scammer but has some serious negatives (although, this could be a scammer), <4.85 = AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

Things should not be this way... I wish it was >4.80 = Amazing vendor, >4.0 = Good, >3.5 = OK, >3.0 = Possibly OK, Less than 3 = Don't order from this vendor.


[2 Points] blackhand25:

Seriously, try the valley girl thing(use any accent that sounds unfamiliar and a little bit silly to you), it's perfect for measuring the validity of complaints:

Valid:

"So like this guy said he'd sell me drugs for some nerdy thing called bitcoin, but after I gave him my money he never sent me any drugs. This is worse than the sweet 16 party daddy threw me."

Not valid:

"OH EM GEE! Like, I'm all upset now because this creepy vendor guy said he'd deliver my drugs in 4 days but it took 5, this is like completely unacceptable, IT'S LIKE HE DOESN'T KNOW WHO MY DADDY IS!"


[2 Points] rappercake:

It's the inverse of Amazon reviews.

"Item exactly as described. 4 stars"


[1 Points] None:

Just the nature of review systems on merchant sites, the vast majority of people are idiots, prone to user error, don't read anything or follow directions, and have zero frame of reference to compare to similar products in the marketplace.

A prime example of this is computer parts, 'enthusiasts' generally build their own computer maybe once every 2-5 years. Product works, it's better then their shitty 10 year old desktop, and then proclaim it's by far the best product in the market and far better than all the similar offerings, even if said product is not necessarily worse, but has differing strengths and advantages.

You'll see almost all computer components receive 5/5 stars, and 90% of the negative reviews are by idiots, ie user error, fucked it up, it was dead on arrival (but that's not the product's fault, just a manufacturing issue and you always get a replacement, even best products have DOAs), rate the product on completely irrelevant reasons, etc ad nauseum. Go ahead, look up any GPU, CPU, motherboard, they all have 5/5 stars.

A good example of this is motherboards. For 99% of hardcore modders and overclockers even, as long as it's the right chipset it'll work and perform just fine. So all motherboards will overclock moderately, and so most people will claim the board is great. However, there are major differences between motherboards in quality, it's just that even more adventurous overclockers don't push the motherboard to places where it would fail, but a higher quality one wouldn't. So who cares, some say, but this also translates strongly to product lifespan as well as electrical efficiency, which degrades over times. In fact, electrical efficiency is an extremely important part of motherboards, a motherboard is literally a PSU for your CPU and RAM. Just as you don't ever want a shitty PSU that supplies dirty power and various, unstable voltages which significantly reduce motherboard, GPU, and peripheral lifespans, you don't want your motherboard reducing the lifespan of your CPU, RAM, etc.

A good motherboard, like a Gigabyte UD3H, will have an efficiency of around ~90%, while a bad motherboard is ~70%, like the Asrock Extreme4. This translates to about $10-30 a year, which is a pretty big deal. Also factor in that lower quality boards are unable to do higher overclocks without significant heat and degradation, an Extreme4 simply can't handle 1.5v but a UD3H could do 1.7v easily. So that's why you care about having a better motherboard - better life expectancy and lifespan, it doesn't damage your components and helps their lifespan, and energy savings. That's basically 99% of what makes one motherboard better or worse than another, every other 'feature' is pretty much meaningless (except RAM overclockability and BIOS found on higher end boards, but that's a whole other issue).

So you have troves of idiots saying the MSI or Asrock Z77/Z87 motherboards are great, when in reality they are so much worse than their competitive offerings at the same price point (certain exceptions exist, of course, like the Z87 OCFM). And sure, they are great in the sense they do their job, and it's awesome what you can do even on a lower quality board. But they are just garbage compared to the competition for the same price.

On top of that, people who know what they are doing, tend to avoid certain products or sellers, so there are no critical, well-thought out post in hundreds of reviews of, say, a Thermaltake psu, and buy a product that is well known for being 5/5 stars. Then the people who actually do public reviews, are usually slanted in some way (incentive for a positive review so there is more shit to review, see basically every single computer review site, yes they are all shit and you should avoid them).

A good reviewer is someone who clearly tells you who is best and worst, who can say 'Well, even though this shit was super fast, it defies logic, it's 10x faster and stronger than the last stuff I had, it's definitely a 0/10 because it's worse then all the others', so if you see a review site, look though and make sure that every single they review isn't some 5/5 A+++'.

You can't force people to be good, nonest, and critical reviewers. A smart buyer will review any low marks and see it's by buffoons, and look for high marks that specifically compare the product to others in the market.


[0 Points] okoaksdo:

Its as almost if we should start requiring id's to purchase.