I look at the reviews to get honest feedback from real people who have bought the products, and frankly your AI sales pitch “reviews” just invalidate the whole concept.
Where to next ? Are you going to follow those chinese online sites by deliberately publishing misleading product titles and descriptions ? By ignoring serious questions and any negative comments ?
I agree with you! Giving people generic ‘opinions’ to save time is absurd.
I said the same thing a while back!
It is actually worse than what it seems … 
Critical reviews do not get published.
How do I know? Because I made the effort to write my own reviews (I did not like the generic pre written reviews one bit. Every single one seemed to suggest a “game changing” product. What game are we changing?).
Positive feedback got published, however anything critical simply got rejected. This was hugely frustrating, as I felt deceived into participating in creating a false narrative. That’s why there is such a huge delay in writing a review to it getting published. The process should be instant. The business picks and chooses what it wants on the website. The justification for this is laughable (to reduce spam) when the published reviews look like bots anyway!
I got given a boilerplate response to my concern so I never wrote another review. I now know they were dishonest and artificially bloated. Negative reviews (including neutral but critical) should always be posted. There is no excuse for review manipulation.
Don’t believe me? I am happy to provide several examples of my reviews not getting published.
I have actually bought products because of a negative review (the reviewer said “this book is too technical for me”).
Often I feel that negative reviews reflect worse on the reviewer rather than the product (eg hadn’t read or understood the product specs). I realise also that customers are much more motivated to complain than to praise, so what is important is the ratio of complaints to number of units sold.
Occasionally a review will point out some aspect I hadn’t realised, and that makes the effort worthwhile.
Me too!! Everything you have said aligns with my feelings exactly. Products that don’t have anything critical written in reviews come across suspicious to me.
It is really disappointing that Core electronics has chosen this stance on their product reviews. They are really great to buy from with great variety and FAST shipping. Like very fast. The postage is their value proposition. I’d buy from Ali Express instead if long postage didn’t bother me. It is all the same stuff, and it is cheaper.
The review thing left a sour taste in my mouth and it is an ugly mark on an otherwise very good business (in my experience). I hope they change their stance as others start to notice. I thought I was the only one that cared as it got brushed to the side when I brought it up.
Say NO to review and rating manipulation!
I have purchased from Adafruit and a few other overseas suppliers when I was getting started … then realised that between shipping time, variety of suppliers, and currency exchange rates that Core are providing good value.
Only issue I have found is that the same product from different suppliers can have very different prices 
Not my experience. Buying their “choice” items (free postage from China) has been less than 2 weeks - I suspect the Chinese government subsidises their overseas postage because there’s just not enough margin in a AU$15 total order.
Their prices can be good - as long as no follow-up is required. Most sellers seem to respond with “we know nothing about this product. Please contact us if you have any questions” - if they respond at all.
Some sellers on Ali deliberately use incorrect product titles (eg a BME280) then when you contact them they refer to the description field which is for a BMP280 - and refuse to correct the error in the product title.
Hm, this sounds pretty terrible. Come on Core, surely you can do better at managing your reputation than this.
Hey, great feedback. Let’s find a way to continue to motivate genuine customer feedback without creating frustrations. By the way, all of our reviews are edited/checked by customers; there are no bots that create reviews that are automatically published. The phrase “Verified Customer” on a product review means that a CustomerID in a MySQL query is linked to a shipped order for that ProductID.
Challenges of the past: The likelihood of someone naturally leaving positive product feedback is almost zero. There is nothing wrong with that; it’s an artifact of the modern world, everyone is busy. Left that way and unattended, our support and supply chain would not be represented fairly in the public domain.
Of the hundreds of commits made to our ERP system/website in the last year (we work tremendously hard at CI/CD across the entire business), tens of them are related to AI assistance and product review workflows. We actively explore ideas, put them to work, and use them ourselves.
FYI to those who haven’t seen the latest design, here it is (we take a less is more approach with most things):
General features:
That’s the current screenshot of the reviews page, and I welcome discussion to make it better.
That is not the case @Tony254187; we publish negative product reviews as they roll through. The only exception is when the negative feedback may relate to another product or something else entirely. We get in touch to assist and figure out how to help. Of the 30 reviews you have on your account, they all have the status of “published”. If this is wrong or something is missing, please DM me directly, and I will help. However, our standard protocol is to leave a review unpublished until it has been checked by a staff member for the usual pitfalls of the internet.
It usually is quick (single-digit days, often 1-3), though there have been periods of short staffing where that was much longer. Rest assured, we got to everything in the end - we tend to focus on customer project support and logistics if we are short-staffed.
Ah yes, that was a specific prompt variant that got too chummy. We made some changes quite quickly; I recall your feedback at the time being associated with my own, which led to several improvements.
And just for transparency’s sake, our recent reviews (including counts) are below. The newest is on the top of each list. Eight are between 1-3 stars in the last 30 days (the count of 3-star reviews in that collection is greater than 1 or 2 stars, if you were interested). We value feedback; thanks for sharing sentiment via phone, email, chat, in-person, forum or product reviews. But back on topic, let’s find the right balance on the current product review page.
Just a quick update for some changes we’ll explore implementing in the coming weeks:
This may lead to more “blank” reviews (score only), but is likely a better middle ground all said.
If anyone has more ideas or feedback, please do post them here!
Graham, I’m all for encouraging customers to leave reviews, particularly positive ones … even if they are just “product works as it says on the box”.
Unfortunately it is problems that get customers worked up enough to go to the effort of leaving a bad review. In the same way that a small percentage of manufactured product will inevitably be faulty, so there will also be some dissatisfied customers. What is more important is the proportion of dissatisfied customers.
As a former programmer I can see and appreciate the amount of thought you have put into the design, to balance the desire to gain needed feedback without making it too onerous for customers.
It really was just the “AI Assist” that I find over the top. Thank you for hearing my complaint and taking it seriously.
Now that I feel heard i would like to go back and adjust the 1-star scores I unfairly gave products …
From the “My Product Reviews” page I can “See Details” of my reviews - but it seems that I cannot change my review or score. Is this intentional ?
Curiously … following the link in the Product Name column takes me as expected to the product page … where my 5-day-old review is not showing in the [Reviews] tab.
Maybe this is a bug in the software, but is seems to explain Tony254187’s perception that negative reviews were not getting published.
Hi @Donald23173,
As we do check all of our reviews, most of yours were flagged as inappropriate and we got in touch with you by phone. We had a good chat and asked if those reviews related to the product or the review process as it seemed inappropriate to publish them as submitted (as you can tell by your screenshot). You agreed and we sought your permission to update the one review that had a positive text sentiment and a negative score sentiment.
Those other reviews remain unpublished and will likely be removed during a longer-rotation admin task of taking out the digital trash.
You’ll be happy to know that as of today, there are no AI Assist tools to help people publish meaningful technical reviews. We’ll leave that to end users though we suspect it will result in a future (as it did before) where almost all text discourse in reviews is negative and positive ones are score only. We tried to level the playing field for positive effort, for what that was worth.
And FYI, we can and do update reviews upon request. That type of request arrives so infrequently (yearly?) that it’s not on our development radar.
There are other public discourse channels as well, such as product comments which make their way into the usual public domain and are likely better suited for working through an integration / setup constraint.
Hi Graham.
I have a question about this change. 
If I go to make a review now what I get is
Here is an excerpt of the page, you can imagine more ~15 more items above.
Those fields used to be auto populated but now they’re blank.
Q: So if I write a quick thought about the item I wanted to review, ignore the rest, and then scroll down the click “Submit Reviews”, what happens?
Do I submit 5 star blank reviews to every product I didn’t interact with?
If I don’t have an opinion on something, do I now need to tick “skip product” to avoid review it?
I think what your suggesting here is a button below each item where I can “Inspire Me” or “AI Assist”.
That actually sounds really helpful. Often I just want to say something like. “works as expected” so a button that types that out for me with a little bit more colour is pleasant.
For me, it’s the choice to review something that I think gives it weight. If AI was an option, that’s totally cool, because it doesn’t change the fact someone chose to review it in the first place.
If that change was implemented, I would at least know that, if I see a review of a product that looks AI generated, I can at least be confident that the person who asked for that ai text at minimum probably read and basically agreed with the output.
Thanks Graham
Pix 
Hey Pix,
That’s a long list! We’ll see if we can find a logical way to shorten it.
If skip product was not checked, the products would be submitted with a score only, as noted in the default text in each field. Star ratings can also be clicked once per product to change them to whatever suits.
If skip product was checked, the product would not be shown again on the bulk review page.
A logged-in user would need to navigate to a product page and click “Review Product” to clear the skip, and be redirected to the bulk review page (there is currently a bug with this flow due to recent changes, though it ought to be fixed in the coming days).
Great idea, and we’ll revisit this someday when it seems more expected to have!
Same page as you - someone had to read the text and agree/edit/discard.
Hi Graham,
Sorry if I came across as a bit harsh in my comment. I hope you understand that I really do enjoy shopping from Core. I may not have made an order for a little while but that is due to no free time and not needing anything (I.E I have not purchased maker goods from anyone lately).
If I get a chance I will message you regarding the reviews that were not published. Maybe things have changed since I last checked. In any case, it is of little relevance now. I can see you have taken our feedback on your review processes seriously and have implemented good changes. It will be interesting to see how it all works. Thank you for taking the time to explain the changes to us and for hearing us.
I hope everyone is enjoying their long weekend!
Until next time.
Kind Regards,
Tony
And you can get our latest projects and tips straight away by following us on:
