To expect Amazon to not butcher reviews I write?

[CupidStuntSurvivor]

Went to order nappies and baby wipes this morning. I normally buy nappies at £18 for 140 with free postage. They've been hiked up to £25.39 in the last month with £3.40 postage added. Anything better value is now Prime exclusive.

The wipes I buy have also been made Prime exclusive and all similarly priced wipes have had a price increase.

It's obvious that they're trying to price customers into a Prime subscription but Amazon Prime is £79. I will of course start buying these things elsewhere where I can get better value for money.

Anyway, I both wrote to Amazon and left a review on each of the items. The reviews have now been posted but have been completely butchered. The first one only has the first sentence I wrote stating that the product is fine and the second one doesn't resemble the review I wrote in the slightest!

AIBU to expect Amazon to only publish edited reviews if they're an accurate representation of what the customer has said?!

And meant to add, YANBU, they should post your review or not post your review, the editing would put me off.

Did you mean to post this in the "IANBU" topic?

I have noticed how companies not only Amazon, are really taking their online reputation seriously. they hire companies to trawl through every customer review and effectively "sanitise" them, removing any comments they find could be damaging. So much for the Internet being open and democratic !

I agree it is annoying when a company doesn't represent your opinions accurately.

I find if you post something accurately constructively and tactfully, they invariably leave the comments as you posted them.

steff it can't even accurately be called a customer review if the customer didn't write it. If the customer doesn't write it, it's not the customer's opinion and is therefore less relevant than it would have been if they'd left it as was, even with an irrelevant sentence in it.

I've never had Amazon change a review of mine.

M&s refused to publish a review I wrote of a top which said something like "poor quality, thin material. I expect better from m&s". It didn't meet their standards according to their email.

I've tried several times to leave a review for Joules wellies saying they leak and they're never published.

Amazon have never changed a review of mine including calling things bad value. They've left several joke threads up and don't seem to have a particularly heavy handed policy.

You can absolutely slate an actual product and they will still post the review. But if you start slating a product in terms of the companies reputation and practices then of course they have every right to remove it. Particularly as the OPs assessment of why they are now Amazon Prime may be inaccurate (it may be that it's no longer profitable to sell them at that price unless to Prime customers, rather than to force people to take out a subscription'.

To say 'they should have posted it because it's a statement about value' isn't necessarily correct. Because if that statement about value includes an attack on the company rather than just a statement that it's bad value then they have every right to remove it. 'This product does not offer good value for money' - fine. 'Amazon are using ramping up the pricing of this product to force people to take out an Amazon prime subscription so now they are bad value for money' - not fine.

They're a business at the end of the day. They don't force anybody to post reviews and they don't offer any sort of guarantee that reviews will be posted or that they won't be edited.

You can (for example) post about it elsewhere, like Mumsnet, to express your disatisaction. But to expect a company at it's direct point of sale to display potentially inaccurate allegations about the company's practices which are designed to stop people from using the company altogether is just silly.

You're making an awful lot of inaccurate assumptions about what was said in my reviews wizard. I'm wondering why.

My reviews were product reviews. One mentioned that I'm disappointed that I can no longer purchase without having a Prime subscription, the other mentioned that the 41% price increase stopped the product being value for money and that the only competitively priced alternatives required a Prime subscription. The majority of each review was about the product.

Granted, if Amazon didn't want any mention of Prime in the reviews they could have either refused the reviews or removed only the bits that mentioned Prime.

My AIBU is about the fact that on one of the reviews, they've posted a single sentence of what I wrote, and on the other they have completely rewritten it and it actually says the opposite of what I said.