What is ResellerRatings.com?

ResellerRatings is a one stop shopping resource for savvy computer and electronics consumers. You can compare prices on millions of products at thousands of online stores, read customer ratings and reviews of products and stores, and get our hand-picked coupons, rebates and other hot deals on popular products every day. We founded the site in 1998 when we identified the need for online retailers to be accountable to their customers. The mission then was the same as it is now: to connect buyers with the products they want at the best price, to help buyers become more informed about the retailers that they would like to do business with, and to help merchants improve their businesses through customer feedback and surveys.

Through our integrated price comparison engine (see the search box on our homepage), buyers can combine the power of reviews and ratings of retailers with the ability to find the best prices on products. No price search site offers such a comprehensive ratings system as ours, and our powerful ratings system is now coupled with one of the best price comparison engines to give buyers an all-in-one shopping resource.

Our relationship with customers

ResellerRatings relies 100% on customer feedback. When customers make a purchase from a company, they can help thousands of other potential buyers by rating that company at our site. Customer comments and answers to our survey questions will help educate buyers, and will help the retailer improve their company. Both happy customers, and disgruntled customers, submit evaluations to our site. It certainly is not one or the other. No matter what a customer's level of satisfaction, it is paramount that they voice their opinion about their buying experiences on ResellerRatings.

After a customer submits an evaluation, they can come back to the site and alter that evaluation at any time. That's important, obviously, because future purchases and/or actions by the merchant over time may change a customer's opinion.

How the ratings system works

As stated above, we rely 100% on customers. We do not invent a rating for any company, and ratings are not subjective such as based upon comments, etc. A company's ratings are solely based upon customers' answers to our survey questions. We ask approximately 40 survey questions, and we publish the results (in the form of a rating, along with a baseline comparison to other companies) for 6 of those questions. The remainder of the survey questions are used for market research, as explained below.

Our relationship with Retailers

From a consumer's perspective, retailers have a lot of power and consumers have little. That view is not completely accurate in the real world, since credit card companies give consumers the benefit of the doubt, over merchants, in the long run, when charges are disputed. Still, when a customer gives money to a merchant and expects a quality product and service in return, they have placed their trust in that merchant, yet the merchant has not been asked to place their trust in the customer.

ResellerRatings aims to level the playing field. Merchants become accountable to customers when they know that customers have a non-biased third party outlet, our site, to voice their opinions about a merchant's service. But in doing so, it is important that merchants also have a voice. That's why we offer complimentary ResellerRatings accounts to merchants, which enable them to flag reviews that may violate our terms of use, as well as our Merchant Member subscription-based accounts which lets merchants communicate with reviewers, post rebuttal comments (aka their side of the story) in reply to any comments that customers submit, to view invoice numbers to verify that customers are legitimate, all in an effort to resolve any customer issues and maximize customer satisfaction.

How we make money

ResellerRatings has expenses and employees, and is a business. Our business model is successful and our services are in demand. We pride ourselves on having the highest ethical standards, and at no time will we ever alter a company's rating or reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind.

ResellerRatings is in the business of providing market research data to companies, based upon our customer surveys. Companies pay us for analyses of our survey data so that they can better understand what their customers think about many different aspects of their businesses.

We also provide certain premium features to merchants, such as email alerts to alert a merchant when customers submit reviews, the ability to post rebuttal comments in reply to reviews, the ability to contact reviewers via our site, and featured merchant advertisements that link to the merchant's reviews page. Any ad that we display for any merchant is not an endorsement by us of that merchant - we no more endorse that merchant than any other on ResellerRatings.com.

If a merchant operates an affiliate program, paying commissions for referred visitors who make purchases on their site, we may sign up for such a program from time to time in order to generate revenue from visitors who visit the merchant's website through our link(s).

Any merchant advertisement will link to the merchant's reviews page on ResellerRatings to give their reviews extra attention, or to the merchant's homepage, and as always, you must make the judgment as to whether you want to purchase from a featured/sponsored merchant or any other, as we will never recommend one merchant over another. Our system simply analyzes the results of customer surveys and displays the data to you to help you make the best decisions.

From time to time, websites may license our ratings and reviews to publish on their own sites. They obtain the data straight from us, and it is unaltered.

Merchants will never have to pay to be listed on ResellerRatings.com. Customers may add companies to the site, and merchants can request to be added.

Again, we never have, and we never will, enable a merchant to alter their rating at ResellerRatings.com, or influence what comments do or do not appear on the site, via compensation to us. Customer comments will only be removed if they do not comply with our published policies and all companies will be treated strictly equally.

How we are different from other ratings sites

Companies are added to our site by customers, or by merchants, but companies cannot opt-out. In our opinion, it completely defeats the purpose of having a company ratings site if companies must choose to appear there. Poorly run companies will never choose to appear on the site and risk giving their customers a voice, but all companies are listed at ResellerRatings and in our 11+ years we have never removed an active retailer from our site.

ResellerRatings is heavily tech focused, with more hardware/software related store reviews than other ratings sites. We also pride ourselves on having a comprehensive fraudulent review detection system to improve the quality of our site's reviews and their usefulness to you, as described below, as well as manual checks that we perform to ensure that all reviews were written by actual customers.

About fraudulent evaluations

Fraud takes on many forms. Companies can attempt to evaluate themselves. Companies can attempt to evaluate competitors. Customers can attempt to evaluate a company more than once. A non-customer can attempt to evaluate a company. If you're reading this thinking, "will they catch me"? Yes, we will.

We have a wide variety of automated tools and manual checks that we use to detect fraudulent voting. The process begins by requiring user registration, logging IP addresses, and requiring invoice numbers for transactions, but we go a lot further - even to the point of asking users to fax us printed invoices as proof of transactions, or manually reading individual comments to note common language and style patterns that may indicate multiple review submissions by a single individual. That should provide you with a glimpse into how serious we are about preventing fraud. Ensuring the accuracy of reviews is a very large part of what we do.

When someone tells you that user review style sites run themselves and that little effort is needed since the users "do all the work", be very wary. Anyone that lets a site such as ours "run itself" will eventually end up with a site full of worthless data that cannot be relied upon for any reason.

You can be assured that we are continually improving our ability to detect and prevent fraud. If for any reason you notice suspicious activity on our site, please, by all means, let us know.

If you ever have any suggestions on improving our site, we want to hear from you!