Destructive Criticism or "Useful" Negativity: How to Distinguish?
Today, marketplaces closely monitor how sellers handle customer feedback left publicly under product descriptions in the form of comments. It's crucial for sellers to respond to all feedback - both positive and negative. Unfortunately, sellers cannot completely shield themselves from negative feedback from customers. However, various programs like Mpstats.io and Neuromarket.online can help manage and "capture" such feedback. Additionally, it’s necessary to have a pre-formed strategy for responding to customer dissatisfaction since feedback can be either objective or destructive.
Destructive feedback is often uncontrollable, carries an obvious emotional tone, and lacks thoughtful information, yet it directly impacts the seller’s rating. Negative feedback can stem from a customer's bad mood, damaged packaging, delayed delivery, etc. - situations beyond the seller's control. Studies have shown that such feedback constitutes about 10% of customer responses. While this isn't an alarming figure, it still requires attention. When negative feedback is related to issues like damaged packaging from the warehouse or delayed delivery, which the seller can't control, a clear and polite explanation is needed. This way, other customers reading the response will be less inclined to write negative comments.
Constructive criticism, which typically contains information about specific issues encountered by the customer, requires the seller to apologize first and then express gratitude for the feedback, which helps improve product quality. The seller should do everything possible to resolve the issue, protect the customer’s interests, and thoroughly study and address the underlying problems.
Product Replacement
On marketplaces, there is a practice where "unscrupulous" customers order high-quality products, then return them with swapped, similar items, leading to a high likelihood that another customer will receive the altered product. This often results in negative feedback accusing the seller of fraud and selling poor-quality goods. Delivery service and warehouse employees are usually not competent in distinguishing product quality and authenticity. The seller learns about such incidents last, when the customer receiving the swapped product writes negative feedback on the site. Although sellers cannot fully protect their online store from "consumer terrorism," such situations are not widespread and cannot significantly impact the brand's reputation. As previously mentioned, protecting against this phenomenon is practically impossible, so sellers should anticipate risks and include them in the budget expenses.
Bloggers
In online commerce, there's an unfortunate practice where bloggers and influencers order large quantities of products for photoshoots or events and then return most of them to the seller, justifying their actions by claiming their fame will help sell the products through free advertising and PR. This can be a serious problem for sellers because new customers receiving such products may be dissatisfied to find they were already used. Consequently, they may leave negative feedback on the online store's page. This behavior is not limited to bloggers and influencers but also includes regular customers.
This situation also falls under "consumer terrorism," which is unavoidable. Sellers can only minimize risks, anticipate expenses, and include 5% of the product value in the budget expenses. Many examples show sellers facing these problems without support from marketplaces, as "protecting consumer rights" is more important to them.
Conclusion
The problems described above are mainly driven by customers' moral standards, which can be improved through "customer education." This is promising but requires considerable time and massive attention and effort from brands to engage intensively with customers on these issues.