Who can leave a review, and when

This lesson prepares you to: Explain that a review requires a real order, and that there is one review per person per product and per storefront.

A review needs a real order behind it

To review a product you must have an order containing that product. To review a storefront you must have an order from that storefront. Without one the review is refused outright with "Only buyers who purchased this item can review it". It is not a policy a moderator applies afterwards, it is a condition of the review being accepted at all.

The consequence worth knowing: your rating cannot be attacked by strangers. A competitor cannot leave you a one star, and neither can somebody who read an argument about you somewhere else. Whoever is rating you gave you money first.

You also cannot review your own store.

When the buyer can write it

As soon as the order is real. An order that is paid, being fulfilled, shipped or delivered all qualify. A buyer does not have to wait for the parcel to arrive before they are allowed to say something, which cuts both ways: it means a review can be written about how the sale went before the item has been handled.

Two separate things get reviewed

Helm has two review subjects, and they are genuinely separate:

• The product. Was this thing what it said it was?
• The shop. Was buying from this seller a good experience?

This split does real work. A perfectly good seller who once shipped a product that turned out to be poor does not carry that on their storefront score forever, and a great product does not launder a shop that takes nine days to post anything.

One review per person per subject

One person gets one review of a product and one review of a shop, and that is enforced by a unique index in the database as well as in the code. Somebody who buys from you eleven times does not get eleven votes on your storefront.

The scale

Ratings are whole numbers from one to five. There are no half stars, no ten point scale, and no separate sub-scores for shipping and communication that quietly average into something nobody understands. A number outside one to five is rejected outright.

What a buyer can change later

A buyer can edit their own review, and editing republishes it. They can also withdraw it entirely.

A withdrawn review is kept as a row rather than deleted, so the audit trail of what happened to it survives. It stops counting toward your score; it does not stop existing.

What this means for you in practice

• Ask. The single biggest reason good sellers have few reviews is that they never mention it. A line in the parcel works.
• Ask after it arrives, not when it ships. A review written before the box is open is a review about anticipation.
• Do not offer anything for a review. Paying for ratings is not accepted here and, unusually, it is provable, which is lesson 7.5.