Why there are no customer reviews on this site yet, and what we will do when there are

There is no star rating anywhere on this site, no review count, and no block of quotes from satisfied customers. That is not an oversight and it is not a design decision. It is because the shop is new and nobody has written one yet. The number is zero, we would rather say so than manufacture a better number, and this is what we will and will not do about it.

The number is zero

A new shop has a genuine problem here. Reviews are the single most effective thing a page can carry, which means the gap between a shop with four hundred reviews and a shop with none is enormous, and it is a gap that has nothing to do with whether the objects are any good.

The easy fix is to write them. It takes about an hour to produce forty plausible reviews, and the standard tells are easy enough to avoid if you are trying. Plenty of shops do it, some of them quite large ones, and most of them get away with it indefinitely.

We will not. Not as a soft intention, as a rule: we will never write a review, buy one, swap one for a discount, ask friends to post one, or dress up a message from a supplier as a customer. If you see a review here one day, somebody who paid for something typed it.

This is also the law, which is worth knowing as a buyer

In the United States a Federal Trade Commission rule on consumer reviews and testimonials came into force in late 2024. It bans writing or selling fake reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, reviews from insiders presented as independent, and suppressing genuine negative reviews through threats or false legal claims. It carries civil penalties.

The useful part for a buyer is what it implies. If a shop's reviews look manufactured, that is not a grey area in the way it was five years ago, and the same shop has probably made decisions of the same quality about its shipping estimates and its photographs. Treat it as a signal about everything else.

How to spot a bought set, on any site

Look at the dates before the text. Genuine reviews trickle in; bought ones arrive in clusters. Thirty reviews across three days and then nothing for two months is the clearest single tell there is.

Then look at the distribution. Real products collect four-star reviews from people who liked the thing and had one complaint. A wall of five stars with almost no fours is harder to fake convincingly than people realise, and most fakers do not bother.

Then read for the tells in the writing. Bought reviews tend to use the full product name as it appears in the listing, because the writer was given the listing. They praise things nobody notices, like packaging and shipping speed, and they almost never mention the one annoying thing that a real owner would mention within two sentences. Check whether the photos are the seller's own catalogue images on a different background, and check whether the reviewer has reviewed anything else, ever.

What a review will have to be before we publish it

It has to come from an order we can match to a payment. No open form, no reviews from people who have not bought the thing they are reviewing.

It gets published as written, including spelling, and including the bad ones. We will not edit for tone, we will not quietly drop the two-star ones, and the only things we will ever remove are abuse and somebody's personal details. If an object turns out to have a flaw we did not know about, the review saying so is the most useful text on the page and hiding it would waste it.

There will be no incentive attached, because an incentive changes what people write even when it is disclosed. And we will not show an average star rating until there are enough reviews for an average to mean anything, because four reviews averaging 4.75 is a decorative number, not information.

What to use instead for now

Measurements, mostly. For anything with a size, the measurement is better evidence than a stranger's opinion, because it answers the specific question you have rather than a general one somebody else had. Where we have supplier measurements we put them on the page, and where we do not we say so.

For clothing and footwear this matters more than anywhere else, because a review saying runs small is almost useless without knowing the writer's measurements. If you are choosing something like a lace up boot, a tape measure and five minutes beats any number of stars, and we have written separately about where boot conversion charts go wrong.

Beyond that, ask. Email us about a specific item and we will go and read what the supplier actually publishes about it rather than paraphrasing the product page back at you. If the answer is that we do not know, that is the answer you will get. For something like a ruched velvet dress, where fabric behaviour matters more than the stated size, that conversation is worth more than a review section would be.

What this costs us, honestly

Sales. A product page with no social proof converts worse than one with proof, and everybody in this trade knows the figure is not marginal. We are choosing to be at a disadvantage against competitors who made a different choice, for as long as it takes.

The trade is that the first real review will mean something, and so will the first bad one. A shop that has published its complaints has told you something about itself that no quantity of five-star text ever can.

Questions people actually ask

Why does this shop have no reviews?

Because it is new and nobody has written one yet. We will not write, buy or solicit reviews to fill the gap, so the section stays empty until real customers have bought things and had something to say.

How can you tell if online reviews are fake?

Check the dates for clusters, the distribution for a suspicious absence of four-star reviews, and the text for full listing names, praise of packaging over product, and no mention of any drawback.

Will you publish negative reviews?

Yes. Reviews will be published as written, from matched orders only, and the only removals will be abuse or personal information. We will not show an average rating until there are enough reviews for it to mean anything.