Just a note not to trust the Reseller Ratings of Tiger Direct right now. On resellerratings.com, starting on 12/9/03 8:07 AM it looks like 50 pages of "very satisfied" reviews started going up at very regular intervals. See Here - the current page number is 50, where it seems to start.

Prior to 12/9/03 there were a handful of reviews per day with many "dissatisfied" reviews.

Something seems fishy to me.

Hmmmm, I'm wondering if they're running a bot there...

F

Just sent them an e-mail about it... Hopefully, they can look into...

This was what I sent:

Hi, just was wondering what's going on with the ratings for tigerdirect.com. They've had ~500 reviews within the past 6 months and for the month of December they have >500 and the month's not even halfway through?!?!?!

Plus, it seems that the overwhelming majority of the reviews were positive and placed within a couple of minutes of each other to start with.

The flood seems to have started on December 9th at about 8:00 am.

Here seems to be the page that has the start:

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller1983-...-p50-s1-d1.html

Could you please look into this?

Thanks,
Frank

I probably should have stated something about how the average of these posts seemed to have varied greatly from the averages in the past which also make it suspicious, but I assume they'll get that message...

F

Nice job Frank. I'd love to see the response you get...if any.

You're right: something is very strange about the radical increase in reviews. Great catch, Alan!

Frank, great inquiry! Please let us know what (if anything) you hear.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure I like their reply:

Frank,

TigerDirect began promoting our site to their customers in early
December, encouraging reviews - this is perfectly acceptable.

Scott Wainner
President/CEO
ResellerRatings.com


F

lol

TigerDirect had 400 reviews in one day........12/9

i'm surprised they can justify that...lol

that's not good for resellerratings......

-------------------------

I wonder if TigerDirect had all their sales people just go nuts on resellerratings....

christmas bonus for a couple ratings...hmmmmmmm

I don't really like that reply either.

Frank said:



I don't think they understood what you were hinting at with your message.

Even if TD asked their customers to leave them reviews on RR, there's no way that a bunch of people just all of a sudden gave all positive reviews within minutes of each other, and sometimes even in the same minute.

This customer is labeled as "Very Satisfied."

I knew a company who put a piece of software on Download.com a couple of years ago. In order to create interest this company started automating downloads and posting rave reviews with different usernames. The one thing they didn't count on was CNet taking notice of the IP address - actually 3 IP addresses. Download counters were reset and a warning phone call from CNet went out to this company. The downloads and the reviews severely slowed down :lol:

I'm thinking that ResellerRatings should have some similar detection in place to ensure the integrity of their ratings. If this thing with TigerDirect isn't corrected or explained I will have a difficult time trusting the info provided by ResellerRatings.com.

Someone want to point this out at the ResellerRatings.com forums? I don't want to seem like an arse by posting their response, but perhaps someone could ask about how TigerDirect.com seems to have so many "satisfied" posts at one time and perhaps someone could ask an admin (looks like the Scott W is an admin there) about the IP addresses logged for the comments.

Also, this thread was kind of disturbing to read. Seems like there may be more chicanery involved with the new version of resellerratings....

F