How we analyze reviews

A product page brings together reviews from three origins.

• Reviews collected by OpenReviews: left by customers of partner shops, after confirming their email address. Collection is run by our partner Inflate.
• Reviews imported by the shop: first published on its own site or on another review platform, then shown here. Those that arrive through a direct connection to their original platform go through the same anti-spam moderation as collected reviews.
• Reviews published on other sites (retailers, specialist sites): their text is not reproduced. Only their number and average rating count towards the page's rating, and a few rephrased excerpts feed the summary.

A page from another site is only used if it is about the same product: the match must be judged certain by our automatic check, or validated by a reviewer. A page reused for several colourways counts once.

On a review, the “Verified” badge means the review was collected by OpenReviews following an order passed on by the shop.

The “Unified” badge marks a review imported from another platform that presented it as a verified purchase. That information comes from the original platform or from the shop.

A review without a badge is not presented as a verified purchase. OpenReviews does not check proof of purchase itself.

The page's rating is an average: each OpenReviews review counts with its own rating, and each external site used weighs as much as its number of reviews. For example, 60 OpenReviews reviews averaging 4.8 and 40 reviews on other sites averaging 4.5 give (60 × 4.8 + 40 × 4.5) / 100 = 4.68, shown as 4.7/5.

There is no weighting by date, author or shop. “N reviews analyzed” adds up OpenReviews reviews and the reviews counted on other sites. Reviews rejected by moderation or hidden do not count. The rating and the number come from the latest summary, whose date is shown at the top of the page.

The summary, pros and cons are written by a language model. It receives the number of reviews, the average ratings and a selection of excerpts from reviews published here and elsewhere, which always keeps a place for critical reviews.

Its instructions: stick to that material, leave delivery and customer service aside, and state a critical verdict plainly when reviews are bad. The shop can set the tone, length and vocabulary of the text, not the reviews it reads.

A summary is only written once the page has enough OpenReviews reviews, or reviews from external sites it uses. It is recalculated when new reviews are validated or when external sites change, grouping changes that come in close succession. The themes shown do not come from the model: they are detected by keywords in the reviews.

At OpenReviews, a low rating is never a reason to exclude a review. Moderation removes reviews that show signs of spam, with the same rules for a high rating and a low one.

Negative reviews count towards the rating, stay in the list, which offers a “Most critical” sort, and feed the summary, which reserves part of its excerpts for them.

A review received twice, for instance collected and then imported again, appears only once in the list: same author and same text, plus the same rating and the same day when the author is anonymous. The most recent copy is kept.