Q&A: "Someone left me a bad review! What should I do??"

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh no, today's listener received a bad review on Etsy through no fault of their own. Like it wasn't their fault, but somebody out there just was upset about something. This happens sometimes. You get bad reviews and you're like, what did I do? You know, if you go to use Yelp as a consumer, you go to restaurants, just think about this.

Like you go and browse the reviews. You know, sometimes, you know, there are good reviews. Sometimes there are bad reviews. And sometimes you can just read a review that you're like, I know the person just had their own issues going on here. So I'm gonna discount that, right?

But we know, you know, when you're on the other side of it as a small business owner and you receive a bad review through no fault of your own, it just feels really bad, right? You're like, oh, this is just so annoying. And it presents both a logistical practical dilemma as well as a psychological one, you know, because as I said, it doesn't feel good. So let's talk about, you know, what do you do? Is there anything you can do to appeal on practical grounds?

And then also that psychological process of like, how do we just kind of move on? Because I don't want this to impact my business and impact all the good things I do and the good people that I hear from. I might say more about that in my answer. We're gonna hear the detailed question from John and that answer coming right up. [Music]

Hey, this is John from DC.

Thanks for the great content and inspiration. Recently, I got a bad review and I'm wondering how I should handle it. I've been selling on Etsy for a while and sell on average 10 items a month. It's a start, but after a long starting of unbroken five star reviews, someone left me a bad review with no real reason. It just seems spiteful, what can I do?

I wrote to Etsy, but they just sent me a form letter in response saying they won't do anything. Would love to hear your thoughts about this. Thanks again. - John, first of all, my condolences, sorry about that. I've been there.

I remember some of my early reviews, like for my first book, for example, and these days I don't even read my book reviews because I've just learned nothing good can come from that. But in the early days, like I was paying attention to each one that came in and I remember some of the early reviews that were negative and you could tell the person hadn't even read the book, I was just so crushed. And so my response of just like not paying attention to them at all, I realize that may not be possible for everyone, especially if you're on a platform where there aren't a lot of reviews or if you see them every time you log in, like you're going to manage your storefront and you see your reviews right there, that's gotta be annoying. So as for what you can do practically, most of the time appealing to the platform is not going to work. To have any chance of success, you need to be able to demonstrate that there are legitimately false claims in the review, that can work to your benefit, or that it otherwise doesn't meet the rules that the platform establishes.

Like if a person left a review without being a customer, for example, or if they gave you a one star rating and said that they didn't receive the product and you can prove that they did through a tracking number or some other documentation, then you might have success with it. Otherwise, your best bet is usually to work with the person who left the review. Most of the time with most platforms, they can go back and change or remove their review if they choose to. So sometimes it's worth it to like reach out to the person and being like, hey, what can we do about this? So sorry that we let you down, even if you know that you didn't really let them down.

Sometimes it's worth doing that. Otherwise, I think your best option is to just kind of learn to let it go and move on and focus on getting more positive reviews. Now, as I said, it is a psychological thing. I know it can feel really personal and discouraging. So I encourage you to depersonalize it a bit and just remember that any business over time is going to get negative reviews.

Just, it's a numbers game, right? It's just kind of how it works. So it doesn't need to define you. You just need to keep going. Try to regroup and put your positive energy on serving customers and making them happy and getting more positive reviews.

That's all you can do. John, I wish you well. Listeners, if you have a question, a comment or an experience, sidehustleschool.com/questions, note the pages for every episode, of course, available on that same site. It's all free there. And of course, you can look forward to new episodes dropping every day, seven days a week, wherever you get your podcasts.

My name's Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from the Onward Project.