"Let me buy a glowing review from you." Wow – really ?

  • I was a Jigoshop user, but as the name suggests, am not anymore.

    Going through my email, I see a newsletter about the latest happenings from JigoShop. I open it, hoping to find some exciting news. Instead, I see this from the classy crew at Jigoshop:

    “…we would like to signal our appreciation by rewarding all of you who have given us a five-star review with a free plugin. Thank you again for your continued support, and click through to enjoy your free plugin on us!*
    * Free plugin to be claimed by 31st December 2014″

    Wow – really? This is not a 5 star review on their website, but rather a 5 star review here – wp.org. Instead of actually encouraging people to leave comments about their true experience with your plugin, you’re trying to buy them. Yes – this is a new profile, and I will admit it. I set this up solely to respond to the inflammatory email I received from jigoshop.com.

    Are you really so desperate for positive press, that you have to stoop so low as to pay for it? Is there really so much negative talk about your plugin that you feel the need to bury it under trash that you purchased from people who can be bought? This statement in no way speaks to the accuracy of any of the individual, previous reviews or their experiences, but it rather meant to call out the author for dubious tactics.

    Like I said, I’ve used your plugin for a couple of years. I made money using your plugin for a couple of years. I bought extensions from you to help me make money over the last couple of years. In that time, here’s what I’ve noticed:
    1. You had a solid plugin, albeit a few kinks, nothing that stopped me from running my website. It ran well, though it seemed little thought was given to making the UI in the admin more productive to shop owners. Did I sell stuff? – yes. Did it take more time than it should’ve for me to sell some stuff? – sometimes.

    2. Your engagement up to this point with the WP community at large has been fairly positive albeit sometimes lacking. You don’t seem to have anyone but a couple contributing to your plugin, which tells me all of the WP evangelists have given up on you. As for as bug reports here, you started strong, but now all we see is “email [email protected]”. Perhaps you’re trying to hide all of the bugs people are reporting? I don’t know, so I can only come to my own conclusion about your intentions. It would be nice to know the answer to something someone else experienced. Clearly your only goal now is to dupe unsuspecting rubes and the WP community into giving you money.

    3. It seems the only thing development wise that you produced recently are a flurry of constant updates to fix problems from your constant updates. While I always new it, I just overlooked it, because I was using your plugin, but your product is stale. Simple things like variations break with updates. You’re issuing fixes for tax calculations years after the plugins initial release. That stuff should be solid by now, but it’s not. The core is old and dying – in my opinion, a few custom post types and reaching out to 3rd party apis. Others have surpassed you with a superior product and based on this latest campaign of deception and review bating on a website / forum not even your own, I can only summise you know this as well.

    For all who have read this far, in fairness, I would probably give the plugin’s usefullness a 3 to 3.5. However, WordPress is a community, so I think it only fair that the practices of plugin authors should be a consideration in the plugin review / rating, particularly when the practices of the plugin author are aimed at deceiving the WordPress community with potentially inflated / exaggerated reviews of their plugin geared solely at marketshare and profiteering.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi NoLongerJSUser,
    Newsletter – please read it fully instead of attaching small bit of it. We wanted to say “thank you” to people that already supported us with positive reviews. Jigoshop changed ownership and has much more support resources at the moment what gained us lot of positive reviews BEFORE newsletter.
    If you don’t like it – of course there was “unsubscribe button in it.
    1 – we do appreciate and accept all reviews – see https://www.jigoshop.com/product/fedex-shipping-rates/ or https://www.jigoshop.com/product/subscriptions/
    2 – as you can see on forums, we do ask to mail us in cases where we can’t reproduce user issue. Of course we can’t ask on public forum for user login details.
    3 – yes we found and fixed after taking over jigoshop massive amount of issues that were here for long time but were not fixed till now. We use standard numbering – change from 1.10 to 1.11 means new improvement. Change from 1.11 to 1.11.1 means small bugfixes. Soon to come change from 1 to 2 will mean core rewrite.
    As you can see with 1.12, it seems we managed to solve all core issues at the moment (no new bugs reported for few days) and we are concentrating on new features for 1.13 already.
    You can always track 1.x and 2.0 development status on our github repository: github.com/jigoshop/jigoshop

    Thread Starter NoLongerJSUser

    (@nolongerjsuser)

    Is that why the free plugin can be claimed until 31st December 2014? Without a cap of the review having been submitted before a certain time period (or before the email going out), you’re asking people to leave 5 star reviews on this site and you will give them free stuff. No where does it say in your “newsletter”, reviews had to be submitted by a certain date – I did read it carefully and also looked at the account creation date with alot of your current 5 star reviews on wp.org ??

    It seems like legitimate concerns, questions or other’s experiences with the jigoshop plugin are trying to be hidden under a bunch of fluff. If I were to have written a 5 star review today, submitted the url to you today and asked for a free product, would you have seriously said “no” because my review didn’t occur before a cutoff point that you didn’t define? I’ve got a hard time buying that one.

    Like I said 3-3.5 for the jigoshop code because I used it to make money and it made me money. -3 for sketchy tactics of the “jigoshop owners” who are in my opinion trying to influence ratings on a website they don’t control, only to further their own gain in a biased fashion, rather than actually putting out a quality product that people innately want to review positively.

    Again, if you’re insinuating that reviews had to be placed before your newsletter was published, why was their no cutoff date? Furthermore, even if you do institute a ‘cutoff date’, you’ve already shown your hand, as a similar ‘thank you’ could be instituted again. Likewise, if you’re truly interested in people’s honest feedback, why are you only awarding 5 star reviews, regardless of when they were placed. Why not reward any one that offers any valid feedback. Maybe I would’ve offered valid feedback you could’ve honestly used, but only rated it a 4.

    From this point forward, the only thing that can be said is that jigoshop paid people in free premium plugins if they submitted a 5 star review. This tactic is truly setting the bar lower for the wordpress plugin repository. If every plugin author payed in some fashion if someone submitted a positive review, the honest feedback, us, the WP community, look for in making decisions that affect our businesses would no longer be reliable.

    Hi,
    Thank you for your point of view, we’ll improve our future mailings to avoid such misunderstandings.
    – we don’t pay anybody for reviews. We do provide freebie. And it’s really freebie – as opposed to some concurring companies, we don’t expect our users to pay again in one year for possibility to update plugins.
    – our paid plugins: hey, it’s our code and we can do with it what we want and give away or set any price we want, right? I would understand you being angry if we would steal it or something. We don’t force anybody to use it.
    – of course we hope to get more feedback and of course we are most happy with positive one
    – we try to make our marketing as non-irritating to our users as possible. Compare it to pop-ups in some plugins or “rate us” big screen on main page in others. Are you as well giving one star rating on their pages for such practices?

    Thread Starter NoLongerJSUser

    (@nolongerjsuser)

    – we don’t pay anybody for reviews. We do provide freebie. And it’s really freebie – as opposed to some concurring companies, we don’t expect our users to pay again in one year for possibility to update plugins.
    Sorry – lets break it down to semantics. You compensated individuals who reviewed you positively with goods that they would’ve otherwise had to purchase. Furthermore, you engaged in this on website properties not of your own. You are correct, you didn’t “pay” them, you compensated them. Would it not be ethical then for those reviews to be marked as “has been compensated based on the content of their review”?

    – our paid plugins: hey, it’s our code and we can do with it what we want and give away or set any price we want, right? I would understand you being angry if we would steal it or something. We don’t force anybody to use it.
    I don’t care what you do with your plugins that people pay for. They’re all open source and can be purchased, forked and resold as someones own. For all I care you could compensate them with free air, provided the air holds the same exchange value to the reviewer as a value added plugin they’d have to otherwise pay to access.

    – of course we hope to get more feedback and of course we are most happy with positive one
    That’s fine – we all do. Again, I get the feeling you’re missing the nature of the issue. wp.org is not your web property. You compensated others after they presented you in a positive light on someone else’s web property, without disclosure that they were compensated, with the intent of positioning yourself above others. If you want to claim that your intentions were honorable and you couldn’t in your wildest dreams imagine that someone would leave an artificially inflated review for the hope of receiving compensation, I’m not sure I get that feeling from your responses. Nor do I think any other reasonable person would as well.

    At the end of the day, you can do what you want and I can do what I want. My experience as a business owner has been that if you’re truly interested in how you’re doing, you listen to the ones that rate you the worst.

    The fact is, if plugin reviews are infiltrated with reviews where the reviewer has been compensated, regardless by whom, with what or when, the intentions of everyone involved becomes suspect. I know you’re trying to make money and run a business. However, if you read nothing else from me and disregard everything said to this point, please make sure you understand the following:

    As the wordpress economy grows and competing plugins come to market, a plugin author can just as easily say “Thank You” for every 1 star review left on a competitor’s plugin as they can a 5 star review left on their own.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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