Unrepresentative reviewing of OcUK on review sites

Didn't there used to be lots of issues with couriers and such once upon a time?

I know personally I've never had a single problem with OcUK so far, which is what keeps me purchasing here, as well as seemingly very helpful people (Fatboy springs to mind) on the forums.

But then it only takes 1 bad experience to leave a sour taste in peoples mouthes, which even if it wasn't down to OcUK at the time, the courier instead could have portrayed a bad service for the company.
 
Kenai said:
Maybe true, but if so, it is also true of all stores and so proportionally things will invariably balance out to a fair level.

Encouraging people to post positive reviews for a particular only skews the results and undermines the whole system.
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i) Things will only balance out if there are enough reviews. The very small number of reviews for OcUK would preclude any such balancing that would occur.

ii) A plausible reason has been put forward as to why the proportion of OcUK customers who make a review might be smaller than that of other vendors. That would cause a higher proportion of negative reviews (see (iii).

iii) People who have a reason to make a negative view are already strongly motivated to do so and don't need encouraging.

edit - the other thing you need to consider is this place will present a very positive view of OcUK - maybe 'wrongly' so, maybe not - if all of that negative opinion is genuinely deserved the last place you would hear about it is here, as the moderators clearly run a very tight ship and stuff like that is snuffed out very quickly when it does appear. This is also somewhere you would be unlikely to hang about if you did have an issue with the store beyond trying to make an initial complaint.
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Of course I considered that these forums present an unrealistically positive view of OcUK - they are deliberately rigged to do so. That's part of the moderators' job here.

I considered it, but I don't consider it relevant to my point.
 
Either way, I think encouraging people to go to a review site en masse and post positive reviews is just as bad as (if not worse) than people perhaps posting overly negative reviews, especially when you have no actual idea how representative a reflection those reviews actually supply, what if it is a fair reflection and that many people really have had a thoroughly bad experience with OcUK?

Would you be happy to find you had shopped at a place with a generally poor rep and suffered poor service on the back of a positive review score you later found was buoyed by many fans of the store (be that forum members or whatever) strategically posting lots of positive scores? I know I wouldn't. (Of course, you'd be mad to take just one review site as gospel, but by that same token you'd be mad to dismiss a store based one negative site too)
 
Amp34 said:
I think OcUK seem to be "hated" quite a lot around the internet, mainly due to ex forumites for various reasons. Personally I've never had an issue with the service, but then I haven't with any of the big online computer stores, however this forum seems to be "disliked" a lot more than other forums.
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What reasons is ocuk "hated"?
 
arknor said:
reasons we obviously cant talk about.

anyway there was a time when ocuk went a bit crap and thats probably the period in which most of the bad reviews are from
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I considered that, but the reviews are dated more recently.
 
Whenever I mention I shop at OcUK, I always seem to get the same replies: "They're overpriced, elitist forum members, etc etc".
 
I used to think OcUK was overpriced myself but I honestly don't think they are anymore. A few things carry too high a premium maybe but I always tend to check prices elsewhere before I order and they are, the majority of the time, competitive here.

In the case of things being a bit expensive, the free delivery is a great incentive anyway :).
 
I have left a review.

I also reported another review which is just a direct attack at Spie, it's a disgrace and I hope they remove it.
 
dirtydog said:
I blame the racists ;)
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I've spoken to quite a few people that know of OcUK shop or forum, and they all say the same thing: Its a nice shop, shame the forum is full of elitist racists. Ofc I try and tell them otherwise, but somehow they are convinced :s



>. >




I've never found anything to be overpriced (or under priced). Pretty competitive, however when you include free postage OcUK is cheaper on many things.
 
You know, reading some of those reviews.. I wouldn't be surprised if competitors are purposely writing them to give rivals a bad name.
 
Pixel said:
You know, reading some of those reviews.. I wouldn't be surprised if competitors are purposely writing them to give rivals a bad name.
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considering how weirdly people react to being permabaned from here I suspect a few of them are ex members :p
 
Kinda pointless thread really since actually talking openly about the subject would likely result in a ban anyway.
 
I reckon a lot of the reviews come from when something goes wrong. I've used OCUK before a lot of times and it was all fine, but when you have a problem I have to be honest and say I have a better experience with other retailers.

I didn't flock to a random review site to bash it as the issue was sorted out and I no longer build PCs, but it was enough to put me off at the time.
 
People are more inclined to write a review if their experience was poor. If things are good, well that's what you expected.

The same is for anything and everything, not just OcUK.
 
I posted a good OcUK deal on a popular UK deals site, and basically got constantly flamed because people didn't like the shop/forums for some reason. People can't separate the forums from the shop unfortunately. I wouldn't be surprised if many were banned forum members too, and a lot of people pop out the woodwork to tell you how awful a shop is when it was probably them who was being the knob in the first place. Having worked in PC retailing, you have to take a whole load of unreasonable crap from these people. They think because they're the customer, it's their god-given right to get whatever they want and be abusive doing so.
 
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