Start › The decisions
Leave feedback or not
A minor step that produces a permanent public record, which is worth thinking about for a minute rather than none.
Leave something short and factual
- What you gain
- The corpus everybody reads gets slightly better, and it costs you almost nothing.
- What you give up
- A permanent public entry that says something about your activity as well as the vendor.
- Suits
- Most people, most of the time.
Say nothing
- What you gain
- No record, no detail, nothing that can be read later.
- What you give up
- The corpus leans optimistic partly because dissatisfied buyers go quiet. Silence is a contribution too.
- Suits
- Anyone whose experience would require writing details they would rather not publish.
Leave a long detailed account
- What you gain
- Genuinely useful to the next reader.
- What you give up
- Detail about timings, quantities and circumstances describes you as much as the vendor.
- Suits
- Nobody. The useful parts fit in two sentences.
What feedback actually measures
Whether something arrived. It is usually left on arrival, before anything is known about quality, which means the corpus measures delivery far better than it measures the thing delivered. Readers treat it as answering the second question, and it mostly answers the first.
| Bias | Effect |
|---|---|
| Timing | Left on arrival, so it describes delivery rather than quality |
| Silence | Unhappy buyers open a dispute instead, so bad outcomes are under-represented |
| Pressure | Both sides know a rating affects future trade, which rounds ambiguous experiences up |
| Averaging | A headline number hides the shape, and the shape is what a reader wanted |
What to include and what to leave out
- Include: whether it arrived, roughly how long it took, and how the vendor communicated when something was unclear.
- Include: honesty about a middling experience. The corpus is skewed because people round up out of politeness.
- Leave out: anything about location, quantities, or timing patterns.
- Leave out: anything you would not want read by somebody who is not the vendor, in circumstances you did not anticipate.
A useful frameWrite it as though a dispute panel might read it later, because on a different order they might. That habit costs nothing and improves your position if this ever becomes a case.
What tips it
Whether the useful version can be written without specifics. If yes, leave it, because the corpus needs the unremarkable entries far more than it needs the enthusiastic ones. If the only honest version requires detail you would rather not publish, saying nothing is a legitimate answer rather than a failure of civic duty.