The Art of Writing a Review

We love getting reviews from our customers - whether they are good or bad, but there is an art to writing an effective review. Here are a few tips to make your review useful for other shoppers, and to ensure your review gets published to the site.

Write a review for an item you actually purchase. While anyone can make reviews through the online review widget, only reviews about the actual item will be published. Making comments about your purchase experience, and the item itself will be the most valuable information you can share with your fellow shoppers.

Write a review that is useful to fellow shoppers. Be clear and specific about what you do and don't like about a product. Writing conflicting or confusing reviews diminishes the value of the review and might actually cause your review to be flagged for moderation by our AI (see more about that in the guideline section below).

Make the review relevant and factual. We can't tell you how many folks write "thought it would be bigger..." when the size of the item is listed in the product description. Reviews that don't actually provide good information to fellow shoppers, are not as valuable as reviews that give specifics about the product and what it is you like or dislike about the item.

Use the Review Request Email to upload images and videos to enhance your review. Show off you product in your collection. Show the item in use. Do a TicTok dance with your item... As long as you keep within our guidelines, you can have some fun with your images and videos.

Approximately four weeks after your order has been marked as fulfilled, the review system will kick you a review request through email. With that request, you can easily make your product review and upload images or videos to accompany your review. This is the ONLY manner in which you can upload images and videos. The onsite widget does not allow images and videos to be uploaded.

Follow the Review Guidelines. Unfortunately, there are always people that treat a review request as an opportunity to "tag" the website. Because of this, we have an AI that reviews every review before it is published and will flag a review for moderation before being published. Getting flagged for moderation doesn't mean your review won't get published - it just need to be reviewed by one of our human community team members to ensure that it doesn't break any of our guidelines. Once it has been reviewed and found not to break a guideline, the review will be published.

What can get your review flagged for moderation?

  • Hate speech. Racial or sexist comments. Any language the denigrates, diminishes, or is hateful to any person or organization. Reviews are not the place to try and forward any personal opinions about social or political issues that have nothing to whether a product is good or bad.
  • Vulgar language. We have fans of all ages, and we enforce the notion of approachable reviews. Please keep it clean and think of the younger fans that might be surfing the site.
  • Factually untrue reviews. We know that everyone has an opinion about the items that you purchase, and we want to give you the space to express your opinions, but please keep your comments factual. If you make statements that veer from an opinion to a statement that is factually incorrect, your review will get flagged for moderation. For instance, if you make a claim that an item is only 3 inches tall, when in reality the item is 8 inches tall - your review will be flagged for moderation.
  • Duplicate reviews. Please do not try to spam the review systems with numerous reviews of the same item. If the system sees that you have already made a review for an item, it will flag your review for moderation. Unfortunately, this rule is in place due to some bad actors that felt it was their right to try and post hundreds of duplicate reviews about an item. It doesn't matter whether the reviews are good or bad, we don't want duplicate reviews that will skew the accuracy of the rating system.
  • Talking about something other than the item under review. Reviews that talk about items unrelated to the product you are reviewing will be flagged and moderated. I other words, if you bought a tee and are reviewing a tee but make comments about a collectible statue... this isn't useful to folks wanting to know information about the tee in question and will also get your review flagged for moderation.
  • Star rating and comments don't align. A few folks thought they could game the system and rate an item high but make comments that either didn't align with the rating or broke one of our guidelines and thought that we would publish it just to get the high star-rating. You can give us a 5-star review, and we won't publish it if you break one of our review guidelines.
  • Making a 1 or 2-star review. This is very important!! We flag 1 and 2 star reviews for a very specific reason, and it has nothing to do with not wanting to publish bad reviews. In fact, it is just the opposite. We flag reviews with low scores so our team can review the comments and get alerted to potential safety or product concerns quickly. This also allows us the chance to check a review and see if the complaint needs to be escalated to our Customer Service team, product development team or fulfillment team so that the issue can be dealt with quickly. While we acknowledge it can sometimes slow down the publication of your review - for us, it is very important that we are able to address important issues as quickly as possible.

We value your honest feedback about the items that we sell on the Gear Store, and encourage you to write a review that helps to inform your fellow shopper, and our team, about both positive and negative experiences.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR GEAR REWARD MEMBERS

If you want to receive your Gear Reward Member points for reviews - you MUST use the Review Request you get through email. This is a limitation of the system as it requires that you must be a confirmed purchaser to be eligible for points for your reviews and uploading of image or video reviews. Reviews made through the onsite widget, are not eligible for Gear Reward Points.

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