Be very careful ordering on this site
Be very careful ordering from this website. While it is a legitimate platform, its policies are not customer-supportive and allows unethical seller behaviour to go unchecked. They have a system in place which allows sellers to leave reviews for customers, which seems fair if a customer was being difficult or unreasonable. A rating that falls below a certain number prevents the buyer from purchasing on the site again. However, this also encourages sellers to leave retaliatory feedback in cases where they received justified negative feedback about the quality of their goods or services. My sister purchased an item for a birthday gift which unfortunately broke the very first time the recipient used it. Unfortunately as it had been ordered in advance, it was a couple of weeks after receipt that the breakage happened and the exchange/refund period had passed. When my sister mentioned that it would be nice if the one earring could be replaced, the seller explained the policy and my sister did not argue or say anything further. She did however leave a review on the item, SOLELY about the item's quality. She did not at all mention the seller's immediate, continual defensiveness or poor service. The seller's immediate response was to leave a retaliatory negative review for my sister, including a request to not "demand a free item", the obvious suggestion being that my sister had made these unreasonable demands (which was untrue as could be seen in their chats). Naturally my sister wrote to Pinkoi about it, questioning the ethics of this, but all Pinkoi said was that they're just a third party platform and would not interfere. Which therefore leads me to question their entire system. How can a customer make informed decisions about products if honest customers are fearful of leaving negative reviews? You can't even reply to the review to clarify anything. All my sister's other reviews are completely positive so this one negative only makes a small dent, but still. It makes one wonder about all the "positive" product reviews one sees, and all the negative reviews which SHOULD be seen, but aren't. The system effectively puts off honest, decent buyers from using the site (including my sister, myself and our friends). Ebay's feedback FAQ puts it very well and Pinkoi should take a lesson from it: We found that when buyers had bad experiences with sellers, they were often reluctant to leave neutral or negative Feedback out of fear that the seller would retaliate by leaving negative Feedback for them. And when buyers did receive unfair negative Feedback, they usually decreased their shopping on eBay. Overall, it became clear that the fear of retaliatory negative Feedback made it more difficult for good sellers to distinguish themselves from not-so-good sellers, and made the Feedback system as a whole less reliable.