When a Review Is Unfair

It arrives, you read it four times, and the rest of the day is gone. Everyone who sells anything has had one, and knowing that helps not at all in the first hour.

Start by leaving it alone until tomorrow. Nothing is going to happen overnight, and every reply written on the day is worse than the same reply written after a sleep. That single delay prevents most of the damage sellers do to themselves in this situation.

Then read it once more and separate the two things inside it. There is what happened, and there is how they felt about it. Often the facts are broadly right and the conclusion is unfair, and it is the conclusion you are furious about. Occasionally you will find, in the cold light, a small true thing you would rather not have found. That one is worth more to you than the rest of the review.

When you reply, understand who you are writing for. Not the reviewer. They have said their piece and they are unlikely to move. You are writing for the next twenty people who read it, and they are strangers who know neither of you and are watching how you conduct yourself. That changes what a good reply looks like entirely.

So keep it short, keep it calm, correct anything factually wrong in one plain sentence, and stop. Do not list everything you did for them. Do not go through the timeline. Do not mention how much you did without being asked, because a long reply reads as an argument no matter how reasonable each line is, and a reader who cannot follow the argument sides with the shorter person.

Then let it sit. One poor review under a run of ordinary ones is barely visible after a month of trading. What is visible for a very long time is a seller who responded badly, and that is the only part of this you control.