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Rated Trades Review Standards

Rated Trades is intended to provide customers with a fair and reliable way to share genuine experiences with trades and service providers. Reviews represent the opinions and experiences of individual reviewers and do not necessarily represent the views of Rated Trades.

By submitting a review to Rated Trades, the reviewer agrees to comply with the following Review Standards.

1. Reviews Must Be Based on a Genuine Experience

Reviews must relate to a genuine interaction or experience with the business being reviewed. This may include work performed, services purchased, a quotation or estimate, an attempted transaction, or another legitimate business interaction.

Rated Trades may request reasonable information from a reviewer to help confirm that an interaction took place.

Reviews that Rated Trades reasonably determines are fabricated, fraudulent, submitted for the purpose of manipulating a business's rating, or otherwise not based on a genuine interaction may be rejected or removed.

2. Reviews Must Be Relevant

Reviews should relate directly to the reviewer's experience with the business.

Reviews should focus on matters such as workmanship, communication, professionalism, customer service, reliability, pricing, scheduling, cleanliness, completion of work, or other aspects reasonably connected to the service provided.

Content unrelated to the business interaction may be removed.

3. Reviews Must Be Honest

Reviewers must provide their genuine opinion and must not knowingly include false or misleading statements.

A negative review will not be removed simply because a business disagrees with it or because it may negatively affect the business's rating.

Differences of opinion between a customer and a business do not automatically constitute a false review.

4. Prohibited Review Content

Reviews must not contain:

  • Threats, harassment, intimidation, or abusive content;

  • Hate speech or discriminatory content;

  • Obscene or sexually explicit material;

  • Personal attacks that are unrelated to the service provided;

  • Private or confidential information, including personal addresses, private telephone numbers, financial information, identification numbers, or other sensitive personal information;

  • Content that impersonates another person;

  • Spam, advertisements, promotional material, or links unrelated to the review;

  • Content submitted primarily to damage a competitor;

  • Reviews submitted by a business about itself;

  • Reviews submitted in exchange for payment, discounts, gifts, refunds, or other incentives where the incentive is conditional on the nature or rating of the review;

  • Multiple reviews intended to artificially increase or decrease a business's rating; or

  • Content that otherwise violates applicable law or the Rated Trades Terms & Conditions.

Rated Trades may edit, reject, hide, or remove content that violates these standards where appropriate.

5. Conflicts of Interest

Reviews should be independent.

Business owners, employees, contractors, family members, competitors, or others with a material conflict of interest must not submit reviews for the purpose of artificially improving or damaging a business's rating.

Rated Trades may remove reviews where it reasonably determines that an undisclosed conflict of interest has materially affected the integrity of the review.

6. Businesses Must Not Manipulate Reviews

Businesses listed on Rated Trades must not attempt to manipulate their rating or reviews.

This includes creating fake reviews, asking others to create fake reviews, offering incentives specifically in exchange for positive reviews, pressuring customers to remove legitimate negative reviews, submitting negative reviews against competitors, or otherwise attempting to artificially influence ratings.

Rated Trades may restrict, suspend, remove verification status from, or terminate profiles or accounts that engage in review manipulation.

7. Review Moderation

Rated Trades reserves the right to moderate reviews before or after publication.

Rated Trades may reject, temporarily hide, edit where appropriate, or remove a review if Rated Trades reasonably believes that it violates these Review Standards, the Terms & Conditions, applicable law, or presents a legitimate safety, privacy, fraud, or platform-integrity concern.

Where only a limited portion of a review violates these standards, Rated Trades may remove or redact that portion rather than removing the entire review.

Rated Trades is not obligated to independently verify every statement contained within every review.

8. Review Disputes

Businesses may report a review that they believe violates these Review Standards.

Premium Rated Trades members have access to Rated Trades' Review Dispute Resolution process, through which they may request a formal review of disputed content.

Submitting a dispute does not guarantee that a review will be removed, modified, hidden, or otherwise changed.

A review will not be removed solely because it is negative, because the business disagrees with the customer's opinion, or because the business and customer have different accounts of what occurred.

Rated Trades will consider the information reasonably available when assessing a dispute and may request supporting information from either party.

9. Supporting Information

When investigating a disputed review, Rated Trades may request reasonable supporting information from either the reviewer or the business.

This may include invoices, quotations, contracts, receipts, photographs, correspondence, appointment records, or other information relevant to establishing whether a genuine interaction occurred or whether the review complies with these standards.

Parties should not provide unnecessary sensitive personal information.

Failure to provide requested information may be considered when Rated Trades determines whether sufficient information exists to assess the dispute.

10. Business Responses

Where available, businesses may respond to customer reviews.

Responses must comply with these Review Standards and must not contain threats, harassment, confidential customer information, discriminatory content, or other prohibited material.

Businesses are encouraged to address the substance of the customer's experience professionally.

11. Review Decisions

Rated Trades may make moderation and dispute decisions based on the information reasonably available at the time.

Possible outcomes may include:

  • Leaving the review unchanged;

  • Requesting clarification or additional information;

  • Editing or redacting prohibited content where appropriate;

  • Temporarily hiding the review while it is investigated;

  • Removing the review; or

  • Taking action against an account where fraudulent or abusive activity is identified.

Rated Trades may reconsider a decision if material new information becomes available.

12. No Guarantee of Accuracy

Rated Trades provides a platform for customers to share their experiences.

Unless expressly stated otherwise, Rated Trades does not endorse individual reviews and does not guarantee that every statement, opinion, rating, or allegation contained in a review is accurate, complete, or representative of the experience another customer may have.

Users should consider reviews as one source of information when deciding whether to hire a trade or service provider.

13. Reporting a Review

Businesses or users who believe a review violates these Review Standards may report the review to Rated Trades.

Review-related inquiries and supporting information can be sent to:

trades@ratedtrades.ca

The report should identify the business and review concerned and explain which Review Standard is believed to have been violated.

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