Feedback on Garden Watchdog

I was checking feedback on Burgess..as my new home needs quick growing trees.,and they showed some nice possibilities (elm was one).
With so many negatives..I checked on the folk who posted + . I checked about 10..each person gave positive feedback on the same day that they joined DG and no further DG activity.
Just saying!!!

Sounds suspicious. Did they have to pay a subscription fee to vote the bogus positives?

ZM

That has happened with various vendors. Sounds like a disgruntled group who only sign up to give negative reviews out of some warped sense of loyalty to a competitor.

When I check reviews I try to take note of the names of the reviewers and if I'm not familiar with them, as being part of the DG community, I disregard what they say - negative or positive.

I don't know about membership fee...I hope they find better things to do.

You do have to read reviews with a grain of salt. More positive reviews than negative are plants. TyTy got so bad about this that they had to be removed. Most negative reviews are genuine, but you have to determine if the complaint was reasonable. Burgess was once a good company.But since they have been sold and resold its buyer beware on the whole rack of companies in that conglomeration.

Perhaps I am naive, but I hope that's not true. I know that each comment about my small plant business (though few) is legitimate, since they are all customers of mine. Most people won't take the time to comment about their (plant buying) experience and I certainly thank those that did.

Ken

Sorry I didn't see this until now. But I double-checked the logins from a half-dozen or so of the most recent positive comments for this vendor, and they appear legitimate - there's nothing in them that would cause us to believe otherwise.

We regularly check the Watchdog for several things: the main one is any unusual pattern of activity for one vendor: a sudden flurry of reviews, especially if it comes on the heels of a negative, or immediately follows them signing up or their representative creating an account. While we do these checks on our own, any time you spot something that seems odd, the best way to get our attention is to use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of each page of our site.

If we spot an unusual trend in activity, we will carefully analyze all the recent activity for that vendor and research the accounts created to post the feedback.

We do our homework before we flag activity as falsified, but if we have proof in hand, we won't hesitate to put a very large disclaimer on any falsified feedback, and set the review to "neutral" so it won't affect the legitimate feedback one way or the other.

It sounds like you have a handle on it.

Hi Terry, what I was checking was the join date, comment date and lack of any further activity.
That is what caught my eye.
I know that you have more than you need on your plate now. I remember when we celebrated 10.000 members.

motts1, thank you for asking instead of quietly wondering. We are always willing to take a look when something looks off. In this case, I honestly don't think there's anything suspect about those reviews.

To their credit, Burgess (and their many sister companies) have some responsive reps who monitor their reviews and quickly respond to negatives, seeming to be trying to make things right with disgruntled customers.

I'm not a recent customer of theirs, but I have ordered from them and similar companies in the past. It can be a mixed bag, but to be fair, I do think that some of the dissatisfaction stems in part from inexperienced gardeners naively thinking they are going to get large pots of full-size plants and trees for dirt cheap. Do they send out some bad/dead stuff? Probably. But there are also some gardeners who panic when they get that bare-root plant in the mail and don't realize it's just as viable as the potted one from their local nursery, if they care for it properly.

Terry, that has been my experience as well. I ship out many dozens of plants that are bare-rooted, and always included instructions on "What do I do now?". My feed-back is very positive and to my knowledge, I have never replaced any of these bare-rooted plants because they did not grow. It helps if the grower takes them from their pots as near to their shipping time as possible.