Stan944

Considering the amount of replies to my post "Think twice before ordering from Whale Tale", I think there is interest in enforcing professional-grade customer service at vendors selling Porsche parts. It would be nice to constuctively stimulate these vendors to observe good practices (most of these companies are already top quality, e.g. Paragon and Pelican, but some need to get better).

I wonder if it would be possible to dedicate a message thread, or preferably a web page to rate companies that sell Porsche parts? Let's say a rating would be from -2 to +2, and calculated as an average of opinions submitted by previous customers. Negative values would indicate problems with these companies.
There might also be links at each company to the relevant message threads from rennlist, and of course a link to their webpage.

I believe rennlisters constitute a non-negligible fraction of business of these companies. And if they were aware of such rating system, they would "think twice" before acting rude to customers.

What do you guys think?
Is there anybody who knows knows how to, and would like to construct such a web page?

cheers, Stan

Luis de Prat

Hi Stan,

I don't know how familiar you are with Rennlist.com, but for some time now there has been a growing group of Rennlist Sponsors who appreciate our business and give back to support the site.

I'm not sure how many of these are local to you in Canada, but IMHO you can't ask for a better company rating than that.

Robert D

Cannot leave IansEuroparts and 944Racing off the list for great people! Or rennbay for that matter!

Stan944

I understand that Rennlist is partially sponsored by the vendors. My primary intention was to point out the vendors with service below the average. Why not let the public know? I was also thinking that the current sponsors already represent the top end of the scale, and would only benefit from receiving high scores!
But whether a vendor rating system shold be available, probably depends also on how much rennlisters want it...
cheers, Stan

Robert D

You know a site for auto-parts vendor-rating is a good idea period. Think of the advertising possibilities...I'm sure many companies would get in on it. As there really isn't a great resource for auto-parts and tools stores, with ratings and classification (paint, tools, parts, used, new, brand, etc.). Excellent idea.

led

I'm thinking of something along the lines of the ebay feedback system. Rate the company, leave a comment and the overall rating is computed. ratings.rennlist.com sounds nice <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Robert D

I envision a website listing auto-parts/tools stores of all kinds, with ratings. Porsche shops would be cool as well, a more broad informative site would bring more advertising.

Matt O.

Stan,

There is something like this at P-CarOnline.com, where folks can write reviews on products.

Rating the business would be a good idea, but we would have to have a way to automatically remove the outlyers because even in the best businesses, there will be someone who will find something to complain about, and that will bring a good score down.

-Matt

Robert D

That is true, but adding a function for reviews would be a nice feature. Assuming they could be reviewed before applying. I don't think a sponsor is going to wish to remain a sponsor if someone posts negative feedback..of course the sponsors are all great . I'd like 944Racing.com to become a sponsor, if they aren't already (been a bit since I've checked that list).

Stan944

Matt,
Censoring entries is a rather dangerous idea... Who should get the privilage of censoring? Remember the movie "Enemy of the state", and a line: "..but who will control the controllers of the controllers?".
But you have a point, not everybody is honest, and it might be easy to hurt some bisnesses. Maybe the score could be calculated after voiding the worst 5% of the submitted entries? And if some a#% tries being too smart, and submitts 100 entries within an hour - make a limit of entries per week, which would be checked e.g. based on the email address. This might make the score less susceptible to dishonest customers.

jabbadeznuts

I try to order from rennlist sponsors as much as possible.

Stan944

I checked P-CarOnline.com, and their product review section. It is very nicely designed, but I don't think too many people know about it yet (the total number of reviews is only 10).
That section is close to what I had on my mind, except I ment part distributors, not actual products, and an easy way of telling if a distributor is reliable or not.
Maybe P-CarOnline would like to add such section to their webpage?

P944forScott

Great idea, however it could get a little sticky.
For an example I was checking out cell phones at cnet.com and after much reading it became apparent that some people would put in a negative post because they had dubious motives. i.e. some people just didn't like a particular brand ("all Sanyo phones suck, you would have to be a moron to buy one!"). Other people could not or would not differentiate between rating a phone and rating the service. Then I started wondering what's keeping competitors from posting negative reports about each other not to mention your typical internet goof ***** who just like to see something they wrote on the internet.

An amusing thing - after spending several hours reviewing cell phone I came to the realization that some of the reviews I was reading were from junior high school students "this phone is cool but it's soooo ugly! I can't take this thing to school, my parents just don't understand!"

Silly me I was interested in sound quality and signal strength... soon you will not be able to buy a phone without a camera built into it.


Sorry for the rant but you get the idea.

Dan Gallagher

you avoid having someone attack a particular shop's score by allowing one review per ip for any given shop in a specific period of time (or one time if you dont care about repeat customers)
[edit] better idea: you can allow the user to post one rating/comment per shop but allow them to change it based on more recent experiences... now that there is obviously a user database we can also let people see what YOU said about OTHER shops too, just like ebay does with feedback, to see if you just a trouble maker. [/edit]

you can also avoid the "all *this brand* sucks" from hurting the shop by having a system that allows users to vote on the value of each comment (one vote per comment per ip), comments with terrible scores will be red flagged for an admin to deal with.

i would probably have fun building a site like that (a shop review/feedback site, not to be interpreted as competition to matts product reviews site), specificly for porsche shops if i wasnt so damn busy all the time plus the fact that i work at a shop would probably make people not trust my site... hell maybe i will write down some ideas and see if anything ever came of it

Stan944

Dan, it sure would be nice if you gave it a shot...