Why does nobody warn buyers that a 5 star review can get edited later

I bought a used food dehydrator off a seller with 47 reviews, all 5 stars, back in March. Two weeks after it arrived the heating element died, so I went back to leave a review and saw the seller had deleted 12 of those old reviews and the star average had quietly slid to 4.2. I took screenshots of the page before and after and posted them with my 1 star review, and a few days later I found the same thing had happened to two other buyers on the same listing. It made me wonder how many of those glowing reviews I trusted were even still there by the time I checked out, and now I always screenshot the review page before I buy. Has anyone else caught a seller wiping bad reviews after the fact?

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wright.sam21d ago

The thing about "47 reviews, all 5 stars" that gets me is how it's kind of a red flag on its own when you think about it, because almost no product gets only good reviews from every single buyer. Even great sellers have that one guy who was mad about slow shipping or a scratch on the box. So a listing with zero bad reviews often means the bad ones were already cleaned out before you ever got there. That's the part nobody tells you, the page you see at checkout might be the seller's best edit, not the real history. Your screenshot habit is smart and I'd add one more step. Check if the reviews have dates and read the oldest ones first, because sellers can't fake the timeline as easily as they can the star count. If every review is from the last two months on a listing that's been up for two years, that tells you something.

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