Confessions of a Review Junkie
I know I know, you want pictures. I need to wait for online reviewing to end first, then the recaps shall begin!
A few weeks ago our DJ, Evan, emailed me asking if I’d be willing to write a review for them, because he’d like it to be their 150th review on WeddingWire.I said sure! Because not only do I love reading reviews, I enjoy writing them too!
It’s important to note however, that Evan didn’t ask me explicitly to write a positive review, because we all know how I feel about that. After checking out Evan’s blog post about WeddingWire/150th review I learned a bit about the vendor perspective of reviews. The post however, had me start thinking of my own relationship to reviews
It reached an almost neurotic level when it came to crafting our registry. I would search through hundreds of product reviews on Amazon. I’d go through the 5 star ones and the 1 star reviews, attempting to get an accurate picture. I did this for every single item on our registry. Every single one. I had this entire “you try before I buy” mentality about the whole thing. Anything I wasn’t 100% sure about I put on the BBB registry because of their return policy.
If I’m that way about a blender….imagine how far off the deep end I went with vendor reviews. I searched Yelp and WeddingWire, I asked individual brides who had used them (found via Weddingbee and the Knot), and just googling the vendor name along with “review” to see what would come up. This process served me very, very well.I felt that anytime you ask for references vendors will (rightly) give you the names of couples they did a great job for. So I was pretty excited to find unbiased reviews for tons of vendors. I felt I needed to hear from couples who had experience with the vendors firsthand before I could think of booking them.
The only point in which my review hunt failed us is where I didn’t listen to the reviews, or pick up on red flags. I’ll write about this more when I’m ready, but I was severely disappointed with our caterer. In her reviews there are several red flags, which, while in the minority are still there in black and white. Instead of paying attention to those (as I would with a blender) I ignored them in favor of price. As you can imagine, that turned out to be a huge mistake. If only I had stayed the course, I probably would have chosen a caterer without the red flags and hopefully had a better experience.
Are you a review junkie too?
October 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Another review junkie coming clean….every single item that went out our registries was researched. A LOT. Particurlarly the appliances. Anything I couldn’t find enough reviews on, or had an iffy review or two, I put on BBB as well because you can’t beat returning for cash! I did the same process with our vendors, at least the ones who I felt had the potential to wreak havoc on our day (for example, if our flowers were terrile…we could have gone without…if our photographer was terrible we’d have been rebooking the entire wedding and doing it all over again)