Our reviews policy

A marketplace is only worth trusting if its reviews are. This page sets out what we do about that, and what we ask of you.

Who can leave a review

Only the shopper on an order we recorded as delivered, one review per item. You can’t review something you didn’t order through Luma, and nobody can leave a review on a shop without buying from it.

That check proves a purchase. It doesn’t prove the words are honest, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. It’s one step among several, which is why the report route below matters as much as the gate does.

Paying for reviews is banned

Nobody may offer, ask for or accept anything in return for a review, or in return for editing or removing one. That covers:

• money, a refund or a partial refund
• a discount, a voucher or a code
• a free item, an extra item, or free postage
• anything else of value

It applies both ways round. A maker offering a shopper a refund to take down a one-star review is breaking this rule. So is a shopper asking for one.

We don’t publish incentivised reviews at all, labelled or otherwise. Some platforms allow them with a disclosure. We don’t, because a review someone was paid for tells you about the payment rather than the work.

Asking for a review is fine. A maker can say "reviews really help" in a message or a thank-you note. What they can’t do is attach something to it, or ask for a particular rating.

We don’t choose which reviews you see

Every published review on a shop is shown. They come newest first, and you can reorder them by rating if you want to. That’s your choice rather than ours.

We don’t suppress reviews, we don’t promote or feature any of them, and we don’t show you a hand-picked few. A shop’s reviews are the reviews it has.

Reporting a review

Every review you can read carries a Report this review control. Anyone signed in can use it, whether or not the review is about their shop or their order. The one review you can’t report is your own: on your order page you edit it instead, and elsewhere we’ll point you back there. If you’re not signed in, use the contact form.

You’ll be asked what’s wrong with it. The grounds are: it didn’t happen or they didn’t buy it, something was offered in return, it’s about a different item, it’s abusive, it contains someone’s personal information, it isn’t about the purchase, or something else.

What happens next

A person at Luma reads it. No maker decides whether a review about their own shop stays up, and no automated rule takes one down on its own.

We look at the review, the order behind it, the reviewer’s history on Luma, and whether anyone else has reported the same review or the same shop. Where the facts are genuinely in dispute we’ll ask for more from whoever can supply it.

If we uphold the report, we remove the review and correct the rating and review count it was feeding. Depending on what we find, we may also warn the account, suspend a listing or a shop, or suspend the account behind it.

If we don’t uphold it, the review stays. A review isn’t fake because the maker disagrees with it. A genuine one-star review is exactly the thing this policy protects, and removing it would mislead the next shopper as much as a fake five-star one would.

Reviews and issues are different things

Leaving a review and raising an issue are separate routes and they don’t cancel each other out.

• If something went wrong with your order, raise an issue from the order page. That’s how you get it put right.
• If you want to say publicly what the experience was like, leave a review.

You can do both. We won’t ask you to withdraw a review because we sorted the problem out, and we won’t quietly turn a negative review into a support ticket instead of publishing it. Reviews are blocked only while an issue is open on the order, so the two don’t contradict each other mid-flight; once it’s resolved the review option comes back.

What we check ourselves

We don’t wait to be told. Reviews, messages and listing copy are screened automatically for the language of a paid-for review, and we keep records of reviews, orders and reporting history so a pattern is visible later. We look again at how well all of this is working on a regular schedule rather than once.

Editing and removing

You can edit your own review from the order page for 100 days after delivery, unless the maker has already replied.

Only Luma can remove a review. A maker cannot, and neither can anyone else.