On Authenticity of Customer Ratings 

In order to ensure the authenticity of consumer reviews in our online shop, the following measures are taken: 

In order to rate a product in our online shop, a customer must first register with email, name and address in our shop. We will use this data to ensure the customer who rates our products actually purchased these products from us - even if the customer decides to publish a product review anonymously. The verification is done by us manually. If a review cannot be linked to a purchase, we will remove the review within 48 hours. 

Ratings for our online shop can be submitted via the external rating system Trusted Shops. Trusted Shops offers no advantages, special conditions, price reductions or other incentives for submitting a positive review or withdrawing a negative one. All reviews, both positive and negative, are published. Trusted Shops has taken various measures in its review system to ensure that the published reviews only come from consumers who have actually used or purchased the products or services. 

Online shoppers who use the Trusted Shops Services, including the buyer protection, receive a review invite from Trusted Shops after completing their order. The link in the e-mail can be used to submit a review of the authentically completed purchase. 

Additionally, users of the Trusted Shops Services can also rate their orders by calling up their purchase in the Consumer World (Trusted Shops login area). Technical measures have also been taken here to ensure that only transactions documented in the Consumer World can be rated. 

We, as an online-shop, can also ask our customers to submit a review via the Trusted Shops system. As part of the automatic dispatch of invites, the customer’s e-mail address is transferred via API or the so-called Review Collector to Trusted Shops for the purpose of sending an invite mail. These technical measures ensure that a review invite is only sent to the e-mail addresses which were used to complete a purchase. 

At the same time, further order reference data is collected in all cases to ensure that the Trusted Shops Services are in general securely allocated as well as that an individual review is assigned to a real purchasing transaction.

 Further manual measures are also used to ensure that only the customers who have in fact purchased the product or used the service provide reviews.

 In order to make it possible to verify whether the review is authentic and legitimate, the reviews cannot be submitted anonymously. The e-mail address used to process the purchase always serves as a verifiable reference for submitting the review. 

In the event of inconsistencies or of indications that a review is not based on experience, despite the implementation of the above-mentioned technical measures, evidence is requested to prove that the submitted review is legitimate, and is checked accordingly. If it is not possible to demonstrate by means of the requested evidence that the product has been purchased, or that the service has been used, the review will be deleted.