Verification
What “verified” means here.
Every claim on this page is one you can hold Hudson to. If a review is marked verified, these are the things that had to be true first.
The five stages
01
An order exists
Verification begins with a purchase record in the merchant’s system, not with an email address. If there is no order, there is nothing to verify and no request is sent.
02
The request is addressed
The review request goes to the person on the order, at the address on the order. It is not forwarded, not shared, and not sent to a list.
03
The response is matched
Every response is matched back to the originating order before it enters the system. A submission that cannot be traced to a purchase is not accepted - it is not published unverified, it is not published at all.
04
The variant is recorded
The review is filed against the exact variant purchased, not the product page. What the customer bought is part of what the review says.
05
It stays
Once published, the review is permanent. There is no mechanism for a merchant to remove it, and that is the point.
The limit
What verification does not claim.
Verification says a real customer bought a specific thing and wrote about it. It does not say they were right. A verified review can be mistaken about a specification, unfair about a fault that was not the product’s, or simply have caught a bad batch.
Hudson does not correct opinions, and it does not weight them. The value of the mark is precisely that it is narrow: it means the purchase happened and the words came from the person who made it. A claim that promised more than that would be worth less.
Review
“Verified” is a claim about provenance, not about correctness.
Joined to
- verified
- the purchase happened
- verified
- the reviewer made it
- verified
- the variant is known
- not_verified
- the opinion is correct
- not_verified
- the fault was the product’s
Imported reviews
Marked, not mixed
Reviews imported from another platform are labelled as imported. Hudson never saw the order behind them, so it cannot verify them, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Counted separately
Imported reviews are excluded from verified counts and from attribute analysis. They appear, they are attributed, and they are not treated as evidence.
Never upgraded
An imported review does not become verified over time, and there is no process for promoting one. The only way to a verified review is an order Hudson matched.
Yours to remove
Imported reviews came from your previous platform, so you may delete them. Verified reviews are the ones you cannot - the distinction is deliberate.
You cannot delete a bad review in Hudson.
Every review in Hudson is published as submitted. There is no editorial queue where a merchant can request removal of a critical review. There is no suppression mechanism dressed as a moderation workflow.
If a review contains fraudulent content, targeted harassment, or a factual claim that is demonstrably wrong about a product specification, there is an investigation process. The outcome is either confirmed and the review removed with the reason logged, or the review stands, permanently.
This is the ground the platform rests on. A verification claim without permanence is not a verification claim.
Frequently asked
Who decides whether an investigation succeeds?
Hudson does, and the reason is recorded either way. A merchant can raise an investigation; a merchant cannot conclude one. If that arrangement is unacceptable, Hudson is the wrong platform, and it is better to know that now.
Can a customer edit their own review?
A reviewer can update their own review, and the change is shown as an edit with the original still readable. It is their account of their purchase, so they may revise it - but not quietly.
What happens to reviews if we leave Hudson?
You can export everything you put in, including verified reviews and their attribute data. What you cannot do is take the verification claim with you: it depends on Hudson having matched the order.
Does a bad review affect what Hudson charges us?
No. Nothing about pricing, placement or support depends on the sentiment of your reviews. A platform that profits from favourable reviews cannot credibly verify them.