Inbox & follow-ups·Setup4 min read

Manage marketplace reviews

How customer reviews work on your marketplace profile, what you can do with reviews you don't like (Hide / Restore), what staff can do, and why you can't edit the words.

In this guide

1. Who can leave a review
2. Where reviews appear
3. Owner moderation — Hide / Restore
4. What counts as "reasonable to hide"
5. Staff escalation
6. The trust pitch
Common questions

Reviews on your Yesoma Marketplace profile are public, customer-written, and front-and-center for anyone considering booking you. This guide is how the review system works, what you can do with reviews you don't like, and what happens when you can't handle it yourself.

1. Who can leave a review

Anyone visiting your /find/<slug> profile can leave one — no signup required. The thinking: locking reviews behind a Yesoma account would kill the feedback loop, especially for first-time customers who already booked + paid you outside the platform.

A reviewer fills in:

Star rating (1–5, required)
Name (required; first name or "Anonymous" is fine — it's free text)
Title (optional, 120 chars)
Body (optional, 2,000 chars)

A 24-hour dupe guard catches accidental double-submits from the same reviewer + body snippet.

2. Where reviews appear

Browse cards at /find — your average rating + count appears as a ⭐ chip on every listing card
Your profile hero — average rating + total count in a chip next to your name
Reviews section on your profile — full list with star rating, title, body, reviewer name, date
The category pages (/find/categories/<key>) — reviews influence sort when "Featured" is selected (featured + high-rated bubble up)
Insights — review count contributes to your "credibility" signal (planned)

3. Owner moderation — Hide / Restore

You moderate from Settings → Marketplace → Reviews from customers. Every review appears with:

The star count + reviewer name + date + title + body
A Hide button (or Restore if already hidden)

Hidden reviews:

Stop counting toward your star average immediately
Drop off your public profile
Stay in your moderation panel with a "Hidden" pill so you can restore

You can't edit the body of a review. That would defeat the trust signal — anyone reading reviews assumes the words come from the reviewer, not the business. If a review has a factual error, the cleanest move is to reply to the customer directly (offline) and ask them to update it themselves.

4. What counts as "reasonable to hide"

Use judgment, but the obvious cases:

Spam — promotional content, off-topic, repeated identical text
Abuse / slurs — anything you wouldn't want a prospective customer to see attached to your business
Wrong business — clearly written for a different vendor by mistake
Off-topic — review of the venue you rented, not your service
Personal info leaks — phone numbers, addresses, private health details

What you shouldn't hide:

A genuine 1-star review where the customer was unhappy. Future customers want to see how you respond, not a sanitized 5-star wall. Future versions will let you reply publicly to reviews.

If you find yourself hiding most low-rated reviews, that's a signal the marketplace + your operation aren't aligned. Worth a conversation with support.

5. Staff escalation

If a review is bad enough that you want it deleted permanently (not just hidden) — defamatory, threats, doxxing — email support@getyesoma.com with the link to your profile. Yesoma staff can hard-reject from /admin/marketplace. Staff rejection is also the recovery if you accidentally hide a legit review and want a second pair of eyes.

6. The trust pitch

The reason the marketplace works at all is that listings here are real businesses with verified reply rates and visible reviews. The temptation to silence every critical review is real, but doing so slowly degrades the marketplace's value to customers — and the long-term game is to win on substance, not curation. Yesoma staff watch for orgs that hide a lot of reviews; if a pattern emerges we may pause your listing.

Common questions

Can I respond to reviews publicly? Not yet in v1. The clean way today is to reach the customer directly via WhatsApp / email and address it, then ask them to update or remove. We're scoping a "reply to review" feature for v2.

Do hidden reviews still affect my star average? No — hidden reviews are excluded from the average immediately. Your rating recalculates on the next page load.

Why can't I edit a review? Same reason a Yelp business can't edit Yelp reviews. The words have to be the reviewer's for the trust to mean anything.

Can reviewers leave a review without using their real name? Yes — name is free-text. "Anonymous" or first-initial-only is common. We don't verify identity (the marketplace serves customers who often don't have Yesoma accounts).

Do reviews ever get auto-removed? The 24-hour dupe guard auto-rejects identical-looking resubmits from the same reviewer name + body snippet. Nothing else is automated — every other rejection is human-in-the-loop (yours or staff's).