Where reviews come from
Each review card on a product page says which kind it is.
“Verified by” and a retailer's name
The review was copied from that retailer's or brand's own listing for the product. The label tells you where it was published. Any check on the buyer was theirs. We have not checked the purchase ourselves.
“Reader review”
The review was written on WantMattress, using the “Leave review” button on a product page. We do not check purchases for these. A reader review is checked before it is shown, so it won't appear straight away.
These are separate from our own reviews. The written review and the editorial Review Rating on a product page are ours, and how we test explains them.
What we include
We take reviews at every star rating, including 1 and 2 stars. A star rating left without any text is kept too.
Our copy is refreshed when we next read the retailer's listing, so it can be behind what the retailer shows today. On some very large listings we keep the newest 3,000 reviews for a product, which leaves out the oldest.
How the star average is worked out
The customer star rating on a product page is a plain average. We add up the star ratings of the reviews we have for that product and divide by how many there are, then show the result to two decimal places.
Every review counts once, whatever its rating and wherever it came from. Nothing is weighted, and reader reviews count alongside retailer ones.
The brand figures in our reliability report are worked out differently. They use only what shoppers wrote where they bought, and leave out reviews posted on WantMattress.
Staff and free-product reviews
A retailer's listing can include reviews written by its own staff, or by people who were given the product free. Our copy of the listing includes them under the same “Verified by” label, and they count in the star average.
Where our own written review draws on one of these, it says so in the sentence, for example “a Dreams staff reviewer, who was given the mattress free”.
Report a review
Use the contact page if you think a review is fake, wasn't written by a customer, or is on the wrong product. Tell us the address of the product page and enough of the review for us to find it. We'll look into it.
If we have described reviews wrongly in our own writing, that is a correction. It goes on the page and in the corrections log.
