These guidelines (the “Guidelines”) apply to any use of Ellivent’s websites by our community, such as ellivent.com and tools created by Ellivent (“our Website”). We refer to users of our Website throughout the Guidelines as “you” and “your”.

Use of our Websites by companies is governed by Ellivent’s Company Guidelines.

1. When can you write a review?

1.1 You can write a review on Ellivent about a company if you have had a buying or service experience with that company, which means that:

• you have purchased a product or service from a company, an organisation, a web service, etc. (“the Company”), or
• you have placed an order with the Company, or
• you can otherwise document your use of the Company’s service, including via correspondence or other interaction with the Company.

(these are collectively referred to as “Service Experience” in the following.)

1.2 You may only write about your own personal Service Experience. You are not permitted to write a review about somebody else’s Service Experience, such as that of a family member or friend.

1.3 You may not write a review about a Company you have previously owned, currently own, or which an immediate family member currently owns, or if you are an executive or employee of that Company, or work for the Company. Similarly, you may not write a review about a direct competitor to the Company you own, are employed by or work for.

1.4 Your Service Experience with the Company must have occurred within the last 24 months. This means within 24 months from the date on which you write the review. If you have signed up for an ongoing service, the Service Experience begins immediately upon sign up and continues until the service is no longer provided by the Company. You are free to write a review immediately after sign up or at any point up to 24 months after the service ends.

1.5 To write a review on Ellivent, you need a user profile and account. You may only have one user profile and account. This must be attached to a valid email address that we can use to contact you directly.

2. What should you write about?

2.1 Your review should be about your Service Experience.

2.2 Your review must reflect your own Service Experience from within the last 24 months. You are encouraged to be specific and factual, and include relevant points about your Service Experience, for example the customer service and other aspects such as the ordering process and delivery.

2.3 Our Website is for service reviews and product reviews. It is acceptable to evaluate the purchased product’s functionality and quality, and/or the user-friendliness of the website – provided that your review also mentions your Service Experience. 

2.4 If you have been offered an incentive by the Company to write a review, you should include information about this in your review. Incentives include the Company offering you a gift, reward, discount or advantage for writing a review about the Company on our Website.

3. When do we ask you to provide proof of your Service Experience, and what should you send us?

If we need to verify your review, we may contact you and ask for documentation that shows that you have had a Service Experience with the Company that you have reviewed. We therefore recommend that you keep such documentation for 24 months from the date of your review.

We don’t share the documentation you send to us with any third parties, including the reviewed Company. Our Privacy Policy details how we process your personal information, including your documentation.

4. When can you edit your review?

You can update or edit your review at any time. 

5. When do we ask you to change your review?

5.1 We do not censor, monitor or moderate reviews on our Website, either before or after reviews are published. We do, however, employ two sets of safeguards:

• We run automatic checks for certain content that is not permitted in reviews, such as coarse language and links.
• We have integrated into the Website two notification options in connection with each review: (1) we can receive notifications from users that a review doesn’t meet our Guidelines, and (2) companies can report a review that doesn’t meet our Guidelines. Collectively, we call these two options for notifying and reporting reviews “flagging”.

5.2 You can be asked to change your review if it has been flagged for any of the following reasons and we agree or cannot reject the report as unfounded:

• Your review contains language that is accusatory and likely to be viewed as inflammatory, includes defamatory statements, or otherwise violates our Guidelines or applicable laws
• Your review contains violent or coarse language, or has a sexist or racial character
• The content of your review appears to be solely concerned with ethical, political and/or value-laden opinion, as opposed to a Service Experience
• Your review includes personal information about another individual, such as a person’s name, address, phone number, email address, credit card information or any other information that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone
• Your review includes promotional references (including links) to other companies and websites that do not relate to your Service Experience
• Your review contains personal email addresses or links, or
• Your review is not a review about your Service Experience because it exclusively describes the functionality of the purchased product or of the website’s layout.

6. When do we remove your review?

As a general rule, we do not remove reviews from our Website. However, we reserve the right to remove reviews that we determine violate these Guidelines, our Terms & Conditions and/or applicable laws or regulations, or reviews that are inappropriate for an online review community. Examples of when we may remove your review include, but are not limited to:

• We ask you to change your review and you don’t do so within the specified timeframe.
• We ask you to send us documentation showing that you have had a Service Experience with the reviewed Company (in accordance with clause 3) and you don’t provide sufficient documentation within the specified timeframe.
• Your review doesn’t appear to be based on a genuine Service Experience (e.g. it is a fabricated review, see clause 11 below).
• Your review is about an imposed tax or a fine.
• Your review violates other people’s or companies’ rights, including intellectual property rights, rights of privacy/confidentiality and/or personality rights.
• Your review is of a marketing nature or has marketing purposes.
• You are, or work for, a competitor to the Company you have reviewed.
• You are an employee of (or work for) the Company you have reviewed, you are or have previously been an owner of the Company, you are an executive of the Company, or an immediate family member to the Company’s owner.
• You have created multiple profiles to review the same Company multiple times.
• We need to delete your user profile (see clause 8 below) which means that by default, your review(s) attached to that profile will also be deleted.

7. When do we block your account and what does that mean?

We may block your account if you are misusing our Website or services. This can include, but is not limited to, excessive use of the notification option (flagging a high number of reviews without justification), writing fabricated reviews, threatening or abusive behavior (see clause 12 below), spamming our Website with marketing material, or violating these Guidelines or our Terms & Conditions.

If we block your account, it will not be possible for you to sign in to our Website and use our services, including writing and notifying us about reviews. Your user profile will still exist and your reviews will stay online, but you will be unable to use our services. If your account is blocked and you want to delete your profile or reviews, you can send an email to [email protected] and we’ll assist you

8. When do we delete your profile and account?

As a general rule, we don’t delete user profiles and accounts. However, we reserve the right to delete your profile and account if we believe that you are violating or have violated our Terms & Conditions, Guidelines and/or applicable laws, or if your profile is offensive or inappropriate.

Examples of when we may delete your user profile and account include, but are not limited to:

• It is not attached to a valid email address, including if the provided email address has expired or is no longer accessible by you. We need you to sign up to our services using a permanent, personal email address because we may need to get in touch with you. This means that we do not accept the use of temporary or disposable email addresses. If you have used such an email to create an account then we will delete your user profile and account.
• Your user profile contains an offensive or inappropriate picture or username.
• Your user profile or account has been used to create fabricated reviews or otherwise misuse our Website or services.
• You have created multiple user profiles. You may only have one user profile on Ellivent. If you create more than one user profile we will ask you which one you want to keep and delete the other profiles. If you don’t get back to us within the specified timeframe, we will remove all but one of your profiles at our discretion. 

If your user profile and account is deleted, the reviews attached to that user profile and account will also be deleted.

9. Misuse of the notification function

All Ellivent users can notify us about reviews that violate these Guidelines (or applicable laws). However, we consider misuse of the notification function a material breach of our Terms & Conditions.

Examples of misuse include, but are not limited to:

• Carrying out unfounded or incorrect notification of many or all of the positive reviews of a Company that you have had a negative Service Experience with
• Carrying out unfounded or incorrect notification of many or all of the negative reviews of a Company that you have had a positive Service Experience with, or have a special relationship to, or
• Notifying us about the same review multiple times when it has already been assessed in accordance with our internal quality process, except in certain exceptional circumstances.

10. When do we move your review from one company profile to another?

As a general rule, we don’t move reviews from one company profile to another.

But if we are notified by the Company or another user that your review has been left on the wrong company profile, we will ask you which company you intended to review. If you left your review on the wrong company profile, we will move your review to the correct company’s profile page on our Website.

We also reserve the right to move your review from one company’s profile page to another in special circumstances and to avoid confusion – such as, for example, where a company is rebranded.

11. Fabricated reviews

Our aim is to create and maintain a best-in-class online review community where you can freely share your Service Experiences with the Company and thereby provide an informative and fair view of the Company’s services.

We use customized and advanced detection software to identify fabricated reviews on our platform. To support the software, we have a dedicated Compliance Team who safeguard trust by protecting our platform from fabricated reviews or other service misuse, and combat fraudulent behavior.

We have a zero-tolerance policy against fabricated reviews. Trust is crucial to us and we cannot under any circumstances accept fabricated reviews. This includes reviews that are not an expression of a genuine Service Experience, for example because they are created by or on behalf of the Company.

We consider the creation of fabricated reviews a material breach of the Terms & Conditions you accept when you create a user profile and account on our Website.

Reviews that we deem false, fabricated or similar will be removed and can lead to the immediate blocking of your account and filing of a report with the relevant authorities. We also reserve the right to inform our community about any domains reviewed on Ellivent that have attracted a high number of fabricated reviews.

If you have evidence that a review is fabricated, we encourage you to notify us through our whistleblower function by sending an email to: [email protected].

We take all reports of fabricated reviews seriously and investigate them. As this is not an easy task, we ask you to provide us with as much information as possible, including documentation showing why you believe a review is fabricated.

12. Threats against Ellivent employees and companies

We don’t accept threats against or abuse of Ellivent employees. Further, we don’t tolerate threats against or blackmail of other companies by our users. This includes users requesting monetary compensation in return for editing or deleting their Ellivent review(s).
We cannot accept such behavior and we regard it as a material breach of the Terms & Conditions agreed between each user and Ellivent. This can lead to us immediately blocking your account and filing a report with the relevant authorities.

13. Enforcement

We are committed to providing businesses and users with a fair and open online experience. We work extremely hard to maintain the integrity of our review community and the online review industry generally, nurturing a culture of trust and transparency and celebrating those businesses and users who use reviews to improve customer service standards and make the online retail environment more fair and open for everyone.

We reserve the right to enforce these Guidelines if we observe violations of them, or of applicable laws or regulations. The same applies if we observe behavior that we believe or suspect to be inappropriate.

14. Got questions, need more information or have feedback?

We welcome your questions and feedback about our services and these Guidelines. Please email us at: [email protected].

15. Changes to these Guidelines

We may at any time and without notice make changes to these Guidelines. We will notify you about such changes via our Website. You agree that your continued use of the Website or our services after we have posted a new version of these Guidelines constitutes your acceptance of them.