Joined Dec 2009
Slickdeals Staff
Community Manager
Forum Thread
Announcement Regarding Aukey
January 10, 2025 at
05:55 PM
Thread Details
Why We Ban Certain Brands, Sites, and Sellers on Slickdeals
Our community is what makes our site truly unique. We rely on feedback from you to determine which of the deals posted here are worthy of being elevated to a Popular Deal and then possibly promoted to be featured as a Frontpage Deal.
This inherently involves a high level of trust. Even those who may not actively comment or vote on deals still trust that the deals they see on our homepage or in the Popular Deals section have been vetted by our community of experienced deal shoppers to ensure that not only is the price great, but it's also a good product from a reliable seller.
As many of you know, certain brands, websites, and sellers are banned from being posted here. With very few exceptions, those bans are in place because we've found that a significant amount of posts, votes, and/or comments for a particular merchant are not organic in nature and have undermined the trust we've worked hard to maintain. While the products these merchants offer may be great, we can no longer routinely ensure that the deals involving them are here and vetted in good faith by our community.
Why We're Sharing This
It is rare for us to publicly announce a decision to ban or reverse such a ban on a merchant. The last two times we did so were in 2022, coincidentally just a couple of months apart. The merchants we have elected to disallow or allow back typically change many times a year and in most cases, involve ones that are not generally well-known. However, when we make such a change for a major brand or site, or one that has been otherwise prominent on Slickdeals in the past, we believe transparency is important.
What Happened with Aukey
In mid 2021, reports surfaced and quickly spread that Amazon had deplatformed a number of big names for allegedly manufacturing fake reviews on their site. Aukey's brands were among those. While this may have been surprising to some, frankly, it was not to us. By that point, we had already spent a considerable amount of time trying to address their history on our site of interfering with deals shared here. We recognized that they provided great products that were quite popular (many of us on our teams, myself included, own several) but we ultimately made the decision to mirror what was done on Amazon and completely disallowed deals for their brands in order to protect our community's trust.
What's Changing Now
We understand that some or all of Aukey's brands have still not been allowed back on certain marketplaces. However, following our teams' communication with Aukey, we feel that we have been able to address the issues we previously faced and effective immediately, we are now able to allow deal posts for their products back on our site.
To assure you that we are adamant about maintaining the trust that the deals you find on our site are here because of the value of the deal, we are committing to not have any of our staff post deals for any Aukey brands, sites, sellers, etc. – regardless of how they may come across them – for the next several weeks. During this time, we will carefully monitor the situation before we allow anyone from our teams to also share deals for products from Aukey brands or sites.
How You Can Help
As always, if you see any content on our site that you believe is in violation of our rules or policies, please use the Mod Alert feature on that post to notify our teams for further review. Also, if you are ever contacted by any company to post or provide feedback on a deal on our site on their behalf, please let us know. We welcome any comments or concerns you have and we can also be reached about this, or any other issue, at [email protected].
Our community is what makes our site truly unique. We rely on feedback from you to determine which of the deals posted here are worthy of being elevated to a Popular Deal and then possibly promoted to be featured as a Frontpage Deal.
This inherently involves a high level of trust. Even those who may not actively comment or vote on deals still trust that the deals they see on our homepage or in the Popular Deals section have been vetted by our community of experienced deal shoppers to ensure that not only is the price great, but it's also a good product from a reliable seller.
As many of you know, certain brands, websites, and sellers are banned from being posted here. With very few exceptions, those bans are in place because we've found that a significant amount of posts, votes, and/or comments for a particular merchant are not organic in nature and have undermined the trust we've worked hard to maintain. While the products these merchants offer may be great, we can no longer routinely ensure that the deals involving them are here and vetted in good faith by our community.
Why We're Sharing This
It is rare for us to publicly announce a decision to ban or reverse such a ban on a merchant. The last two times we did so were in 2022, coincidentally just a couple of months apart. The merchants we have elected to disallow or allow back typically change many times a year and in most cases, involve ones that are not generally well-known. However, when we make such a change for a major brand or site, or one that has been otherwise prominent on Slickdeals in the past, we believe transparency is important.
What Happened with Aukey
In mid 2021, reports surfaced and quickly spread that Amazon had deplatformed a number of big names for allegedly manufacturing fake reviews on their site. Aukey's brands were among those. While this may have been surprising to some, frankly, it was not to us. By that point, we had already spent a considerable amount of time trying to address their history on our site of interfering with deals shared here. We recognized that they provided great products that were quite popular (many of us on our teams, myself included, own several) but we ultimately made the decision to mirror what was done on Amazon and completely disallowed deals for their brands in order to protect our community's trust.
What's Changing Now
We understand that some or all of Aukey's brands have still not been allowed back on certain marketplaces. However, following our teams' communication with Aukey, we feel that we have been able to address the issues we previously faced and effective immediately, we are now able to allow deal posts for their products back on our site.
To assure you that we are adamant about maintaining the trust that the deals you find on our site are here because of the value of the deal, we are committing to not have any of our staff post deals for any Aukey brands, sites, sellers, etc. – regardless of how they may come across them – for the next several weeks. During this time, we will carefully monitor the situation before we allow anyone from our teams to also share deals for products from Aukey brands or sites.
How You Can Help
As always, if you see any content on our site that you believe is in violation of our rules or policies, please use the Mod Alert feature on that post to notify our teams for further review. Also, if you are ever contacted by any company to post or provide feedback on a deal on our site on their behalf, please let us know. We welcome any comments or concerns you have and we can also be reached about this, or any other issue, at [email protected].
About the OP
1 Comment
Your comment cannot be blank.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.