dooyoo.co.uk > Reviews > Dooyoo Do The Doo ? - UPDATED !

Author's product rating:   

Layout & Design	Good
Navigation	Satisfactory
How fast is this website?	Fast
Quality of the Content	Good
Choice of Earnings	Above average

Advantages:	A good review site, which is very similar to Ciao .  .  .
Disadvantages:	But has drawbacks .  .  .  read on .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

When, as a regular and (hopefully) respected writer on Ciao, I decided to expand the audience for my opinions, dooyoo.co.uk was the obvious choice.

Dooyoo is a German based company which lauched in May 2000, providing "a dynamic internet platform enabling customers to make better buying decisions".
The site works in a very similar way to Ciao and Epinions - everyday people can register and write about their experiences on both products and services with virtually any product or companies. In return, they get paid a small fee each time another member reads their review.

Registration is very straightforward - it's simply a case of completing an online form with your personal details. An email is sent to your registered email account which you click upon to activate your account.

Once this is active, you can get straight down to reading and writing reviews.

The home page has recently been redesigned. On the home page, you'll find some links to the main catergories, a list of the newest reviews written and some brief account details.
There is also a search engine to look for reviews on individual products or members on the site.

Reviews are divided into catergories and subcatergories, so for example if you wanted to look for a review on the best action DVD of all time, "Die Hard", you'd search under movies, then DVD's beginning with "D".

When you've found the item you are looking for, it will list all the reviews for that product or service. You simply choose which review/s to read, then rate them to how useful you found the information. The ratings are very similar to Ciao - Very Useful, Useful, Somewhat Useful and Not Useful. If a particular review is outstanding, you can nominate it for a crown. Again, this is similar to the premium fund on Ciao, but rather than a review being made once a month, and the best reviews getting a diamond and £10 (or a smaller payout from the Premium Fund), each review chosen by the dooyoo team gets a crown, and 1500 dooyoo miles (equivilent to £1.50).

By clicking on the link at the top of the page, you get to your account details. This provides information on how many dooyoo miles you have earnt, how many people have read your reviews along with a summary of the ratings, and how many reviews you have read.
This page also shows all of your most recent reviews, along with how many members and non-members have read them.

Along the top of the reviews, there are tabs that take you to other pages. These are fairly self explanitory, although one to note is the "Suggestions" tab.
It is inevitable that before long, you'll want to write a review for which no product is listed. In a similar way to Ciao, you can suggest a product for inclusion in their catalogue. This is a simple case of filling in some boxes with the product details, a link to a picture of the item or company and their website address. After you click submit, your suggestion will join a queue where you can track it's progress.
I'll warn you now that this can be a slow process - I had suggested about five products since the beginning of December, and my first one was still 107th in the queue today !! The most recent suggestion that I made is ranked at number 588th ! However, paitence is a virtue as they say, and you get an extra miles bonus for suggesting the product.

As you accrue points, they can then be redeemed for either Amazon vouchers (when you reach 10000 miles) or a cheque payment when you reach 50000 miles. (Each 1000 miles equates to £1.00). Alternatively, you can choose to donate any miles earnt to a selected number of charities once you reach 5000 miles.

Another feature on your account page is a list of members whom you trust, and who trust you. Again, this is very similar to the Circle Of Trust / Buddies system on Ciao, and along with this you can activate alerts so that you will receive an email when these members write a new review. This makes it easy to get to members reviews that you enjoy reading, and can be rewarding to see when members add you to their trust. It should be noted that there can be a downside to this (please read on....)

The site itself is now fairly reliable - although sometimes pages appear out of place, and a message pops up saying I need to update my browser.

So, if the site is very similar to Ciao, and the payouts are slightly better, it must be a great site to write reviews on then, right ? Well, there are some big drawbacks to the site...

There is no guestbook facillity on dooyoo, which means that it is more difficult to keep in contact with members. Apart from the short occasional message in a comment field, the site lacks the community spirit and friendliness of Ciao. Of course, others may argue that the guestbooks are the source of many problems on Ciao, but fortunately guestbook abusers are few and far between, and Ciao has adequate measures for dealing with these people. It should be noted, however, that there is a similar - non-affiliated - facility in the form of tooyoo, where members can contact each other.

Another problem is that the rewards per read are fixed - 30 dooyoo miles per read, regardless of the rating given by the other members. This has resulted in some members intentionally writing very poor quality, short reviews - fully aware that they will only get "Somewhat Useful" or "Not Useful" ratings, yet still get paid for each person that rates them low. I actually had a run in with one such member, who was leaving sarcastic messages on peoples reviews. This person was writing really short, low quality reviews on a regular basis, but "rating" other members in huge quantities, in the hope that people would return the ratings. You'll note that I put "rating" in quotes, as another drawback on the site is that there is no minimum length of time you have to spend reading a review, so this person was literally going from review to review clicking on ratings without even reading the contents.
I simply left a comment on one of his reviews, (no rating), explaining that members like him lower the quality of the site, and he should take more time to write good reviews rather than quick-rating others.

Communications with the dooyoo team, and their customer service in general is pretty poor. I have yet to experience cashing in any dooyoo miles, but there are widespread reports of payments taking weeks to arrive. I sent an email to the dooyoo team with a general enquiry about three weeks ago, and I still haven't received a response to it.

Now comes the biggest problem and worst experience that I have had with Dooyoo...

I tried to log onto my Dooyoo account tonight, only to be greeted with an "Invalid user id / password" message. It must have been an error, so I tried again... same problem. I thought that it could have been a technical problem, so I thought no more of it... until I got an email from dooyoo saying that my account had been terminated !
My first reaction was that it was a spoof email - similar to those you get on a regular basis from people posing as eBay and banks, and are after your log in details. But with the combination of the problems logging in and the details of this email, it had to be genuine.
I was being accused of fraudulent activity by being part of a "Clicking Cartel". This is a group of individuals who mutually agree to rate each others reviews in order to boost their earnings from the site.
I was absoultely mortified by their accusation, and that in turn has turned to anger and disappointment. Those of you who know me would hopefully know that I would not do that... indeed in an earlier challenge on this site I wrote..."I can't be dishonest !! I think it's to do with my upbringing, but I just can't do anything that's not above board. Obviously, this is not a bad thing - especially given the industries I have worked in." Why would I risk gaining a few extra pence by getting involved in something like this, when I could lose my sizable earnings on the account ?
Whilst I can't check (as I can't access my dooyoo account), as far as I remember I had received about 1000 reads of my reviews, and had read around 400 of other peoples reviews.
I would estimate that probably around 20% of these are from a fairly large group of individuals who I do rate on a fairly regular basis - those in my trust on the site, and other members who write consistently high quality reviews on a regular basis and those I've received new review alerts on.
If this is regarded as wrong, then surely the site must be partly to blame for having things such as alerts that encourage you to read certain members reviews on a regular basis.

I am currently in the process of disputing these allegations with dooyoo however, much to my concern, there is a passage in the email that states that my dooyoo miles will be deleted whatever the outcome. This sounds as though the dooyoo team are acting as police, judge, jury and executioner, and even when I prove my innocence, they'll cut my head off as a warning to others !
My other concern is that I won't hear back from them - I've already mentioned that their response to emails is very slow, if at all, and they've only given me five days to dispute these claims.

Now, I know from reading other reviews about dooyoo on this site that many of you are happy with the progress that the site has been making (interestingly though, there are few up to date ones). Indeed, I was very happy with dooyoo up until last night, and would have given them a 4-star rating. However their email has really hurt me - it's like getting told off for something that you didn't do as a child - and has left me feeling angry and physically sick ! (I had plans for the money that was accruing in my dooyoo miles account, and was just a few pounds of acheiving this). As a result, I have given dooyoo just one star. Despite this, I have tried to keep this review as balanced as I can, and would still recommend the site - just watch out that you don't get caught out as I was !!

I shall keep this review updated with any response I receive from the dooyoo team - and hopefully I'll be seeing you back on there in the very near future !!

UPDATE - 31 Jan 2006
==================

Well, it has now been a week since this all started, and as promised, I've come back to update this review. Again, I aim to keep this update as balanced as I can, and is a reflection of my own experiences and feelings over this past week...

I emailed the Dooyoo team three times during the week, and sent a letter via Recorded Delivery.
On Friday, I received an email from Dooyoo, with an apology for the inconvenience and confirmation that "you were not involved in the clicking cartel."
Despite this, I was still annoyed with the whole way the situation had been handled, the fact that many other members were still blocked and, in particular the original email.

On Monday, a public apology was posted on the dooyoo site, as follows...

"Some of you have complained about your accounts being locked or have wondered why other users' accounts have been locked.
The most important point about these account locks is that the locks are not permanent and nor were you accused of having done something wrong (although the email sounds a lot like you were!).
The problem is that we found a clicking cartel and had to lock a number of users' accounts. Messages were sent out to those people concerned asking about what had happened. The dooyoo team decided on a number of reciprocal reads which would cause us to investigate the account and to ensure that we cleared up the cartel once and for all we set the number fairly low. Unfortunately this meant that some people were included who need not have been. We are sorry about this and those accounts are being reopened as soon as possible.
An email was sent to each person involved asking for information. Looking back this email was phrased a little harshly. Originally it was intended only to send this to those people who caused the problem. There should have been a separate email sent to those who were only incidentally involved. We are sorry if you felt insulted by the email you received. It wasn't intended as a direct accusation but it did lack the empathy a personalized email would have had."

In my opinion the comments made in this message go a long way to restoring my own faith in the site. For ANY business to acknowledge that mistakes were made, and that they could have - and should have - handled the situation better, shows that they do have concern for their customers.
I don't think that anyone would disagree that any site attempting to crack down on fraud is a bad thing, it's just the way that Dooyoo went about it that people objected to. Of course, this may be easy for me to say, as I have been cleared, but this seems to be the general opinion.

There are still a few members that have yet to be reinstated, but it appears as though most accounts that were blocked are now up and running.

The acknowledgement of the poor wording on the emails, and the public apology on the members board has restored my confidence in the site to the most part, and I have upgraded the overall rating accordingly.

I am sure that events that occured will be remembered and discussed for a long time yet, but I sincerely hope that things can settle down and peace can be restored. I didn't really get the opportunity before all this to get used to the site (I had only been on there for about six weeks !), and I would like to have the opportunity to acheive this now.

I would also like to thank all the members who left comments and messages of support on the original review. It was a difficult week, and every message of support helped. In particular, I would like to thank Rachel (thingwhatsit) for believing not just me, but all the members whom she has come to trust on here, and her efforts in the near impossible task of maintaining peace when perhaps some other members were no so supportive.