Review Policy

Version 1.0·Effective November 20, 2025

BM-RP-v1.0

This page describes how Berry Marketplace handles user-authored reviews — who can write them, what is published, when reviews can be moderated, and how account closure interacts with the review record. It documents how Berry has interpreted Section 7 (Reputation System) of the Platform Terms since those Terms took effect. It is published here for transparency and does not itself form a contract.

What a review is

A review is a structured opinion submitted by one Company about another Company, after a real, completed trade between them on the Platform. Each review is composed of:

A star rating between 1 and 5 stars, selected by the reviewing Company.
An optional written comment, typically explaining the rating.
A role tag (the reviewer's role in the underlying trade — buyer or seller).
A trade context (a reference to the completed contract, including any associated dispute outcome) which is shown alongside the review on the reviewed Company's profile.

Reviews are published only after they are submitted. They cannot be written without an underlying completed contract on the Platform — there is no mechanism for anonymous, walk-up, or off-platform reviews.

Who can write a review

A user can submit a review only when all the following are true:

A contract on which the user's Company is a party has been marked COMPLETED.
The user holds an OWNER, ADMIN, or TRADER role within that Company.
The user's Company has not already submitted a review for this contract (one review per Company per contract).
The review is submitted within 180 days of the contract being marked completed. Outside that window, the "Leave review" button is hidden and the API rejects the submission.

A Company that closed and was reactivated may submit reviews for contracts completed after the reactivation date, subject to the same 180-day window.

What gets published, what stays internal

Published on the reviewed Company's public profile:

The star rating.
The written comment (verbatim, save for the moderation actions below).
The reviewer's Company name.
The reviewer's role on the contract (buyer or seller).
The contract month (e.g. "October 2025") and product category. Specific contract numbers, prices, and delivery addresses are not published.
A short context strip when the underlying contract had a resolved dispute — for example "Dispute resolved: replacement delivery agreed." This is the same wording shown on the contract's resolution panel; it is never written by either party.

Kept internal (visible only to Berry Operations and the parties to the contract):

The contract number and any dispute number.
The full evidence record, including chat history and any uploaded documents.
The reviewer user's identity (only the reviewer's Company is named publicly).

What is not allowed in a review

Berry Operations may hide, redact, or remove a review (in part or in whole) when the review:

Names a third party (a Company not party to the underlying contract, or an individual person) in a way that could damage that third party's reputation. The review may be re-published with the third-party name redacted.
Reveals personal data of an individual (full name, email, phone, etc.) that is not already public information about that Company.
Contains threats, hate speech, sexual content, or content that incites illegal acts.
Contains content that is demonstrably false about the underlying trade (e.g. "the seller never delivered" when the contract has a recorded delivery date and a buyer-signed acceptance).
Was clearly written by a Company other than the one whose user submitted it (for example, ghostwritten reviews coordinated through a third-party reputation service).
Reveals confidential commercial information that the reviewing Company learned only through the contracting relationship and continues to be subject to a confidentiality obligation.
Has a star rating that is materially inconsistent with the written comment (for example, a 5-star rating with a comment describing a poor experience, or a 1-star rating with a comment describing a positive experience). Sometimes accidental (the reviewer clicked the wrong star), sometimes deliberate; in either case the published review fails the "accurate information" standard and Operations may ask the reviewer to revise. If the reviewer does not respond within the request window, the review is removed.

In items 1, 2, and 6 the review is preferentially redacted rather than removed — the rating and the rest of the comment are kept. In items 3, 4, and 5 the review is removed and the reviewer is notified. In item 7 the reviewer is contacted first and asked to revise; the review is removed only if the reviewer does not respond.

When a review is hidden, redacted, or removed, the affected Company is notified by email and the action is recorded in the per-Company "Reviews" tab in CRM with the reason.

Reviews following a dispute

A reviewer who was a party to a contract that ended in a dispute may write a review reflecting their dissatisfaction with the dispute outcome. This includes the case where the reviewer was the party at fault, or the party that initiated and then withdrew or lost the dispute. Reviews of this kind are not removed simply because they are unfavourable to the reviewed Company. A real trade happened, a real disagreement happened, and the review records the reviewer's perspective on it.

The appropriate response is right of reply, not removal: the reviewed Company may post a public response that contextualises the review (for example, "this review was filed after the dispute on this contract was resolved with the buyer at fault — the dispute outcome is on file"). Counterparties reading the profile see two further signals alongside the review:

The dispute outcome itself, which is shown next to any review that touches the same contract (see "What gets published" above).
The Company's Trade Health Score, which is computed from the documented dispute outcome — not from the star review — and therefore reflects how the trade actually resolved on the merits.

Together those three signals (review, dispute outcome, Trade Health) let any reader weigh a post-dispute review on its own. Operations does not remove such reviews unless they meet one of the criteria 1–7 above on independent grounds.

Editing and withdrawing reviews

A reviewer may edit or withdraw a review they wrote, but only while the review window is open — the same window that allowed the original review to be submitted. Once the window closes, the review freezes.

Editing

Editing replaces the rating, sub-ratings, title, and comment in place. The published row is updated and an "Edited" marker (with the date of the most recent edit) is shown on the public profile next to the review. Older versions are not shown publicly. They are retained in Berry's internal records and can be viewed by the reviewer, the reviewed Company (in their CRM-facing review history), and Berry Operations.

Edits that change the star rating, change a sub-rating, or substantially rewrite the comment are treated as material. When a review is materially edited, two things happen:

The reviewed Company is notified that the review changed. (Repeated edits within the same day are batched into a single notification — you will not be paged five times if a reviewer edits five times between morning and afternoon.)
If the reviewed Company had already posted a public response to the original review, they may update their response so it remains anchored to what the review actually says. The original response is retained in the internal audit record.

Minor changes — a typo fix, a small wording tweak — do not trigger a notification and do not unlock the response surface, but they still update the public "Edited" marker.

Withdrawing

Withdrawing removes the review from the public profile and from the reviewed Company's rating average. The row itself is preserved in Berry's records (with a snapshot of the pre-withdrawal text) so the reviewed Company can still demonstrate, in a later dispute, what the review said on the day they responded to it. The public profile shows no placeholder — the review simply disappears.

Withdrawals are notified to the reviewed Company so they know the review is no longer pointed to in any of their own materials.

What editing and withdrawal cannot do

You cannot edit or withdraw outside the review window. A review that has frozen freezes for everyone, including the reviewer.
You cannot use editing to bypass the moderation criteria above. Editing a review to add defamatory or third-party content trips the same Operations review as if you had submitted that content originally.
You cannot use editing or withdrawal as leverage. Repeatedly editing a review back-and-forth, or threatening to withdraw a review unless a counterparty does X, is itself a violation of the policy on "deliberately false or misleading information" and may result in the review being locked, the reviewer's editing rights being suspended, or — for repeat patterns — Operations restricting the Company's ability to write reviews.

When a Company can ask to have a review reviewed

The reviewed Company may ask Berry to review a published review by opening a ticket from My Company → Reviews → "Flag this review". The form requires:

The review row identifier (auto-attached when the link is followed from the review).
A reason from a closed list (defamatory, third-party named, confidential information, threats / hate speech, demonstrably false, ghostwritten / coordinated, rating–comment mismatch, other).
Optional supporting evidence (screenshots, contract excerpts).

Berry Operations reviews the request within 10 business days and decides one of: kept as-is, redacted, or removed. The decision and the reason are emailed to the requesting Company. The requester sees the case in their My Company → Support tab.

A Company cannot ask for a review to be removed solely because:

The review is negative or critical.
The review is unfavourable to the Company's preferred narrative of the trade.
The reviewer is a competitor or has a separate commercial dispute with the Company outside the underlying contract.

The reviewing Company may also ask for their own review to be edited or withdrawn while the review window remains open — 30 days from contract completion. Once the window closes, the review text is locked; only Berry Operations can act on it under the rules above. This window protects the reputation system from late-stage arm-twisting between parties.

Account closure (GDPR Art. 17 / Art. 21 interaction)

A Company may close its Berry account at any time. When that happens:

The Company's outgoing reviews (reviews the closing Company has written about other Companies) stay published, with the reviewer's name shown as "Former Berry user". The review text and rating are not modified. Other Companies relied on those reviews when deciding to trade — removing them would distort the historical record.
The Company's incoming reviews (reviews other Companies have written about the closing Company) become inaccessible along with the rest of the closed Company's profile. Other parties who can still see internal CRM views (e.g. Berry Operations during a regulatory audit) will see the reviews; the public profile is unreachable.
The closing Company's user identifiers are removed from public surfaces within 30 days of account closure. Internal audit records retain a hashed reference for the legal retention window required by Section 9 of the Privacy Policy.

A Company that has the right to object under GDPR Art. 21 may submit an objection to a specific outgoing review's continued publication. The objection is decided under the same 10-business-day SLA as a flag, with the additional consideration that the legitimate-interest balancing test in Section 7 of the Privacy Policy weighs in favour of preserving the reputation record unless the review meets one of the moderation criteria above.

A Company cannot use the right of erasure under GDPR Art. 17 to remove incoming reviews about itself — those reviews are not the Company's personal data, they are someone else's opinion about the Company. The "data subject" of an incoming review is the reviewer, not the reviewed Company.

Moderation surface for non-Berry parties

Berry does not accept review-moderation requests from third parties who are not party to the underlying contract, except where required by law (for example, a court order in a defamation proceeding, or a Digital Services Act notice from a Trusted Flagger). All such requests are handled by the Legal team and are out of scope for the public flag form.

Aggregation, ranking, and display

A Company's published star rating is the mean of its incoming review ratings, computed across all currently published reviews. Hidden, redacted, and removed reviews are excluded from the mean. The number of reviews shown next to the mean is the count of currently published reviews.

The mean is recomputed nightly at 06:00 UTC and any time a review's publication state changes. Reviews are not weighted by trade size, trade recency, or reviewer rating — every review counts equally.

Reviews are sorted on the Company's profile in two ways:

Most recent: by review submission timestamp, newest first.
Highest / lowest rating: by star rating, then by recency.

Berry does not boost, demote, or hide reviews based on whether they are positive or negative. The only moderation actions are the ones described in "What is not allowed in a review" above.

Disputes are not reviews

A dispute is a record of a trade-event problem (delivery shortage, quality fail, payment dispute) and a resolution. It is not a review, and resolving a dispute does not create a review automatically. The dispute outcome is shown alongside any review that touches the same contract, so a reader can read both signals at once: the reviewer's opinion (review) and the platform-attested outcome (dispute).

Dispute outcomes feed into the Trade Health Score, not the star rating.

Methodology versions

This Review Policy is versioned. The current version is v1.0, in effect since 20 November 2025. The full version history will appear at /review-policy/v1, /review-policy/v2, etc. Any change to the rules described above is a version bump: the rules in effect for any given review at any given time are the version that was current when the review was submitted (for moderation actions) or when the request was opened (for flagging and erasure decisions).

The version number is shown at the top of this page and on the acknowledgement email when a flag or request is filed.

Where to ask

Flag a review: My Company → Reviews → "Flag this review" on the review row, or use the form linked from the public profile.
Ask to edit your own outgoing review (while the 30-day-from-completion window is open): My Company → Reviews → "My reviews" tab.
Ask Berry Operations to review a Trade Health event: My Company → Trade Health activity → "Request review" (the same Operations team handles both, and the form preserves the distinction between a review-moderation request and a Trade Health event review).
Anything else: Help → Contact Support.

The Berry Support team replies in writing within 10 business days during normal operating periods.