I RATE IT GREAT (u-rate-it.com)

Member Name: junkboxjules

Product:	u-rate-it.com
Date:	12/01/03 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No pop ups to irritate you, A new site that is like a breath of fresh air and welcomes suggestions and help in improving the site

Disadvantages: Not all categories are paying yet

At the end of December I read a review about U-Rate-It.Com, up until that point I'd never heard of U-Rate-It, I already find it hard to believe that I've only known about this website for a couple of weeks as since I became a member I have become very involved with the site and am even a Guide in the Food & Drink and Medical Product sections.

**SO WHAT IS U-RATE-IT.COM**

U-Rate-It.com is a consumer website that was initially established about a year ago, under the name Word of Mouth Online.

It was initially created as a local website, whose aim was to get people to leave their opinions about local services, ie a great local electrician who will bend over backwards to help you in your hour of need or a dodgy plumber who left you with more mess than you had before you called him.

Unfortunately despite being a good idea the site didn't generate a lot of interest and decided to re-market themselves and add new categories for members to write opinions about, with help from Amazon and DVDOptions they managed to gain more users and towards the end of 2002 the site suddenly took off in a big way - this is probably largely due to members of Ciao and Dooyoo who had discovered the site and been so impressed by what they saw that they decided to share their opinions about the site with other members.

Slowly one or two Ciao and Dooyoo members decided to check out the site and obviously via word of mouth news about the site soon got out and the site is currently growing bigger and bigger every day with many familiar names from both Ciao and Dooyoo joining daily.

**HOW DOES IT WORK THEN?**

Well U-Rate-It works in a very similar manner to both Ciao and Dooyoo in so far as members write opinions about products that they have used and then share their views with other members.

However, unlike Dooyoo who pay for all opinions received, and Ciao who pay for the majority of opinions received, U-Rat
e-It are currently only paying for opinions in the DVD, MP3 Players and Console Game categories - these opinions are worth 1p for each Very Useful or Useful rating.

Payment is made when your account reaches £10.00.

At this point I'm sure many of you are wondering why join if I'm not going to get paid for the majority of my reviews.

I can understand this point and can only answer this by giving you my own thoughts, which are that I don't believe that any of us writing opinions at consumer websites are doing it purely to earn money - if we were we'd have probably given up a long time ago - if we're honest, unless we regularly win Diamonds or Crowns we are not going to earn a fortune from opinion writing but I think that most of us are writing here because we enjoy the community side and being able to interact with other members without having people making judgements about us.

Indeed through these websites we probably know more about each other than many best friends know about each other - as we share our views on anything from which toilet roll we use to the ailments that we are suffering from.

U-Rate-It is growing rapidly and is like a breath of fresh air.

The owner of the site, James (Support), is genuinely interested in his members and what they want from this site. He has proved this by listening to what his members want and implementing their ideas, sometimes in as short a time as 10 minutes after they have been requested. One of the most recent additions to the site being the introduction of a members guest book, each member has their own guestbook to enable them to interact with other members. The guest book is a public guest book and therefore can be viewed by anybody - for more private messages there is a Private Messaging Facility which allows you to contact another member without the information submitted being available to every man and his dog!

Another huge
plus is that there are no irritating pop-ups.

U-Rate-It has a facility for its' members to add categories and indeed items within the categories to write about. So if you tried a great new chocolate bar out today and are desperate to share your views with other members you don't have to request a new product and then wait for it to be added, you can quickly and easily add the product yourself and immediately submit your review.

In the foreseeable future U-Rate-It does hope to introduce more paying categories and this I'm sure will attract even more new members.

At the moment I am more than happy to be part of a growing and successful website and community without being paid for my contributions as I find the fact that I am helping to get the site established highly satisfying and reward enough, although I would obviously like to see more paying categories introduced in the near future.

In lieu of payment for non earning categories U-Rate-It awards its' members with tokens for the ratings they receive on their opinions.

Tokens earn entry into the monthly draws that the website runs. Forthcoming draws include the following prizes, Amazon vouchers, MP3 player, and one months membership to MovieMatch from DVDOptions.

Tokens can also be earned by rating opinions, commenting on opinions, adding new products and suggesting new ideas to aid the continual and ever growing success of the site.

A new feature, only introduced today, is the introduction of the Marketplace.

The Marketplace is an area which allows members of U-Rate-It to sell their unwanted items free of charge.

It works similarly to the FreeAds newspaper and E-Bay - in so far as you choose a category, list a description of the item(s) that you have for sale and then give details of the price you want, once you are happy with your advert just hit the send button and you can submit your advert to the Marketplac
e.

All items in the Marketplace are advertised free of charge for a period of 28 days.

Other members can view all the items for sale and if they wish to purchase anything there is a link which enables them to contact the seller. The seller is informed that there is an interest in their product via the Private Messaging link and it is then up to them to contact the purchaser to finalise the details and complete the sale.

Once the transaction has been complete there is an area for the purchaser to rate the vendor, similar to E-Bay, this will enable future clients to be able to make an informed decision on whether they wish to deal with the vendor or not.

I'm sure that there is loads more that I could tell you - but the best advice I can give you is to type www.u-rate-it.com into your browser and check the site out for yourself. Membership is free and it is very easy to join - so do yourself a favour and sign up today.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you over there too.

Julie

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