People / Pair 31 of 41

Feedback tells you a mood, evidence tells you a fact

A wall of good ratings and a saved order record both read as proof. Only one of them keeps its meaning once it leaves your hands.

The thing that carries a name and the thing that carries proof

FeedbackA

An aggregate of opinions

Numbers and short lines left by parties you cannot identify, about transactions you cannot inspect. It may be perfectly honest and still tell you nothing checkable, since there is no chain from the score back to any order an outsider could look at.

EvidenceB

A specific record that exists on its own

An object rather than an impression. The order page and the figures the interface itself wrote down, the message thread inside the market, a statement signed by a key you already held. Somebody who was not there can open it and read the same thing you did.

Both appear as text on a page, both sound factual, and both get used to justify the same decisions. That is the whole of the resemblance, and it is enough. Ratings arrive wrapped in the vocabulary of proof: totals, percentages, counts of completed sales. It reads like an accounts ledger, so people file it under fact.

It is not a ledger. It is a summary of feelings held by strangers about parcels you will never see, and the summary can be inherited with an account, traded, farmed, or simply left by people whose standards are not yours. Even the honest portion of it, which is most of it, is still an opinion about an event with no public record.

Take the author away and see what is left

The stranger question

Remove the person making the claim and ask whether anything remains that a stranger with no stake could examine. If the claim dissolves without its author, it was feedback. If an object stays behind, that object is your evidence.

Name the thing precisely. Not "their reputation" but the actual item: a figure on a profile, a page in your account, a line in a thread.
Ask who produced it. The interface itself, or a party with an interest in how it reads.
Ask whether it can be looked at again later by somebody else, in the place it was made, without anybody retyping it.
Anything that fails the third question is feedback, however impressive the number attached to it.

Pasted screenshots and retyped totals fail that last question straight away. A screenshot is a picture of a claim, and pictures are made by whoever benefits from them. The same applies to a total quoted in a profile line. It is the party being described doing the describing.

The near miss worth knowing is your own copy of a record. Noting down what the order page said is sensible and you should do it. It is not the same object as the page, though, and if the moment comes to point at something, you point at the record where it lives and use your note to find it. A note is a description of evidence rather than the evidence itself, and the gap between those two only shows up when it matters.

Records the interface wrote: the order page, the amounts, the dates, the state the order is in.
The message thread as it sits inside the market, rather than as anyone recounts it afterwards.
A statement signed by a key you held before this all started, which is a narrower thing than it looks and is covered at a signed message or a claim to be somebody.
Not: a score, a count of sales, a run of five word reviews, a vouch posted in a place where anybody can post.

What each mistake actually costs

If you treat feedback as evidence: You size an order on a number anyone could have arranged, and you carry that number into a formal complaint where it counts for nothing at all. The loss is real and it has a ceiling, which is whatever you chose to spend.
If you treat evidence as feedback: You shrug at the one thing that could have decided the matter. You close the tab, let the record go, and arrive at the argument holding your recollection. Recollection persuades nobody and cannot be produced on request.

The second is the direction that ruins people, and it does so quietly. Nothing goes wrong at the moment you discard the record. The bill arrives later, at the exact moment you needed it, and by then the thing is not retrievable by any amount of asking. If you want the same asymmetry laid out across every pair on this site, the costs table collects them.

Handling each one properly

If it is feedback: Use it as a weak lean and nothing more. It is fair grounds for preferring one shop over another and poor grounds for raising what you are willing to risk. Let the size of the order reflect what you can actually check.
If it is evidence: Keep it where it was made and keep your own note of what it said, since access to any interface is not something you control. Do not paraphrase it when the time comes to point at it. Point at the record itself.

Questions readers send about this pair

Is a vendor with thousands of positive ratings safer than one with none?

It is a reason to lean, not a reason to relax. A long record raises the odds and proves nothing about your order, and the difference between those two statements is where most disappointment lives.

What should I keep from an order in case something goes wrong?

Whatever the interface produced rather than whatever you would write about it. The order identifiers, the figures, the dates, the thread as it stands. Keeping your own note of what it said costs nothing and can only help.

Do reviews count in a dispute?

Whoever handles a complaint is looking at records attached to the order, not at how popular either party is. Bringing a reputation into it is the sort of argument that feels strong to make and does nothing once made.