RateTheBusiness.com: Policies

Please note the following guidelines with regard to this site.

• Ratings must come from customers, and NOT employees. Anyone who is employed by a specific business is not eligible to rate that business even if they are also a customer of the business.
• Ratings of 1,2,9 or 10 MUST be accompanied by complete comments in order to be posted and averaged in. See the Ratings Guide for information on the specific ratings.
• We encourage comments to be entered for every rating, as these are made available to others who are studying that business.
• We wish to limit ratings to those who have actually been a customer of a business, to ensure that the ratings are made by actual customers. To enforce this we will require a receipt to be mailed or faxed in to represent a "Verified Customer" rating. Raters who do not wish to provide some kind of proof may rate businesses as "Unverified Customers". Obviously the "Verified Customer" rating will carry more weight. Please put your name and address on the receipt if it does not already show. Please black out any credit card numbers.
• We will maintain two average rating numbers for customers, one for ratings by Verified customers and one for ratings by Unverified customers. No rating average will be calculated until at least five different raters have rated a business, although the comments and ratings of lesser numbers will still display under the business name.
• Geography. This first version of RateTheBusiness.com is designed for customers who live in the Cypress and Northwest Harris County areas in Houston, Texas. In the future it will expand to all of Houston area and other cities and states. As such all businesses rated must be accessible to Northwest Harris County and Cypress residents. This does include Internet businesses that deliver right to the door, even if they are not based here.
• As a general rule, smaller businesses treat their customer's better than bigger businesses do, because they have more at stake with every single customer. There are of course many exceptions to this, but one purpose of these pages is to help everyone find those smaller businesses that they may not have heard of that are really good.
• Businesses are invited to respond to any rating that they wish to, good or bad. Please send responses to Info@RateTheBusiness.com and they will be posted next to the comment that they reply to.
• RateTheBusiness.com reserves the right to remove/prevent any posting that is offensive in language or in violation of policies.
• RateTheBusiness.com takes no responsibility for anyone's experience with a particular business, and warns that past ratings are no guarentee of future results.