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THE RATINGS PAGE

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The Ratings Page enables members to see what experiences other shoppers have had with suppliers in a particular category. When members submit their opinions into the Opinions Database they assign a numerical value in the Intensity field. When a search is done for a particular business, all the records in the database that pertain to that business are found and the numerical values in the Intensity field are added together. If an individual member has more than one entry in the database for a particular business, that members entries are treated as a subset and averaged before being passed along as a single numerical value within the larger found set. In this way, no one member's opinions count more than once in the overall rating assigned to any specific business.

Members must include their membership number and their password with each submission into the database. Shoppers Union makes no attempt beyond this to validate or verify the information or opinions submitted by members. Accordingly, if only five or ten members are dissatisfied with a certain business, then other members should probably be skeptical of the validity of their complaints since there are likely many, many more customers of that same business who are not having problems. If however fifty or a hundred members have submitted negative comments about a particular business, then other members might be foolish to ignore their opinions.