Garage reviews.

[Muffster]

I'd like to try and get an opinion on customers reviews of garages and how much i should read into them.
Why? I've been hunting for a car for a few months, saw some examples that ticked all the boxes and was about to make a long drive to inspect. When i looked at some online reviews of this particular garage which were pretty poor so i gave it a wide berth.
A week later, same model car,right up my street, different part of the country. Again looked for reviews which again sounded like the place to be avoided.
Now i obviously don't want to end up buying a dog, so how much credibility do places like this have, are the reviews fporm people who think they ended up with a bad deal.
have you ever left a review?

Thanks.

[andyiley]

Having bought all over the country in recent years (if the right car is the other end of the country, I will gladly travel for it) I have always worked on the principal that you are buying the car not the garage.

Most of these places just get the car in, clean it & sell it.

From what I gather (right or wrong) if you are buying from another part of the country you are unlikely to take the car back to them for anything, so their after service is not really relevant.

[calibrax]

Bear in mind that online reviews of garages will usually tend to be negatively biased.

Imagine a garage has 10,000 customers. And 200 of them have problems. Not bad, right?

Now on the internet, of the 9,800 customers who had a good experience, maybe 30 of them will take the trouble post to praise the garage. The rest are just happy, and get on with their lives. But of the 200 who had problems, 180 of them will post, slating the garage for the problems they had, because they are angry and need to vent their frustration.

So on the internet, you have what looks like a garage with 86% of the customers having a bad experience. Whereas in real life, 98% had a good experience.

[McSam]

Both the above posters are quite right, the Internet is amazing for negatively skewing all opinion polls, and you are buying the car not the garage - but the reputation of the seller does matter for things such as how big a pinch of salt I take descriptions of condition, for example.

A well-reputed place I would be happy to travel a long way for a car described as clean, but if somewhere known to be occasionally sub-standard is selling "ABSOLUTELY IMMACULATE" I am unlikely to waste a day on it.

If you get there and the car itself is good, though, I usually stop worrying about the garage and its reputation/lack thereof at this point.