Do you trust online reviews?

Where in southern NJ are you OP? I couldn't find our DJ's company when I looked but he seems amazing! Not sure if he's in your area tho

I've noticed that most wedding vendors have 5 star reviews. While I don't doubt people were happy with their experience, that makes it very hard to compare vendors and figure out who is legitimately good. I've also seen people reluctant to post a negative review because "people make mistakes" or "maybe my expectations were unrealistic" or they don't want to hurt a small business.

For all of my vendors, I've spent time researching all the info I can find to make sure I'm aware of potential problems. I look at WW, The Knot, Yelp, Facebook, and Trip Advisor. Plus I google their name and business name. That still won't find everything, but I guess there's only so much you can do.

I got a shitty review here (ha ha....saying, "For someone who calls herself a pastor, she sure does swear alot"....well, I knew it was fake because I never refer to myself that way (even though I am....). The reviewer couldn't produce any proof that we worked together and it was taken down. I plead guilty to the swearing part.

No review collection site is going to be perfect; I have a review from a dog on one of my wedding FB pages....but WW is pretty spot on. Still, look at everything you can find about a vendor, weigh how they actually behave (do they return calls, respond in a timely way), the quality of their website, which tells you how detail oriented they are, and your gut feeling too.

In South Jersey, my picks would be EMG entertainment, Ambient DJ's and Affordable Dj's and SCE entertainment. EMG is, by far, my favorite because of their professionalism and their non-cheesy DJ's, but you'd be in great hands with any of them.

I didn't book any just on reviews. I always first asked my venue to recommend vendors. For most, they gave me 4-5 recommendations that have worked at their venue and are familiar with it. From there, I looked at their websites and reviews, talked to them, etc.

I trusted reviews, but also met with all vendors before officially booking them. You can tell a lot based on professionalism and personality in a meeting!

FYI - @Jenny, all of those fake reviews were identified and removed from WeddingWire. Also (per our Terms of Use), WeddingWire reserves the right to suspend or terminate accounts if WW suspects that they have engaged in fraudulent activity in connection with WW's site. Fraudulent acts include, but are not limited to, the manipulation of the Rating and Review system.

Some more information about our review based awards...

WeddingWire Rated is an award that is automatically given to all vendors who maintain a 3.5 overall review rating and have more than 3 reviews. WeddingWire Rated has different badges based on the quanity of reviews (3, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, and 500).

WeddingWire's Couples' Choice Awards are given once a year and are also based solely on reviews. Awards are determined by a combination of excellence in four factors: overall lifetime review rating, total number of reviews, and review performance from the following year.

We have review programs and awards (and incentives) to encourage everyone to write more reviews!! We know that 87% of engaged couples read reviews when searching for wedding vendors, and that couples consider price and reviews to be the most important features when choosing which vendors to reach out to for their big day. At WeddingWire we absolutely understand the power of reviews, and want you all to share your vendor feedback!

I would read the really bad reviews as well as the good reviews when looking into someone online. Then weigh both ends and see if you want to go forward with that person

Well, I'm not going to get in the way of promoting WW, but there's only so much any website can do to identify and get rid of all fake reviews.

Also just keep in mind that people *generally* only write reviews for the extreme highs and lows. People hardly review things if they were just " ok." I compare all the reviews and compare the bad content to see if its something i would be willing to deal with. They generally have some truth to them. Ex: Its highly unlikely that 50 people are complaining about someone being rude and it will turn out to be a lie. lol

On WW the vendor can dispute the review and it gets removed immediately. The burden of proof is then on the reviewer to provide contract documentation, etc. Some people don't feel like doing it so they don't, or if they are like me, registered with an email account they never check because spam. People have posted on here before complaining about reviews getting taken down because they didn't provide their contracts in a certain amount of time. There's no perfect sytsem.

Use multiple sources. If all the WW reviews are 5 stars, great. Double check them with several other sites.