How we ask, and what we will never do

East Cambs Oven Cleaning is new and has no customer reviews yet. The three quotes you will see in the review sections on this site are placeholders, written so the design could be judged before the business opened, and each one is signed “Placeholder name” rather than a person, because inventing a customer would be the exact thing this page says we do not do.

They come off and real ones go up when there are real ones. Until then, judge us on the things you can check instead: the prices are published in full, the figures we quote carry the date we read them, and we say what we will not take on as plainly as what we will.

Writing a review of your own business, or getting somebody else to write one for you, is a banned practice under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The penalty can reach 10% of worldwide turnover and it can be a criminal matter. That is not the reason we do not do it, but it is worth you knowing the rule exists.

So: nobody here writes a review of this business. We do not ask a friend, a family member or a supplier to write one. We do not use an agency that writes or arranges them. If anybody ever offers to sell us reviews, the answer is no.

No discount, no money off the next clean, no prize draw, no free add on. The guidance is clear that offering money or gifts for a positive review is not allowed, and a reward quietly changes what people write even when nobody intends it to.

What we do is ask. Once, after the work is done and paid for, and we ask everybody rather than only the people we think will say something nice. If we only invited the happy ones, the average would be a number we had chosen rather than a number you could trust.

When there are real ones, they will live on the platform that collects them, and anything shown on this site will be a quote from one, with the original sitting where anybody can go and read it in full alongside every other review we have. We will not be the only copy, which means we cannot quietly edit one, reorder them, or drop one we did not enjoy.

That is deliberate, and it is the reason the three placeholders above are labelled rather than dressed up: a business that types its own reviews onto its own site, with no original anywhere else, is asking you to take its word for all of it.

We do not stop asking when a bad one arrives and start again when it has scrolled away, and we do not screen people beforehand to find out what they are going to say. If we get something wrong, the review of it stays up.

It can happen to anybody: a competitor, a bot, or somebody who has confused us with a different business with a similar name. Because reviews sit on the platform rather than here, the platform is where it gets dealt with, and this is what we do.

We read every review that comes in, and we check it against our own record of jobs: who we visited, where, and when. If a review does not match any job we have ever done, we report it to the platform as fake and ask them to remove it, and we do not reply to it as though it were real in the meantime.

What we will not do is use that process to get rid of criticism. A review from somebody we genuinely worked for stays, whatever it says, and we answer it.

We would rather hear it from you than read it later, and not because it keeps a review off a page: it is because most things can be put right, and a review is a poor way to get your oven finished. What we will do about it is written into our terms rather than left as a promise here.

The rules on this page are the ones set out in the Government’s own guidance for businesses whose products are reviewed, which was last updated on 28 August 2025 and which points to the Competition and Markets Authority’s detailed guidance, CMA208 on fake reviews and CMA207 on unfair commercial practices.

Reviews: guidance for businesses and agencies, GOV.UK

This page changes at the same time as the practice, not afterwards, and the date at the top changes with it. If you think we are not doing what it says, tell us through the contact form.