![Three product categories whose Flipkart star ratings shoppers lean on hardest — a gaming laptop, an iPhone and a 55-inch television — arranged as a colour-block panel, on this page explaining how Flipkart moderates ratings and reviews]()
Almost every marketplace promises to remove fake reviews. Flipkart's Terms of Use go further and publish the thresholds. If more than 48% of a buyer's ratings are one star, and more than half of those sit outside two standard deviations of what everyone else gave, that buyer's ratings come down. More than 75% five-star ratings triggers the same rule in the other direction.
Below: the seven profile checks in full, why the star average is a deliberately unweighted number, and the published rejection lists that keep price, delivery and rival brands out of every review you read.
📅 Read 12 September 2026 from flipkart.com's Terms of Use
Ratings deleted above 48% one-star or 75% five-star, on an anomaly test
Verified purchasers only · star rating is a plain unweighted average
📅 Update log:
12 Sep 2026 — first published, from the Ratings and Reviews section of the Terms of Use at flipkart.com/pages/terms as served to a logged-out visitor on 12 September 2026. Flipkart can change its moderation rules, thresholds and rejection categories at any time, so we re-read the page and log any change to the profile checks, the published percentages or the rating calculation here.
Flipkart publishes the exact thresholds at which it deletes a reviewer's ratings
Most marketplaces say something general about removing fake reviews. Flipkart's Terms of Use go considerably further and publish the arithmetic. Two of its seven profile-level checks carry hard numbers: if more than 48% of a buyer's ratings are one star and more than half of those are statistical anomalies, that buyer is treated as unreliable and their ratings are taken down. The same applies if more than 75% are five star on the same anomaly condition.
It even states the anomaly test. For the one-star case, a rating is an anomaly if the product's average rating minus two standard deviations is greater than 1 — in plain terms, if a one-star rating sits far outside the spread of what everyone else gave that product. For the five-star case the mirror applies: average plus two standard deviations below 5. Flipkart notes both cut-offs were “arrived at by using outlier detection techniques”.
The practical consequence is that the star average on a Flipkart listing is not a raw tally of what people typed. It is a filtered number, and Flipkart has told you the filter.
| Profile check | What the policy says | Published threshold |
|---|
| Blacklisted for fraud | A buyer blacklisted by Flipkart Trust & Safety for one or more frauds, who has stayed blacklisted long enough to rule out a false positive, has their ratings and reviews taken down | More than 30 days blacklisted |
| Linked to a blacklisted seller | If a buyer is linked to a seller that Trust & Safety has blacklisted for selling fake products or for SPF fraud, that buyer's ratings and reviews are treated as unreliable and removed | Any linked seller blacklisting |
| Praising a seller you are linked to | A buyer linked to a seller who gives that seller's products good ratings has those ratings marked as spam and taken down | 4-star or 5-star ratings |
| Attacking a linked seller's rivals | A buyer linked to a seller who gives bad ratings to products sold by other sellers in the same vertical has those ratings marked as spam and taken down | 1-star or 2-star ratings |
| Rating five stars after returning it as unsatisfactory | If a buyer returned the product with a return reason signifying dissatisfaction and still leaves a high rating, that rating is marked as spam and taken down | 4-star or 5-star after a dissatisfaction return |
| The serial one-star outlier | If the majority of a buyer's ratings are one star and more than half of those are statistical anomalies, the buyer is treated as unreliable and their ratings come down | More than 48% one-star, more than 50% of them anomalies |
| The serial five-star outlier | The same test in the other direction: if the majority of a buyer's ratings are five star and more than half of those are anomalies, the buyer is treated as unreliable | More than 75% five-star, more than 50% of them anomalies |
🔍 Two checks catch seller-linked accounts in both directions. A buyer linked to a seller who gives that seller's products 4 or 5 stars has those ratings marked as spam. A buyer linked to a seller who gives rival sellers' products in the same vertical 1 or 2 stars is caught by the same rule. And a buyer who returns a product citing dissatisfaction, then leaves it 4 or 5 stars, has that rating removed as spam too.
The star number is a plain average — no recency weighting, no cleverness
This is stated so directly that it is worth quoting in full: “Rating of a product is the plain average of all valid ratings that have been received by the product since the very first rating it received. There are no other considerations/weights here.”
Two things follow. First, a rating from the day the product launched counts exactly as much as one from yesterday, so a listing that improved after a bad first batch carries that history forever, and one that got worse is flattered by its early reviews. Second, the word doing the work is valid — the average is computed after the profile checks above have removed what Flipkart considers unreliable.
The Wilson Score does appear in the policy, but not where people assume. Flipkart uses the thumbs-up and thumbs-down votes on individual reviews to compute it, and says it is “one of the factors in the ranking the reviews”. It decides which reviews you read first. It never touches the star number.
✅ Only verified purchasers can review at all. Flipkart states that ratings and reviews are solicited after delivery, through the app and by email, SMS and push notification — and that if someone who has not bought a product attempts to rate it, “we do not allow it under any circumstances. These users see an error.” That is a stronger rule than several marketplaces apply, and it is the reason a Flipkart rating count is usually smaller than the equivalent count elsewhere.
Why no Flipkart review ever mentions the price, the delivery or a rival brand
If you have ever wondered why Flipkart reviews read so narrowly — all product, no context — the policy explains it. Price and offer content, delivery and installation content, packaging content, payment, return, refund and cancellation content, service-centre experience, competitor brand mentions and promotion of other retailers are all published rejection reasons for a text review.
Flipkart auto-moderates text through an algorithmic pipeline and removes reviews that breach those conditions. Where the model is not confident enough to categorise a review, it goes to manual moderation; all profane reviews go to manual moderation regardless. So the reviews you are reading have been filtered down to product experience on purpose.
This is worth knowing in both directions. It means a Flipkart review is unlikely to warn you that the price jumped last week or that the courier left it in the rain. It also means the reviews are not diluted by complaints that belong to the logistics chain rather than to the product.
| What gets a text review rejected | What Flipkart's policy says |
|---|
| Anything about price or offers | “Price/Offer Related Content” is a published rejection reason, and “Price/Offer related information” is separately listed as an auto-moderation trigger |
| Anything about delivery, packaging or returns | “Delivery Related/Installation Related Review”, “Packaging Related Review” and “Payment/Return/Refund/Cancellation Related Review” are all listed rejection reasons |
| Naming a competing brand or retailer | “Competitor/Competitive Brand mentions” are auto-moderated — the example Flipkart gives is mentioning Brand B in a review of Brand A's product — and “Promoting Other Retailers” is a rejection reason |
| A rating that contradicts the words | “Rating & Review Mismatch” is a published rejection reason, and the example given is a 1-star rating attached to a very positive review |
| Service-centre and post-sale experience | “Service Centre Related (Post Sale Related)” and “Service related reviews for the product” are both listed |
| Regional language, mixed language and emojis | “Regional Language Content” is a rejection reason; emojis and “Other mixed languages” are auto-moderation triggers |
| Jokes, queries and unreadable text | “Misleading joke review”, “Product Related Query” and “Unintelligible Text/Very Bad Formatting” are all published rejection reasons |
| Personal information, URLs and spam | “Contains Personal Information”, “Spam/HTML” and URLs for external websites are listed across the auto-moderation and rejection lists |
Photos and videos are moderated by hand, and the video bar is high
Text is machine-filtered first. Images and videos are not: Flipkart states that all images are manually moderated, that image and video components go directly to manual moderation, and that only media which has completed moderation goes live.
The video rejection list is the longest in the policy and unusually specific. A video can be rejected for containing background user audio, for not meeting length specifications, for lacking focus on the product, for being a screen recording rather than user-captured footage, for not matching its own thumbnail, for vernacular content, for sarcasm, for comparing the product with a competitor, or for mentioning offers.
| Media type | How it is moderated | Published rejection reasons |
|---|
| Images | All images are manually moderated — Flipkart states that only images and videos that have completed moderation go live | Product mismatch, brand mismatch, screenshots from an online platform, blurred or pixelated images, partial or cropped images, images with unwanted objects, personal or sensitive information |
| Videos | Videos go directly to manual moderation, with a longer published rejection list than either text or images | Background user audio, not meeting length specifications, lacking focus on the product, screenshots rather than user-captured footage, thumbnail mismatch, vernacular content, sarcastic content, comparisons with competitor products, offers or deals content |
⚠️ The discretion clause cuts both ways. Beyond the listed rules, Flipkart reserves the right to delete a review if, in its opinion, the review unfairly “(i) causes disadvantage to a product; or (ii) increases the popularity of the product”, and to blacklist that customer from posting further reviews. Read plainly, that is a discretion to remove unfairly negative and unfairly positive reviews alike. It is Flipkart's own wording and it is broad.
What this changes about how you read a Flipkart rating
Treat the star average as a filtered figure, not a raw one. It is a plain average of ratings that survived seven profile checks and an auto-moderation pipeline. That is more curation than most listings anywhere admit to, and it is published rather than implied.
Weigh the rating count, and remember it is verified-purchase only. Nobody who did not buy the product on Flipkart can rate it, so counts here are generally smaller than the same product's count on a marketplace that allows open reviews. A smaller number is not automatically weaker evidence.
Do not expect a review to tell you about price, delivery or packaging. Those are rejection categories. If you want to know whether a courier is reliable in your pin code, a product review is the wrong place to look for it, by design.
Remember the average never ages. Ratings from the first week of a listing's life weigh exactly as much as ratings from this week, because Flipkart applies no recency weighting at all. For a product that has been through several revisions, sort by recent reviews and read those instead of trusting the headline number.
How this page was read, and what it does not tell you
Everything here comes from the Ratings and Reviews section of Flipkart's own Terms of Use at flipkart.com/pages/terms, read on 12 September 2026 as a logged-out visitor in India. The verified-purchase rule, the statement that non-purchasers attempting to review see an error, the auto-moderation pipeline and its trigger categories, the text, image and video rejection lists, the seven profile-level checks, the numeric thresholds of 48% and 75% with their “more than 50% anomalies” condition, the two anomaly definitions expressed in standard deviations, the 30-day blacklist condition, the Wilson Score's role in ranking reviews, the statement that the product rating is a plain unweighted average of all valid ratings, and the discretion to delete reviews that unfairly disadvantage or unfairly popularise a product are all Flipkart's own published text, quoted or paraphrased without adjustment.
What that means for what you can conclude. We read the policy document only. We did not post a review, attempt to trigger any rule, audit any product's rating, sample any listing's review set, or measure how often or how consistently any of these rules is applied in practice — so nothing here reports what actually happens to any individual review. A published policy describes intent; it is not evidence of outcome in either direction. Nothing on this page alleges that Flipkart's ratings are inaccurate, manipulated, over-moderated or under-moderated, and no wrongdoing by Flipkart, by any seller or by any reviewer is alleged or implied. The anomaly formulas are reproduced as printed in the policy. Flipkart can change these rules at any time without notice, and the live Terms of Use page is authoritative. Seller-side rules, the Replacement Guarantee and the dispute process appear elsewhere in the same document and are not covered here.
The short version
Flipkart publishes its outlier thresholds. More than 48% one-star ratings, or more than 75% five-star ratings, with over half of them statistical anomalies, and that buyer's ratings are removed.
The star number is a plain average with no weighting at all — Flipkart says so explicitly. A rating from launch day counts as much as one from yesterday. The Wilson Score only ranks which reviews appear first.
Only verified purchasers can review. Anyone who did not buy the product on Flipkart gets an error, which is why counts here are often smaller than elsewhere.
Price, delivery, packaging, refunds and competitor brands are all rejection categories, which is why Flipkart reviews read so narrowly. And Flipkart reserves a broad discretion to delete reviews that unfairly disadvantage or unfairly popularise a product.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Flipkart reviews genuine?
Flipkart's published policy sets a stricter gate than many marketplaces: only buyers with verified purchases can leave a review, and it states that anyone who has not bought the product and attempts to rate it “will not be allowed under any circumstances — these users see an error”. On top of that, reviews pass through an auto-moderation pipeline and seven profile-level checks that remove ratings from blacklisted buyers, from buyers linked to blacklisted sellers, and from statistical outliers. What we can report is the policy, read from flipkart.com/pages/terms on 12 September 2026. We did not test it, audit any product's ratings or measure how consistently it is applied, and nothing here is a finding that Flipkart ratings are or are not accurate.
When does Flipkart delete a customer's ratings?
The policy lists seven profile-level checks. Ratings are taken down if the buyer has been blacklisted by Flipkart Trust & Safety for more than 30 days; if the buyer is linked to a seller blacklisted for fake products or SPF fraud; if a seller-linked buyer gives that seller 4 or 5 stars; if a seller-linked buyer gives rival sellers in the same vertical 1 or 2 stars; if a buyer returns a product citing dissatisfaction and still rates it 4 or 5 stars; if more than 48% of the buyer's ratings are one star with over half of those being anomalies; or if more than 75% are five star on the same anomaly condition. Flipkart defines an anomaly in standard deviations from the product's average.
How is the star rating on a Flipkart product calculated?
Flipkart states it plainly: “Rating of a product is the plain average of all valid ratings that have been received by the product since the very first rating it received. There are no other considerations/weights here.” So there is no recency weighting and no extra weight for any reviewer — a rating from the listing's first week counts exactly as much as one from this week. The operative word is valid: the average is taken after the profile checks and moderation have removed ratings Flipkart treats as unreliable. The Wilson Score, calculated from thumbs-up and thumbs-down votes, is used only to help rank which reviews you see first — it does not affect the star number.
Why do Flipkart reviews never mention price or delivery?
Because both are published rejection categories. Flipkart's list of reasons a text review can be rejected includes “Price/Offer Related Content”, “Delivery Related/Installation Related Review”, “Packaging Related Review” and “Payment/Return/Refund/Cancellation Related Review”, alongside service-centre feedback, competitor brand mentions and promotion of other retailers. Price and offer information and competitor brand mentions are also listed as auto-moderation triggers. The effect is that reviews are filtered down to product experience by design — useful for judging the product, useless for judging the courier or the current price.
Why was my Flipkart review rejected?
The policy publishes the full rejection lists. For text, the reasons include profanity, spam or HTML, irrelevant content, price or offer content, misleading joke reviews, unintelligible text or bad formatting, product queries, personal information, a rating that mismatches the words (Flipkart's example is one star with a very positive review), delivery or installation content, regional language content, packaging content and promoting other retailers. Images can be rejected for product or brand mismatch, screenshots, blur, cropping or unwanted objects. Videos can be rejected for background audio, length, lack of focus on the product, thumbnail mismatch, vernacular or sarcastic content, or competitor comparisons. Images and videos are always moderated manually.
Prices & codes last verified: 12 September 2026
Everything on this page is taken from the Ratings and Reviews section of Flipkart's own Terms of Use, read on 12 September 2026 from flipkart.com/pages/terms as served to a logged-out visitor in India. The verified-purchase-only rule and the statement that non-purchasers attempting to rate a product see an error, the description of the auto-moderation pipeline and its trigger categories, the rejection reason lists for text reviews, images and videos, the seven profile-level checks, the 30-day blacklist condition, the numeric thresholds of more than 48% one-star and more than 75% five-star ratings together with the more-than-50%-anomalies condition, the two anomaly definitions expressed in standard deviations, the note that those cut-offs were arrived at using outlier detection techniques, the role of the Wilson Score in ranking reviews, the statement that a product's rating is the plain average of all valid ratings with no other considerations or weights, and the discretion to delete a review that unfairly causes disadvantage to a product or unfairly increases its popularity are all Flipkart's own published text, quoted or paraphrased without adjustment. We read the published policy document only. We did not post or attempt to post any review, trigger or test any rule, audit or sample the ratings of any product or seller, or measure how often, how consistently or how accurately any of these rules is applied in practice; consequently nothing on this page reports what happens to any individual review or rating. A published policy states intent and is not evidence of outcome in either direction. Nothing here alleges that Flipkart's ratings or reviews are inaccurate, manipulated, unreliable, over-moderated or under-moderated, nor that any review was wrongly removed or wrongly retained, and no wrongdoing by Flipkart, by any seller, by any brand or by any reviewer is alleged or implied. The observation that price, delivery, packaging and competitor content are absent from Flipkart reviews is drawn from Flipkart's own published rejection categories rather than from any count we performed. Moderation rules, thresholds, rejection categories and the rating calculation can be changed by Flipkart at any time without notice, and the live Terms of Use page is authoritative. Seller-side obligations, the Replacement Guarantee, the dispute and chargeback process and the intellectual-property reporting process appear elsewhere in the same document and are not covered here. Zoutons earns affiliate commission on some links; this does not affect what is written above.
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