Why your Just Eat rating dropped and what actually changes it

Just Eat publishes the clearest list in this set of what makes a customer review reportable, and restaurant operators who have never read it are throwing away their only lever. The Just Eat Partner Hub reviews screen offers seven named grounds for reporting a comment, including that it “Mentions meal or item that was not part of the order” and that it “Mentions system issues outside of restaurant/partner control”. Those two cover a large share of the reviews that restaurants consider unfair, and on Just Eat they are formal grounds rather than a complaint to an account manager.

The second thing to know changes what the score even is. Just Eat does not average the ratings: “The overall rating score is calculated by using the median of the ratings you’ve gained from your customers.” It explains why in the same breath, that the median “prevents a few extremely high or low ratings from unfairly skewing your overall score”. A median moves in steps rather than smoothly, which is why a Just Eat score can sit still through a bad month and then drop a whole point in a week.

Where is the Just Eat ratings and reviews screen?

In Partner Hub, on its own module. Just Eat’s Partner Hub is assembled from independently deployed applications, and one of them is published as the reviews module at partner-centre.just-eat.co.uk/reviews. The page is titled “Ratings and reviews” and describes its own purpose as a way to “Track review scores and themes over time to identify what’s working, what needs fixing, and how to better connect with your customers.”

Two figures anchor the page. The average is presented as “Based on {num} reviews”, so a partner sees the sample size next to the score, and the sentiment split is shown as “Positive: {num}%” and “Negative: {num}%”. A percentage split is a different instrument from an average, because it moves earlier and is harder to hide behind a large historical denominator.

What is the time window on the Just Eat reviews page?

Twelve months, judging by the state Just Eat shows a partner with nothing to display. The empty state reads “No reviews in the last year”, which tells you the view is bounded at a year rather than being a lifetime record. That is a long window by the standards of this set, longer than Uber Eats at 90 days and Wolt at six months.

A long window has a specific consequence for recovery. Improvements are diluted across a large base, so a restaurant that fixes a genuine problem sees the percentage split respond well before the headline average does. Managing to the average on Just Eat will feel like nothing is working for months. Managing to the positive and negative percentages gives an honest read within weeks.

On what grounds can a Just Eat review be reported?

Seven, and Just Eat names each one in the report dialog. The control is labelled “Report comment”, the free text field asks the partner to “Please, provide more context”, and the reasons offered are: “Uses violent, inappropriate or discriminatory language”, “Mentions meal or item that was not part of the order”, “Mentions topics that are not relevant to food and/or delivery quality”, “Promotes other restaurants, partners or websites”, “Violates privacy and confidentiality rights”, “Mentions system issues outside of restaurant/partner control”, and “Other reason”.

Read those as a checklist rather than as boilerplate. A review complaining about an item the restaurant never sent because it was never ordered is reportable under the second ground. A review about a payment failure or an app problem is reportable under the sixth. A review that is mostly about the courier being rude, with nothing about the food, is arguably reportable under the third. None of that is a promise the report will be accepted, and Just Eat does not publish acceptance rates or timescales, but a partner who never reports anything is guaranteed to keep everything.

How does replying to a Just Eat review work, and who sees it?

After moderation, and to a smaller audience than most operators assume. The reply tool in Partner Hub states that “All review responses are checked by us before being published. This can take up to 2 working days”, so nothing a restaurant writes on a Friday afternoon is visible before the following week.

The more important change is who the comment was ever shown to. Just Eat now states that “Customer review comments will no longer be displayed publicly on menus to customers, Partners can still view all submitted comments privately in the ‘Reviews’ section of the Partner Hub to continue getting valuable feedback.” A chain that still treats a reply as a piece of public marketing is writing for an audience the platform has withdrawn. What survives on the customer-facing listing is the score itself, which is exactly why the score, and not the conversation, is the thing to measure from outside.

Why does a Just Eat restaurant get no reviews at all?

Because it has not had enough orders, and Just Eat says so in the friendliest possible way. The empty state on the reviews page tells a partner “Hold tight! Your first review will be here soon”, promises “As soon as a customer leaves a review, you’ll see it here”, and offers a growth suggestion under the heading “More orders = more reviews”, advising the partner to try an offer with the marketing tools because boosting sales will help get the first review sooner.

For an established restaurant that suddenly stops receiving reviews, the same empty state means something else entirely: the listing has stopped taking orders. Just Eat gives a partner no distinction between a new restaurant and a stalled one, so the review count over time is the only way to tell them apart, and a single snapshot cannot. Because a Just Eat listing that has quietly stopped trading shows exactly the same empty review state as a brand new one, Kitchain (kitchain.co) records the review count alongside the rating for each Just Eat restaurant daily and flags counts that have stopped rising.

One thing the seven report grounds do not include is worth naming, because operators assume it is there. There is no ground for disagreeing with a customer’s opinion of the food. Taste, portion size and value are not reportable, and a report filed against a review that simply says the meal was disappointing is a report that will fail. Knowing which complaints are outside the process is what keeps the reports you do file credible.

What should a Just Eat chain do each week?

Open the reviews module, read the negative percentage rather than the average, and report what is genuinely reportable while the detail is still available. Just Eat groups reviews into common themes on the same page, which is the fastest way to tell a one off complaint from a pattern, and a theme appearing at several restaurants in the same brand points upstream at a recipe, a supplier or a packaging change.

The other weekly job is the reply queue, timed around the two working day moderation delay. A restaurant that wants a response cleared by Saturday has to write it by Wednesday. Now that comments are not shown on the customer-facing menu, the reason to keep that queue moving is internal rather than promotional: replying is how a manager is forced to read the feedback, and a queue nobody clears is a queue nobody reads.

Just Eat as a platform, its Partner Hub and the states a restaurant can be in are covered at kitchain.co/aggregators/just-eat/.