Welcome to Clean4happy! I’m Dan Harris, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Clean4Happy. I started buying and repairing used electronics and appliances for resale a few years ago and became painfully aware of the amount of junk that ends up thrown away due to poor quality and bad design.
Clean4Happy is a product review, and informational site aimed to help you find the best ideas and products for maintaining a clean home. As we say, cleanliness is happiness!
Don’t let the name fool you, though; we are serious about recommending only the best products.
“Best” is a word thrown around a lot. However, everyone’s concept of best can be different depending on their needs. So while we try to find the best products, we also take into account many factors when recommending a product. We don’t just recommend the product that happened to get five stars on a big name e-commerce site
Our Review Process
Honesty and transparency are very important to us. To date we have not received any products for free and do not favor products if we do receive them from manufacturers. It’s not in our best interests to recommend a product we have tested and found that it doesn’t meet expectations.
How do we decide which products to review?
One of the first things we do is see what other websites have done and decide if we can do it better, or add useful information that other reviews lack. We don’t currently have the budget to buy every single product we review, but consulting with experts and consumers on their experiences helps us fill in the gaps. Also, our past hands-on experience with our tested products helps us speak with authority on products in a particular category.
Step 1: Study the Product Category
Understanding the key brands in a product category is our first step in deciding which products to purchase. With this information, we go deeper into compiling a list of all the products that consumers care about. Sometimes, if customer reviews are so bad, we just avoid a product as it’s not worth the effort, money, or time.
To be sure we give the most complete and accurate information, we select a sample of products to purchase that are representative of the full range of features and use cases that you might run into when deciding which product to buy yourself.
Some questions we ask before purchasing:
- Are people currently interested in the product?
- Will purchasing and testing the product give us more information than thorough research?
- Have we reviewed similar products, and if so is there a new feature that warrants testing?
Step 2: Purchase the Product
Consumer reviews and ratings are often beneficial for gauging the sentiment toward a particular product, but they sometimes don’t tell the whole story. Some consumers try to use products for situations they aren’t designed for, or push products beyond reasonable limits.
Sorry, but your $100 cordless stick vacuum isn’t going to clean your 3000 sq. ft. house with 4 labradors. It is not happening.
With that said, when we purchase a product, we might receive a non-defective model, while 50% of customer reviews say the product is garbage. For situations like this, it’s essential to make sure we consider these customer experiences when deciding on products to review and during the review process.
Step 3: Test the Product
Here is where the rubber meets the road…or maybe the vacuum meets the carpet. We take the products we purchased and use them just like you would as a customer, and try to see where they succeed or fail.
The testing criteria depend on the product, but we intend to keep our tests realistic and use the product for its intended purpose. Sometimes manufacturers aren’t so clear about how certain features work and set the wrong expectations, which can result in bad reviews from people that felt misled.
Most importantly, we want our test data and results to be reproducible and easily understood.
Step 4: Writing the Review
We usually lead a review with one or two sentences that tell you, the reader, why you should or should not buy this product. Also, you can quickly skim our Pros and Cons to see if a product fits your specific needs.
For many products, the difference between their performance and that of a competing product can be small. We often see this with vacuums where for many common situations the vacuums work just fine, but one may perform better when used a certain way. The vacuum isn’t necessarily “better,” but everyone’s needs are different, and some people might prefer one product over the other based on this information.
The above scenario is why we often recommend different products for different purposes. However, if one product blows everything else away, then we certainly will say so. That makes our job easier!
Product Cost is a significant factor for most consumers. That’s why we are always on the lookout for budget-priced products in the category we’re testing that doesn’t compromise too much on quality and performance while still staying at a relatively low price compared to its competitors.
When there is a substantial price difference between products in the same category, we want to know if it’s justified, quality is the first concern, and we keep this in mind during our tests as well as reading other consumer reports to see other people’s experiences. If we feel the lower-priced product does the job just fine, then we’ll say so.
Paying the Bills
All of the time and effort that goes into researching and compiling reviews is paid for by commissions from sales of products that we recommend.
If you return a product that we referred you to purchase, then we don’t make any money.
That’s our incentive to provide the best information that tells the whole story. Returns are annoying, especially if you bought a gift or have a deadline. If you’re not satisfied with a product, then leave a comment! We can only share our experience and collect information from the experiences shared by others. Everyone can get a more accurate picture when we share information.
The best thing that has happened for consumers is the freedom and availability of information. What do you do when you’re at a store trying to decide if you should get something? Pull out your handy Google Machine and read reviews. What’s more convenient than that?
Clean4Happy is dedicated to finding the best tools and solutions for people who quickly want answers to their questions. Clean4Happy is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.