CustomerReview — a cr.hjlabs.in service by hjLabs.in
Every review platform you have ever used points one way: the customer rates the business. That leaves the business with no memory. CustomerReview points the other way — businesses record what happened with a customer, keyed to the one identifier in India that is hard to fake, and the next business gets to see it before it commits stock, a delivery slot or a consultation.
Cash-on-delivery is the default in most of Indian e-commerce, and it is where the money leaks. A refused COD parcel is not a lost sale — it is a paid forward leg, a paid return leg, packaging that cannot be reused and stock that comes back weeks later, often damaged. The order value was never at risk; the logistics were.
The same shape repeats outside e-commerce. A clinic holds a slot for a patient who never arrives. A salon blocks two hours for a no-show. A landlord signs an agreement with a tenant whose last three landlords all had the same experience. In every case the business absorbed a cost that a five-second check would have priced in — if anyone had written the last incident down anywhere the next business could read it.
Return fraud, wardrobing, empty-box claims, chargeback abuse and serial COD refusal are not random. A small number of repeat actors generate a large share of the incidents, and they move between sellers precisely because no seller can see the others’ history.
A reputation record is only worth reading if the identifier behind it is expensive to replace. Names are free to change and rarely match across two marketplaces. Email addresses are free and infinite. Delivery addresses change with a flat move, and the same address covers a whole building.
An Indian mobile number is different. Under the Department of Telecommunications’ SIM registration rules, every connection is issued against a verified government ID, and a subscriber may hold only a limited number of connections. That makes the number the cheapest reliable identifier a small business already collects at checkout — and it makes a throwaway identity cost real money and real paperwork rather than thirty seconds.
It is not a perfect identifier. Numbers get recycled by operators after long periods of disconnection, and a number can be shared inside a household or a business. That is exactly why a review here is presented as one business’s account of one interaction, with a date and a described incident — not as a verdict on a person.
You enter the number the customer gave you at checkout, at booking or on the agreement. The lookup returns what other businesses recorded against it: how many reviews exist, the average rating, the structured incident tags they picked (refused COD, return fraud, payment scam, abusive, great customer), the total amount other businesses said they lost, and the recent written accounts with any evidence links attached.
What it never returns is who wrote any of it. Authorship is stored in a separate private record readable only by the author, which is what lets a reviewer edit or delete their own entry while the customer, other businesses and other reviewers can never see who filed it. Anonymity here is not a courtesy — it is the only reason a seller will honestly record a bad interaction with someone who knows where their shop is.
Most numbers return nothing, and that is the normal, expected result. No history is not a red flag; it means nobody has recorded anything, which is true of the overwhelming majority of customers.
The useful response to a flagged number is almost never “refuse the customer”. It is to change the terms so that you are not the one carrying the risk: switch that single order from cash-on-delivery to prepaid, ask for a booking deposit, take a partial advance, or add delivery confirmation with a photograph. The customer who genuinely intends to buy pays; the one who was going to refuse the parcel walks away before you have spent anything on shipping.
Treat a review as one business’s opinion, because that is what it is. Reviews here are community accounts, not verified findings of fact, and they should inform a commercial judgement rather than replace it. Anything that reads as harassment, as a personal attack, or as an attempt to punish a customer for a legitimate complaint is removable under our content rules — report it and it goes.
If you run a store, the check does not have to be manual. CustomerReview exposes a free, read-only, CORS-enabled JSON endpoint that returns the same aggregate reputation for a number, so a WooCommerce, Shopify or custom checkout can call it when a cash-on-delivery order is placed and route risky orders to prepaid or to manual review instead of straight to the packing table.
The endpoint is documented on the API page, cached at the edge for sixty seconds and rate-limited per IP. It returns aggregates and anonymous review bodies only — it never returns reviewer identities.
We do not publish a directory of people. Individual number pages are excluded from search engines and from our sitemap: they are reachable when a business looks a number up, and not otherwise. We do not sell data, we do not score people with a credit-style number, and we do not treat an absence of reviews as a negative signal.
Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, anyone can ask what is held against their number, contest it and have unlawful or policy-breaking content removed. The grievance route, the timelines and the retention rules are set out in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.