How To Get Your Product Reviewed

If you make or distribute a product for parents of young children or for children ages 1-8 and would like to discuss having it reviewed on our blog, email us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com with a link and some information about your product.

If we feel your product is a good match for our readers and reviewers, we will contact you to arrange to have a sample of your product sent to us for review. If your product is valuable and you would like to have it returned, we will do so if you can provide a prepaid shipping label or shipping account number. We do our best to respond to product inquiries within two business days.

The Review Process

In addition to reviewing items in our own home, we have several contributing reviewers in various locations in the United States with children of varying ages. Depending on the product you would like reviewed and the reviewers we have available, we may have you ship your product to them for review. We do not ask our contributing reviewers to go through the effort of returning products they receive.

When we or our designated reviewers have had time to use your product, we will write and publish a review. This may take a week, or it may take four or even eight weeks, depending on our publishing schedule. We frequently coordinate bundle content, including multiple reviews, into series or "theme weeks" to maximize the interest of our audience in a general topic. Gathering together the needed materials to ensure a successful theme week or product roundup may take additional time and delay the review of your product. If this occurs, we try to contact individual companies to let them know when we will run the extended content package.

If we determine that our review of a product is likely to be of great interest to our readers, we may inquire prior to publication to determine if the company would be interested in holding a product giveaway on our blog. If we have agreed to review your product and you are interested in running a product giveaway, please tell us, but be aware that we cannot discuss your product or the possibility of hosting a giveaway until we have used your product enough to determine whether it is one we will be writing about positively enough to make such arrangements reasonable to our readership and productive for the company involved.

Our product reviews often include some criticisms, but we rarely publish a thoroughly negative product review. We belive our blog's role is primarily to recommend products we like to our readers, and prefer not to expend our readers' attentions on products we dislike. For this reason, companies can be assured that if we are requesting your product, we have researched it to the extent that information is available online and have high hopes for it. If we have concerns and questions about your product after receiving it, we will contact you; if, however, we simply dislike the product, we may decline to review it rather than publishing a highly critical review. We reserve the right to choose to review or not review any donated product, regardless of our assessment of it; that said, we consistently review more than 95% of the products we directly solicit, and over 50% of those sent to us unsolicited.

After we have published our review, we will do one of several things with your product. We may keep it, if it is of particular interest to our three-year-old daughter, who works for free; donate it to a local charity, business, or organization in our area; give it away through a giveaway on our blog or informally to a reader; or, if it is a high-value product (over $200) and you have arranged for return shipping, we can return the product to you.

Product Endorsement

When we run "showdown" reviews of multiple products, we assign the designation of "Top Pick" to the products we feel performed best overall in our product tests. Beginning with products reviewed in 2007, each November we will compile "Top Picks" lists in a variety of categories. Only items reviewed on ZRecs in the previous 12 months are eligible for inclusion, although they need not have been originally brought to market during that period. Designation of the year's "Top Picks" will be based on both the performance of the product at the time of our review and of any additional information we have gained since that time. After showdown reviews and our annual Top Picks selections, companies whose products have been selected will be sent a badge which can be used to promote the recommended product.