I work as a Frontend Dev for a company that has a good rating on Trustpilot, but based on their poor service and very high costs, we decided to quit about a year ago.
The first weird thing is that you can’t remove your profile. Trustpilot believes in “transparency”, haha, but I’ve never seen a more dodgy and rotten business model ever. In practice this is what happens when you quit, and this is also what forced us to become a paying customer again, bear with me:
Customers with bad experiences will go to Trustpilot to upload their very nuanced and sincere 1 star review. Trustpilot happily accepts these reviews and publish them. We saw that happening and thought, ok let’s ask our customers for a review and so we link them to our Trustpilot profile. Suddenly Trustpilot is less eager to accept this behavior. They were telling us it’s illegal to send traffic to our profile without paying Trustpilot. In other words to be able to receive reviews from non-raging customers, you need to pay Trustpilot.
In return the product is really shitty. Paying 500 euro a month to be able to receive a limited amount of reviews is already very bad and absolutely not helping end-customers. But the worst thing: the “customer success manager” that tries to stay in touch with me, telling me all kind of things like “Hey, you can tag reviews” and “did you know we have an API where you can filter reviews by tag?”… Wowzers, you have an API that can return filtered results, amazing! Can you believe it? An API that can return filtered results? And no way, you have widgets? Tell me all about it. They were very happy that we are paying customers again. Kill me now!
We are making a plan to quit asap, and I want to encourage you to do the same. Trustpilot makes the internet only more rotten, and they earn a lot of money on it; can we please stop with this nonsense? Thank you! And thank you for reading my rant.
You see it a lot on dodgy software or drop-shipping sites where they claim something like a 4.7 trustpilot rating, but they just go in and flag the negative reviews as abusive and get them removed. Trustpilot is working for the companies that pay them, not the users.
@Bao
Exactly my point, it is rotten to the bone. The interwebs is better off without Trustpilot, especially customers are better off. I wish also the 1 star keyboard warriors could see this.
I hate TrustPilot. I was the victim of a sustained spamming of negative fake reviews. Even after I compiled evidence linking the reviews to a rival site, TrustPilot responded with lies about having seen evidence that the fake reviews were the result of genuine experiences.
All places like that are same. Glassdoor is even worse. The only way to deal with it is not to participate in the first place. Average customer does not use those sites. I do go deal with BBB reviews however.
@Zhen
Glassdoor is hilarious. They claim to be neutral but I am pretty sure as a paying customer you can just pin a five star review to the top of your profile.
So even with a 2.4 rating, weirdly the top rating is always a 5 star.
If you read this LinkedIn post from Simon B of Krystal hosting, you will see all the nonsense at Trustpilot. There’s more in the comments. I happened to add a voice too.
Thanks god we learned they are cunts before we considered paying.
We started using it (free tier), we got some reviews and a nice score so we added a little custom “excellent on Trustpilot … blabla 50+ reviews” in the footer.
Same content of their official widgets but properly styled, not that different at the end of the day.
We got legal threats after a few days because apparently a few CSS lines can damage their “transparency.”
The website was brand new so 500e wasn’t really an option at the time; we put the ugly default widget and decided to not even consider their premium.
@Remington
If I were you I would even remove their widget, and source certified reviews elsewhere if it is important for your business. Trustpilot could be seen as a parasite of success, the more exposure the better it is for them, and soon there is no way back.
As a paying Trustpilot user I hate them, but for sure they don’t remove reviews whenever you ask. It’s a long and tiring process that works only in like 15% of the cases (for me).
The annoying part is that they remove REAL reviews as well (5*), while on their TP profile, they get people reviewing them for “good quality watches” or “amazing dresses” and they don’t remove those reviews which are fake/misplaced.
@Milan
The fact that you hate them and still pay them says something about their business.
And to be honest, I don’t care if they remove reviews, it adds nothing to this world. Their business model is already so damn bad, it is enough to genuinely hate them
@Oak
Thing is via API, collecting reviews is easier because customer is not required to register to TP, which limits friction and allows you to build reputation in an easier way. We average 4.9 across all of our businesses, with more than 10k reviews on each profile. Before we’d get like, 50-150 reviews by invitation a month, with API the number grew to 700.
Oak said: @Milan
But their API is also a paid feature right? Which is basically playing along with the circus?
Yes, it is a paid feature; it boosts conversion though, so it’s worth if you are looking to increase review count. Yet, they are still a bad company to me.
@Milan
Same here. I am helping my GF set up her business; she requested reviews from past customers, TP just decided to remove some of them randomly. Quite annoying, given they are all true reviews.
