Trustpilot

[ian-d]

Are any of you guys/gals using Trustpilot, either on a free account or paid? What is your general opinion and would you recommend them? Also, if you pay, can you give an indication of how much they charge, as they don't appear to want to share this on their website.

I'm looking to promote my customers leaving reviews by them just to improve my star rating, as I currently am 8 out of 10, yet all my reviews have been 5 out of 5. It is some crazy algo thing and the only way to get to 10 out of 10 is many more reviews!!!

(I want genuine ones of course)

 

[jimmyjimmerson]

I wouldn't mind hearing about peoples experiences with Trust Pilot. I am considering using it in my ecommerce websites

 

[PolicyBee_Vicky]

Hi there Jimmy and Ian.

I haven't used Trust Pilot. We use Feefo to collect customer reviews (google have picked up the stars as well, google 'PolicyBee feedback' you'll see).

We've used them for a few years, and found them really cost effective.

 

[Curious]

I spoke to Trustpilot a while back and they wanted £780 a year (if paid in one go) or about 900 quid a year if paid in four quarterly payments.

They'll let you have a month free trial Jimmy if you want to try it on one of your shops? Simple to use and integrate.

I'm just contemplating signing up fully at the moment.

 

[jimmyjimmerson]

I spoke to Trustpilot a while back and they wanted £780 a year (if paid in one go) or about 900 quid a year if paid in four quarterly payments.

They'll let you have a month free trial Jimmy if you want to try it on one of your shops? Simple to use and integrate.

I'm just contemplating signing up fully at the moment.

Pretty expensive to be honest.

I will probably try a few of them out and see which one is worthwhile.

 

[Curious]

Pretty expensive to be honest.

I will probably try a few of them out and see which one is worthwhile.

That was my first thought as well - I couldn't quite see the roi on it at the early stage we're at..

 

[Bill1954]

I hate the way they let anyone make a comment about your site but, if you want to comment on the review, you have to sign up for an account.
Seems all a bit one sided given that anyone with a grudge can open any amount of free email accounts and make bad reviews with each one.

 

[ian-d]

I only was made aware of them having a single review on me when doing a google search for my company name to see what it returned. I noticed one 5 out of 5 review yet it gave me a overall score of 7.1 out of 10 which I was fuming about, as it potrayed my company to be ok, but not great.

When I contacted them about it they gave some nonsense about algo's and when I requested they remove my company from their site they refused. In the end I left it because a few more reviews appeared and it started to build my score, but on my initial complaint to them, the cheeky b*ggers created an account for me, which I've just noticed hense the further investigation into them.

Thanks for the price quoted, but I fail to see how a ROI is possible? Small companies barely get seen on there, so not sure there is a benefit over having a testimonial section.

In any case, I've asked a few customers that have left testimonials on my site to do the same (if they want) on Trust Pilot to build my rating.

 

[SEO Lady]

I spoke to Trustpilot a while back and they wanted £780 a year (if paid in one go) or about 900 quid a year if paid in four quarterly payments.

They'll let you have a month free trial Jimmy if you want to try it on one of your shops? Simple to use and integrate.

I'm just contemplating signing up fully at the moment.

Hi everyone

I'm very experienced with Trustpilot and for 300/orders per month it works out at £1,000 a year to have their services.

The advantage is that your customers get an email allowing them to review with just one click instantly. You can set the time of the email to be 10 days / 30 days after order process (or however many days you want) and Trustpilot imports every order number to verify they are a buyer, and not a random 3rd party. If you use the paid for service and the customer cannot provide an order number, the review can be deleted.

There is also a facility whereby if you have had a customer issue you can manually login and remove the review invitation email.

You can select a featured review to be at the top of the page.
You can install a widget on your site or any webpage.

When a new review is left you get an instant email alert - so if it's a negative comment you can act upon this to change their opinion of you. I have had apologies from customers that leave a bad review online then I phone them up and they get really embarressed about being tracked down and remove / amend their review! Some people don't tell the company about any issue, no notes on their order, yet they leave a negative comment online without communicating with us that they had an issue.

As a company you can respond to each review, here's an example

The ability to respond in my eyes is priceless. In today's society of everyone placing a high regard for review sites, especially for unknown brands to instill confidence, I think that the personal touch goes a long way. This is why I respond to each and every review.

 

[SEO Lady]

Thanks for the price quoted, but I fail to see how a ROI is possible? Small companies barely get seen on there, so not sure there is a benefit over having a testimonial section.

Depends what kind of return you are looking for.

If you Google the brand name, the company is Gpage1 pos1, Trustpilot is Gpage1 pos2.

Surfers who are in a spending frame of mind want confidence before they commit to give their hard earned cash to a business they've never heard of.

I carried out an experiment last 3 weeks - a customer had reported a 5% discount code and I selected her trustpilot review as the featured review, in 2 weeks there had been 12 orders, average order value £100.

You could argue that these 12 people may have bought regardless. But, you could argue that Trustpilot gave people the confidence to spend £100 because of the great reviews and the discount incentive.

That's £1,200 in 2-3 weeks has paid for the entire year's worth of Trustpilot services.

I guess ROI could depend on your industry and average spend.

 

[Curious]

I carried out an experiment last 3 weeks - a customer had reported a 5% discount code and I selected her trustpilot review as the featured review, in 2 weeks there had been 12 orders, average order value £100.

You could argue that these 12 people may have bought regardless. But, you could argue that Trustpilot gave people the confidence to spend £100 because of the great reviews and the discount incentive.

That's £1,200 in 2-3 weeks has paid for the entire year's worth of Trustpilot services.

I guess ROI could depend on your industry and average spend.

All depends on your margins though really doesn't it as you say - that £1200 pounds of revenue doesn't take into account costs so it doesn't really pay for Trustpilot for the year, if you want to pay for the service from profit (not looking to to cause an argument but it's just the truth).

I'd love to trial it for a few months to actually properly test any uplifts in conversion it might offer, the problem with the 30 day trial is it can take a month to get some reviews in. I've had all the spiel about increases in conversion rates from the guy at TP but I'd love to split test it for myself on my own site..

 

[Andrew Baker]

We are looking at both Trust Pilot & Feefo for our eCommerce site.

We would have gone with Feefo initially but they lacked the integration with our eCommerce platform so we still haven't decided which way to go just yet.

Like Barny mentions I'd like to split test both services for 2-3 months and analyse the results, pros/cons, etc.

 

[SEO Lady]

All depends on your margins though really doesn't it as you say - that £1200 pounds of revenue doesn't take into account costs so it doesn't really pay for Trustpilot for the year, if you want to pay for the service from profit (not looking to to cause an argument but it's just the truth)..

Yes I agree, but I was using these figures as a demonstration of fact specific to my research.

I'd love to trial it for a few months to actually properly test any uplifts in conversion it might offer, the problem with the 30 day trial is it can take a month to get some reviews in. I've had all the spiel about increases in conversion rates from the guy at TP but I'd love to split test it for myself on my own site..

You can sign up for a 30 day trial, and you are able to submit previous customers emails to 'kick start' your reviews.
Kickstart reviews

Use your existing customers to kickstart the reviews on your Trustpilot profile!
The kickstart feature is a great way of quickly generating a lot of reviews.
Simply send us a list of your existing customers and we'll send them an invitation email immediately.

 

[ian-d]

The kickstart feature is a great way of quickly generating a lot of reviews.
Simply send us a list of your existing customers and we'll send them an invitation email immediately.

This is what I don't get; this is a main feature of TP to make the process seamless, but to be honest, at a cost of £xxxx per year, I could send the invitations myself!

 

[SEO Lady]

This is what I don't get; this is a main feature of TP to make the process seamless, but to be honest, at a cost of £xxxx per year, I could send the invitations myself!

Yes you could, but when you send people the link personally they have to login either

• Using Facebook
• Create an account

By using their service it's a simple one-click no register system.


To encourage someone to leave a positive review with no incentive to login via Facebook (and if they don't have Facebook) to create an account to leave a positive review in my experience people do not do this. It's too much hassle. When was the last time you created an account from scratch to leave a positive review of a new company / unknown brand? Apart from eBay I have never done this.

People are more inclined to take time to register and leave a bad review. This is precisely the reason why a paid-for option was chosen. Years ago the only reviews were 4 bad ones. Now there are nearly 300 reviews with just a smattering of less than favourable - and these are resolved swiftly.

 

[ian-d]

Yes you could, but when you send people the link personally they have to login either

• Using Facebook
• Create an account

By using their service it's a simple one-click no register system.

I'm not sure that is correct, I can send a link to my company on Trustpilot and ask the customer to click on 'rate company' and they don't have to fill in any personal information or register; just provide a name and description; no email address etc.

 

[SEO Lady]

I'm not sure that is correct, I can send a link to my company on Trustpilot and ask the customer to click on 'rate company' and they don't have to fill in any personal information or register; just provide a name and description; no email address etc.

Ah, yes I forgot I knew that as I've never used it as we get them automatically sent.

DISCLAIMER: I do not work for, or have any affiliation with Trustpilot

 

[EM223]

I've also been looking into Trustpilot and seen that quite a few of the more higher rated companies, have reviews from others sites. How does that work? I've seen one with 18,000 ebay reviews linked in, how easy is it to bring over your previous ebay reviews to the site?

 

[EM223]

I already tried to post so hope I don't double post, if I do then apologies! I have seen that on Trustpilot it is possible to take reviews from Ebay and use them on Trustpilot? Could anyone with any experience tell me how to do so and if they've found this to be useful? Thanks

 

[EYT2007]

Are any of you guys/gals using Trustpilot, either on a free account or paid? What is your general opinion and would you recommend them? Also, if you pay, can you give an indication of how much they charge, as they don't appear to want to share this on their website.

I'm looking to promote my customers leaving reviews by them just to improve my star rating, as I currently am 8 out of 10, yet all my reviews have been 5 out of 5. It is some crazy algo thing and the only way to get to 10 out of 10 is many more reviews!!!

(I want genuine ones of course)

I had a call from Trustpilot salesman and his selling points rang alarm bells, If I paid a annual fee close to £800 I was told I could exclude reviews I didn’t like from being seen via their B2B site which to me defeats the object of a good honest system for the customer to see, also it would rank me higher on Google?. The companies that have signed up to trustpilot have fantastic reviews NO Negative comments and the companies that haven’t have a mixed bag of reviews! How can you trust a system like that?

 

[SEO Lady]

As of November 19th 2012 the facility to cancel a review invitation will no longer be possible

 

[trustico]

We have been using Trustpilot for different industries and it is a great 'add-on' to help the 'social buying'.

Now a days customers wants advice from other customers (is it not why we are on this forum ) and having the 5 stars rating display on your site from a third party website is becoming more and more important.

Moreover, with Google rich snippets you can display these 5 stars in your search results or in your Adwords campaign.

In term of prices, you could pay anywhere from £70 to £100 per site per month but if you do a lot of orders it is worth it.

I definitely recommend it, they are located in Norway I believe and have a good customer support.

 

[Neil Bayton]

Hi,

Sorry really late to the party, but I have just joined Trustpilot after working with other Customer Review Platforms. Just to be CLEAR I am not in SALES.

Firstly thanks to 1weekSEO some really fair honest posts.

I don't think that we would be in business if we did not offer a ROI for a large proportion of businesses.

My very simple view is that companies have these main drivers to improve their business:-

Increase turnover
Reduce Costs
Improve Customer Service
Peace of mind

I could argue that Trustpilot can deliver on all four however I can make a great case for the top 3. Whether the benefit outweighs the cost only you will know after crunching some numbers.

Happy to answer any questions you may have.

Neil

 

[Nochexman]

Congratulations Neil, you are the new leader in resurrecting an old discussion thread: 14+ months - well done!

Maybe you could consider opening a new thread and telling us a little about yourself?

 

[zigojacko]

Trustpilot is a rip-off. There are no set prices, they just quote you whatever they feel like you can pay. Their algorithm is poor and there is no chance of using their network in any way to find a decent provider because they crawl the entire web and stick every domain in their database so when you search, it just comes up with loads of sites that don't even use TP. It's useless. This means, the only benefit whatsoever is displaying their widget on your website to show your reviews - well you could do that manually and not pay their over-priced fees.

We used to use TP and I relayed all this feedback over to them (well over 12 months ago) and nothing has changed.

Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion of which I have told them that directly myself.

Sorry to pi$$ on your bonfire Neil.

 

[Neil Bayton]

Hi,

Don't hold back zigojacko

We don't publish set prices for all of our packages because different customers have different requirements so we tailor the price dependent on the customer requirements.

We constantly work on the algorithm to improve this and with most algorithm's when it comes to large volume it will not always be right all time for all the customers.

Where you allude to every domain being on our platform, this is a symptom of Trustpilot being an open platform which is consumer driven. We don't add the domain, consumer's do, we just help facilitate this when a consumer wants to feedback on a domain not currently registered on the site.

Depending on the individual business will depend on where the perceived benefit is. If merchants use Google Adwords then they qualify for Google Seller Ratings which further promotes their ad words and increases the CTR. It also reduces their ad word spend with Google by increasing their quality score. This is a measurable and tangible benefit for most e-commerce businesses.

If the convenience of the paid service does not deliver value then I recommend using the free version which can still deliver benefits.

We really do appreciate feedback good or bad ( Well it's what we do )

We also have some really interesting new features coming VERY soon, that I would be happy to share should you wish, that may add the benefit you are looking for with a customer review platform.

Regards
Neil

 

[zigojacko]

Hi,

Don't hold back zigojacko

We don't publish set prices for all of our packages because different customers have different requirements so we tailor the price dependent on the customer requirements.

We constantly work on the algorithm to improve this and with most algorithm's when it comes to large volume it will not always be right all time for all the customers.

Where you allude to every domain being on our platform, this is a symptom of Trustpilot being an open platform which is consumer driven. We don't add the domain, consumer's do, we just help facilitate this when a consumer wants to feedback on a domain not currently registered on the site.

Depending on the individual business will depend on where the perceived benefit is. If merchants use Google Adwords then they qualify for Google Seller Ratings which further promotes their ad words and increases the CTR. It also reduces their ad word spend with Google by increasing their quality score. This is a measurable and tangible benefit for most e-commerce businesses.

If the convenience of the paid service does not deliver value then I recommend using the free version which can still deliver benefits.

We really do appreciate feedback good or bad ( Well it's what we do )

We also have some really interesting new features coming VERY soon, that I would be happy to share should you wish, that may add the benefit you are looking for with a customer review platform.

Regards
Neil

Fair play for taking the feedback on the chin and replying...

Your prices differ massively. Your service doesn't have enough features to warrant that level of differentiation in pricing. One website went to you one month and was quoted a four figure monthly price, another month, they were offered a completely different price.

Just exactly what are you quoting on? If it's the volumes of reviews then surely it should be set pricing? For example:-

£100 p/month for up to 100 reviews
£200 p/month for 101 - 200 reviews
£500 p/month for 201 - 500 reviews

It really does just seem that you make it up as you go along. And for what you provide, it is immensely over-priced still. I don't believe in the 'contact us for pricing model' with no examples or basic standard pricing in place. It's BS as far as I see it and you just try to get what you can out of your customers.

I don't believe that god knows how many millions of website owners have manually added their website to TP without ever using your service or intending on doing so. That being said, I just tried searching and you have actually changed it now, when I last tried searching for SEO, thousands of random domains came up, there was no default sorting or algorithm in place but now it actually displays companies that have TP reviews.

The search is still awful though. As are your categories, companies can't even categorise themselves properly. Lat time I looked, you have crap DIY website builders websites appearing way out in front for a category like internet marketing or something. I just searched for website marketing, it shows two websites. My business is on there, we do internet marketing. It's all screwed and has been since, well... forever.

Maybe TP should lead by example... You're not trusted and your customers don't think much of you.

The whole concept of needing tons of reviews to get anywhere close to 10/10 is also flawed and misleading. To anyone that doesn't know any difference or how TP works, seeing a company rated 8.4 out of 10 with 8 reviews doesn't look brilliant when in actual fact, every review has been 5/5.

I could go on but it's nothing I haven't already said to TP so I'm probably wasting my breathe. There just isn't value for money in using TP. If you lowered the cost (let's face it, why on earth do you need to charge so much just for websites to sent automated emails to customers to gather reviews and display a widget on their website is beyond me), you would get far more customers using your platform and utilising your full feature-set which will in turn, generate some useful feedback for you to improve...

 

[Neil Bayton]

Hey,

The packages differ in price due to a number of factors:-
Number of orders
Number of domains ( A package can cover all the merchants domain for one price )
Social Media integration ( Whether merchant requires this or not )
Kickstarts ( Ability to engage with previous customers to gather reviews )
API

Price is always a contentious issue with most businesses, different services deliver different value to different companies. - One example is a customer using adwords and spending £2000 per month with Google can potentially save £200 per month by using reviews to increase the Ad quality score. If the cost of Trustpilot was £75 per month the value is there to see with just that one feature of Trustpilot. On average companies see a 12% increase in order volumes by using reviews, £10,000 turnover a month soon becomes £11,200, the argument to pay £100 to see this return is an easy one to win.

Sorry I was not clear when it comes to adding domains to our platform. Due to the open nature of Trustpilot ( Think TripAdvisor but for e-commerce websites ) then a consumer wishing to review a merchant can add the domain of the merchant they wish to review. So the power is with the consumer, most successful merchants are successful as they want to hear from their customers to know what they are doing well and what they can improve on, an open customer review platform facilitates this.

I would not disagree that the search can improve and yes the categories is a challenge which we are facing head on and looking to make changes to.

I disagree with the notion that our customers don't value us and the service our customer retention rate is a very respectable 97%.

Other features not mention that further add value to companies are sentiment analysis and tagging, these insights allow businesses to retain customers and improve customers service. Also In fact some companies use their Trustscore to measure internal service levels and to reward staff.

I promise you that you are not wasting your breath, although we are growing very quickly we have a start up vibe the culture at Trustpilot is very open and collaborative. I will feedback your comments as you make valid argument on points and that you have been a customer that has used the service.

Regards
Neil

 

[Nochexman]

Hi Neil, I believe that reputation management can be very important in terms of business success. Can you point to a source for your statement that using TrustPilot increases customer order volumes by 12%? Thanks, Peter

 

[Neil Bayton]

Hi,

The 12% average figure is from our own research from our own clients.

I cannot post links yet due to me not having the correct amount of posts.So cannot share our findings.

I'll try and PM you with them.

Neil

 

[Jonsam]

i would never use trust pilot they allow false reviews of your company

and then wont let you reply the the comments unless you pay them a lot of money to subscribe

we saw them at a ecommerce show in london and at first i was interested as it looked a good service. later they contacted us to see if we wanted to pay to use their service.

but we did not go with it and then a few weeks later some bad reviews started to come up about us.

we would not mind if the reviews was true reviews but one is for a product we dont even sell and never have.

we will never pay for this service out of principal as we feel it is a very unethical company.

our main competitor uses trust pilot and we think it is them who have posted a few of the negative reviews.
but trust pilot my even be posting the negative reviews them self to get you to subscribe to them

i wrote on the trust pilot website a negative review (but true) of the trust pilot website and it was removed with in a hour

double standards or what

 

[SEO Lady]

Report the review to be investigated, the reviewer then has to prove they bought an item / service.

If they can't prove it, the review is removed.

If they can prove it, then maybe they have a point. Check on their order details and see if they raised a concern, contacted Customer Services, called in?

Personally I have found by publicly resolving an issue online in a public forum is good for customer trust.

I have proved before (so many occasions) that customers leave a negative review - yet when screenshots of orders without customer emails complaining, or emailing concerns, then it's the customer that ends up red faced .

 

[zigojacko]

i would never use trust pilot they allow false reviews of your company

and then wont let you reply the the comments unless you pay them a lot of money to subscribe

we saw them at a ecommerce show in london and at first i was interested as it looked a good service. later they contacted us to see if we wanted to pay to use their service.

but we did not go with it and then a few weeks later some bad reviews started to come up about us.

we would not mind if the reviews was true reviews but one is for a product we dont even sell and never have.

we will never pay for this service out of principal as we feel it is a very unethical company.

our main competitor uses trust pilot and we think it is them who have posted a few of the negative reviews.
but trust pilot my even be posting the negative reviews them self to get you to subscribe to them

i wrote on the trust pilot website a negative review (but true) of the trust pilot website and it was removed with in a hour

double standards or what

You can join the other many thousands of business owners complaining about the same issues.

Just goes to show that even now, it hasn't been possible for a legitimate and trustworthy review platform to emerge. A typically flawed system and is probably why Google have even now dropped the reviews rich snippets showing stars in their organic search results.

 

[Nochexman]

I have proved before (so many occasions) that customers leave a negative review - yet when screenshots of orders without customer emails complaining, or emailing concerns, then it's the customer that ends up red faced .

Not sure I understand what you are saying. Do you post screenshots of customer orders to rebut negative reviews on Trust Pilot?

 

[Jonsam]

i did call them and ask for proof of they brought it from us and they said they dont

so i asked them to remove it and they said no

i asked for the contact details for the reviewer the said no

thay said the only thing i can do is sign up with them and reply to the review on there system

but i did not want to to that so on the bottom of the review there was a facebook comment thing so i replied in that

but now they have removed the facebook widget so you cant even do that

its so frustrating one review is for a product we dont sell and saying dont buy from us and then it says i recommend this site (our competitors)

 

[Neil Bayton]

Jonsam

Reviews can be immediately reported by the merchant and these reviews are immediately taken down, the reviewer then has 7 days to proof they have consumed a product or service. Our free service allows not only for you to be notified immediately a negative review has been posted on our platform, but it does give you the opportunity to reply.

Zigojacko

As with most things on the internet ( and in life ) things are open to abuse, however we cannot let these keyboard warriors win over a platform that does more good than harm and which has far more positives than negatives,we have in place a legal and compliance team far larger than any other Customer Review Platform in Europe to keep the integrity and transparency of the honest reviews. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin all the big internet platforms are open to abuse yet they do so much good.

Google change their algorithm regularly, the reason the stars do not show in organic listings for the merchant site is because the reviews can only be used to once and we use this to promote the merchant profile page on our site. Now with the release of Product Reviews the reviews will be used to benefit the merchant site, so you will very soon see Google Stars in organic listings when the page refers to a product.

With reference to your review, I cannot comment as I don't know the specifics but happy to investigate should you wish, however it might be due to the fact that you were not a confirmed purchaser of Trustpilot, but happy to take a look.

 

[Bulldogfix]

Thanks for the info guys, have been debating whether to use Trustpilot or not, going by the responses here I think I may consider some alternatives

 

[Edith@TerraNetwork]

I'm using their free service which is okayish. When I phoned for a quote I'm pretty sure it was thousands per year, not hundreds which is in no proportion to the number of clients we have.

Main issue I can see is getting people to review your services. I'm now getting review requests for everything I buy online, even if it's just a pack of envelopes and my standard reflex is to hit delete, there's an over saturation of feedback requests.

 

[onlineseller2018]

Stay well away from trustpilot

 

[onlineseller2018]

Reviews can be reported and trust pilot side with the customer even though its fraud

The customer tried to purchase and the card provider contacts us warn us that this order has a high potential for fraud, to add its never been wrong in 3 years and every warning has been spot on.

Card scammer then leaves a review WTF and we contact trust to remove the review.

Straight no we will not remove the review until 100% we can prove the review is from a scammer. So we have to wait roughly 2 months for the chargeback to appear and then trust will remove.

The irony is we pay thousands to use their platform and we have to prove the customer is a scammer when all it takes is for trust to remove the review till the chargeback hits

So scammer wins and we end up with a bad review

Crazy when a con man can leave a 1-star review complaining he did not receive the goods he tried to gain by using someones stolen credit card details

Maybe it needs to be renamed scampilot.com

Jonsam

Reviews can be immediately reported by the merchant and these reviews are immediately taken down, the reviewer then has 7 days to proof they have consumed a product or service. Our free service allows not only for you to be notified immediately a negative review has been posted on our platform, but it does give you the opportunity to reply.

Zigojacko

As with most things on the internet ( and in life ) things are open to abuse, however we cannot let these keyboard warriors win over a platform that does more good than harm and which has far more positives than negatives,we have in place a legal and compliance team far larger than any other Customer Review Platform in Europe to keep the integrity and transparency of the honest reviews. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin all the big internet platforms are open to abuse yet they do so much good.

Google change their algorithm regularly, the reason the stars do not show in organic listings for the merchant site is because the reviews can only be used to once and we use this to promote the merchant profile page on our site. Now with the release of Product Reviews the reviews will be used to benefit the merchant site, so you will very soon see Google Stars in organic listings when the page refers to a product.

With reference to your review, I cannot comment as I don't know the specifics but happy to investigate should you wish, however it might be due to the fact that you were not a confirmed purchaser of Trustpilot, but happy to take a look.