Warning to those thinking about using trust pilot

[imonit45]

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[Mr D]

Any sort of clue besides the title?

Is it a film? A play? A book?

 

[WebshopMechanic]

@imonit45, not sure what happened there so I've copied your post and given my advice below it.

Hello Guys, listen to this one! (Long rant ahead)

A customer places an order on our website, uses multiple cards to complete the order and finally succeeds, having entered a billing address that doesn’t match his card.

His order comes through as High Risk of Fraud on Shopify (which is never wrong), so we proceed with our standard procedure of requesting further validation from the customer for their proof of billing address and ID.
We email them and have no response after a day, two days, three days…
We attempt to call them a number of times, but the phone line is dead.

To anyone who ever sold anything online, this will look like a scam. So we do what any other lawful company would do, email the ‘customer’ and tell them that the card has been refunded and order canceled due to the high risk of fraud and no verification received.

Give it a few days and the fraudster leaves us a 1* review on Trustpilot.
What a cheek we thought!

It gets better though.

We write to Trustpilot and provide all the proof showing that the order has been refunded and that it is definitely fraudulent.

We get told to reply to it officially online and to report it via the report tool. Great service we thought from our account management, seeing as we cannot actually supply any proof via the report tool and that there isn’t actually a section for ‘report as fraudulent’ on there. But hey, we follow the instructions.

Give it a couple of days and we get a response, saying that in their wisdom, Trustpilot has decided to keep the review on our account as it does not match their criteria for removal.

So let’s get this straight. Trustpilot is now encouraging fraudulent behavior, by allowing fraudsters to further abuse and antagonize the retailers, affecting their online presence and reputation, also giving the fraudsters extra power by blackmailing the retailers with bad feedback.
Well played TrustPilot, well played.

Our care as a retailer at Trustpilot has been terrible from day 1, but this really is a step above anything I’ve seen before.

I might go shopping at some online stores later, claim my money back with the bank and then leave them negative reviews.

As a B2C business, we understand the need to align with customers and doing everything in your power to work with them, but where do you draw the line? What proof do they need?
And why the heck would they completely ignore a report from a retailer that has been with trust pilot for over 2 years.

Word of warning do not work with the company or waste any money and would advise you use another reviews platform as trust pilot have lost the plot


My response:

Trustpilot's support team is based in another country and I think they have a one-liner to bat back most support issues with a 'it doesn't meet our removal guidelines'.

It's frustrating, especially when you pay for the service. In my experience, the UK account managers have no power over the support team either so it's a waste of time.

However, most shoppers who look at negative reviews are savvy and they can see whether a customer's poor feedback is them being a pain or it is genuine. My advice is to reply back to the review stating:

'We are very sorry. You did not pass the fraud and security checks. We did try to get hold of you on numerous occasions using the contact details you supplied to us but we didn't hear from you. Therefore, under our fraud policy (Created to protect our customers) we were unable to ship the item and we refunded your card.

Hope that helps.

 

[Justin Smith]

Would it not have been easier to just tell the dodgy customer the product is out of stock or otherwise unavailable at the moment ? That way you avoid getting into implying the customer is dodgy, even if you think he is.....