Trustpilot is a review service that gained popularity over the last decade. Now lots of companies keep their accounts on this platform to present themselves to potential customers: there are more than 70 million reviews, and the figure grows every day. We in Belov Digital like staying transparent to everyone and have an account there since February, 2021, too – you’re welcome to pay it a visit.
Customer reviews are crucial because reputation is everything to an online business. But you may wonder what’s so good about Trustpilot in particular since we already have dozens of platforms where one can share their feedback on virtually anything.
Strong no-fake attitude
Sharing data online became so easy and convenient that the world could hardly avoid having lots of fakes spreading all over the place. The same is valid for reviews: some companies turn to such unethical practices in quest of better ratings. Amazon has up to 64% fake reviews, as the Statista research states – that is a huge problem.
Over time, we’ve learned to identify faux feedback by triggers like the lack of detail in the text, same phrases repeated in multiple reviews (sometimes even an entire review gets copied!), or the author account is new, empty and suspicious in general. But you can’t always distinguish mala fide reviews from the actual ones. Science shows that our judgment is only correct in just over half of cases; in essence, that’s a pure yes/no guesswork.
Striking back against fakes
Trustpilot puts significant effort into blocking fake reviews. It uses fraud detection algorithms to filter out what’s most likely a fake. To quote the Trustpilot team,
“We use considerable resources to protect our platform from misuse, including a combination of fake detection technology, review monitoring algorithms and robots and over 50 highly trained experts.”
Apart from that, the platform allows flagging potentially misleading reviews like those posted more than a year after the deal took place. Experts check such reports to rule out the possibility that a company is merely trying to delete negative feedback by reporting it.
Rules and restrictions
Not to be only reactive, Trustpilot also implements active measures that prevent users from leaving fake reviews. You can only post so much unless you get an invitation to do so: for this service, it’s one review per 24 hours.
Of course, companies’ actions are also subject to the anti-fraud rules. If you receive a review, you can’t delete or edit it in any form – for most of the part, that’s a given for any online platform with feedback functionality. Then, you can’t hide reviews in any way to keep people’s attention off the negative side. And, as we’ve mentioned, any attempt to flag a derogatory review for bogus reasons will be overridden by the Trustpilot expert team.
High standards for rating
With Trustpilot, 5 stars are quite hard to get. The calculations behind what seems so simple and familiar are more complicated than you may think. Their formula accounts for the time when a review was posted, the frequency of the appearing and ensures a freshly created account doesn’t drown because of all that. These factors balance the score left by customers to make the overall rating up-to-date and fair.
For strictly negative feedback, a company can get up to 100 subtracted from its Customer Satisfaction Score. That’s different from what you can find with other review platforms, and that’s one of the main reasons you can rely on Trustpilot rating with more confidence.
A paid plan doesn’t buy you stars
If you saw that Trustpilot offers premium plans, you could have started questioning the fairness of their rating. However, worry not: paid subscription doesn’t change anything in the score calculation algorithm. It only provides more personalized service and allows inviting more people to comment on your business.
Among the privileges of paying for your Trustpilot account, there are advanced analytics and promotion. For instance, you can have your star rating displayed next to the company name in organic search. But there’s no way you can add a point or two to your score, regardless of your plan.
Moreover, not so many Trustpilot users choose any type of premium service. As their website says, around 90% of accounts are the free ones.
Let people see your score!
If you’d like to boast a bit about your rating, showcasing it on your website is a great option. Trustpilot’s WordPress integration allows adding a box with your rating and reviews directly to your site. They call it TrustBox and it comes in the form of a widget.
What you need to do is go to Integrations – Ecommerce from Trustpilot Business and download the file you’ll see there. This is a plugin that you should upload to your WordPress site (there’s a button in the Plugins tab that says Upload – you want to click on that one). After you finish installing and activating it, you’ll find all the necessary configurations in the freshly added Trustpilot tab.
A word of advice
As a business that has worked on and with many platforms, we say Trustpilot is a trustworthy resource. You can read more on their website to decide for yourself. Just one thing you should always keep in mind: the best way to ensure you’re not lied to is to check. Nothing can guarantee 100% fake proof, but you’re the one to minimize the risk. A helpful practice is to compare the results from several resources and watch out for suspicious stuff.
