Trustpilot - not to be trusted so much 14 March 2015 at 9:56AM in Praise, vent & warnings 51 replies 32.5K views

corum_uk67

I recently left a four star review of parcel2go on Trustpilot. The experience with the courier (Fedex international) was great, however the experience with the parcel2go website and online help was not so great. Basically the webpage kept rejecting my details and saying contact customer support. So I used the online chat function. 20 minutes later the advisor says 'oh yeah i'm getting the same problem' as all he had been doing was sitting there filling in the same details! Hardly tech support. He passed me to a colleague who suggested trying a different courier and then the chat ended abruptly. Reassuring stuff - not. Anyway after registering on the fedex website I managed to find out that the area I was sending to was out of their service range.

So armed with new information I went back to parcel2go and successfully used their online form. My experience was thus that they offer great prices but their customer support was poor and a lot of time was wasted because they didn't know what the problem was.

Anyway I digress. A month later, the review, along with several others for the same company has been suspended, parcel2go clearly having a trawl through and challenging anything it didn't like the look of. In my case this was on the pretense that the purchase wasn't verified. This after having to provide the transaction reference at the time of the review!

I immediately challenged this and said that I would strongly object to the review being removed and asked what details they needed. It took from February 26 to March 9 for them to respond and they are now dragging their heels and making it extremely difficult to get the review reinstated. They rejected an extract from my bank statement as proof of purchase, even though it clearly shows a payment to the company in question on the date in question. I'd deleted the original emails from parcel2go but after trawling my browser history came across a link to the tracking page so I have now sent them a screenshot which clearly shows the consignment number. That was on March 10 and as of today they have still not responded and the review remains hidden.

Any faith I previously had in Trustpilot has been severely eroded by this episode and I've since read articles online which cast serious doubt over the integrity of the site management and many of the reviews (which are posted to order apparently).

If my review ever does get reinstated I will be dropping the score somewhat from its original four stars however by that time it will be so far down the list that anybody visiting the site will probably miss it anyway.

Shame on Trustpilot and shame on companies like parcel2go who, rather than take on board customer feedback and use it to improve their services would rather go out of their way to silence honest reviews.

Nodding_Donkey

P2G are the Yodel of wholesalers. TBH I don't think anyone takes much notice of Trustpilot.

JReacher1

Trustpilot feed into Google to provide a seller rating for a business. So as an example if you google cotton traders under their advert listing there is a star rating out of 5 (currently 4.1). These ratings are driven by companies like trust pilot and bazaarvoice. So even though people may not read trustpilot reviews they do actually see a companies rating when they Google them.

This is why companies like trust pilot are very important to business's.

corum_uk67

I've no doubt that Trustpilot is very important to companies, which is why some companies such as parcel2go will go out of their way to have any negative reviews/scores removed, even under false pretenses, and why Trustpilot support them in doing this by making it so onerous and time consuming to challenge.

Whether people rely on the reviews or the average score is irrelevant if the reviews/average scores presented do not include customers who have had bad experiences and whose feedback/score has been removed.

corum_uk67

Well we're a couple of weeks further on now and still Trustpilot are giving no ground despite several email exchanges. I've just left the following review on their site which pretty much sums things up.

Title - all faith in trustpilot has gone

I recently left a review on trustpilot. Of the five or so reviews I have ever left on the site (all for totally different types of companies) this was the only one that didn't get five stars.

A month later I received an email stating that the review had been pulled because it was lacking proof of purchase.

I emailed a screenshot showing a dated bank statement entry with a payment to the company concerned. Trustpilot said this was not acceptable. They wanted the original receipt which I had permanently deleted weeks before.

After trawling through my browser history I got lucky and found the parcel tracking page. This shows the company name, parcel reference, tracking reference and delivery confirmed status. I sent Trustpilot a screenshot. They said this was unacceptable as, to put it in their words, it did not prove I was 'the person who had the buying experience' and did not show my personal details.

I have offered to send them a copy of my passport and council tax bill as evidence of my name and address. This, together with the parcel reference, would allow them to confirm with the company that the purchase details tied up. They say this is unacceptable and will be archiving my review if I can't come up with the original receipt (deleted) or account details from the company website (there aren't any as registration wasn't required).

This has been going on for weeks now and its clear to me that Trustpilot are not interested in listening to reason and my opinion is that their policies and blinkered practices only assist companies in weeding out reviews that they don't like and making it very difficult or even impossible to get honest reviews reinstated even when offered perfectly acceptable evidence.

I have absolutely no confidence in the integrity or reliability of the scores and reviews found on Trustpilot any more and have deleted my previous reviews from the site, apart from the one in question which no doubt they will be deleting soon.

Exile_geordie

JReacher1 wrote: »

Trustpilot feed into Google to provide a seller rating for a business. So as an example if you google cotton traders under their advert listing there is a star rating out of 5 (currently 4.1). These ratings are driven by companies like trust pilot and bazaarvoice. So even though people may not read trustpilot reviews they do actually see a companies rating when they Google them.

This is why companies like trust pilot are very important to business's.

They may well be important to businesses but that has no bearing on the OPs point - in so much as their review is not being posted by Trustpilot - a website that by its very name you are meant to Trust.


By not allowing their review and by not responding to the OPs complaints they are being very far from trustworthy.

JReacher1

Exile_geordie wrote: »

They may well be important to businesses but that has no bearing on the OPs point - in so much as their review is not being posted by Trustpilot - a website that by its very name you are meant to Trust.


By not allowing their review and by not responding to the OPs complaints they are being very far from trustworthy.

Yes I should have quoted nodding donkey as I was replying to his statement that nobody takes much notice of trust pilot. My point was that people don't always realise that data they are looking at is fed from trust pilot.

sunflowersuffolk

I am no longer confident in Trust Pilot. I looked on there at bagsetc, and there were just loads of fantastic reviews, all in the last 3 weeks, a lot from first time posters. I find that rather suspicious.

I did used to trust them.

dollydiva

Its not only Trust Pilot who do this. I left a 2 star Review for Clear Chemist on ekomi. I had received a fake perfume from Clear Chemist and IMO 2 Stars was generous; but CC refunded me, although I had to argue with them for a refund of my Postage costs.
Ekomi asked me to Review my feedback of 2 stars, but I maintained this was fair, given the fact CC sent me fake goods. They still didnt publish my full Review though.

hollydays

When I was having a problem with teletext-i looked at feefo and saw it was full of reviews obviously left by their foreign call centre staff, praising and naming themselves! It was so obvious it was embarrassing . Review sites like this are of absolutely no interest to me.

londonTiger

Companies pay a subscription fee to be listed in trust pilot. I wanted to get it so I could get my clients to leave me a review. But they want 1 grand a year or something like that to allow them to add my business. So you can see there's clearly a conflict of interest there. Additionally, to leave a verified review the suppler needs to send you a link to review. You can see there's a bias there because the seller can set it up so that if he knows the product is poor quality he might not send the review link to the customer