You can't tust Trustpilot.com Reviews

BusyBoy

There are many fake reviews of items on various consumer websites. We have all read about people getting paid in India, Bangladesh, Malaysia to write hundreds of fake reviews about products.

There is also another side of the Review business - Sites like Trustpilot.com actively manage customer reviews. Service providers can sign up with Trustpilot and in return for an yearly fee consumer reviews are managed by Trustpilot.

Essentially when customers put up a bad review - Trustpilot takes many of them down citing breach of their reviewing guidelines on flimsy excuses. As a result most companies who have a yearly management contract with Trustpilot tend to have very few negative reviews.

Many people will be familiar with Checkatrade - on this site as well there are no negative reviews. Everyone has glowing reviews and there are many comments about this site on MSE. Also the Daily Mail has done a report on their questionable practice.

My experience of Trustpilot's dodgy practice came into light recently when I had a bad customer service experience with a dental veneer company called INSTAsmile - I put up a detailed review on Trustpilot about INSTAsmile. Within hours my review was taken down because INSTAsmile responded by saying I was not a customer of theirs. I provided proof my purchase to Trustpilot.com but never heard from them again and my review never went live. Apparently if I am persistent Trustpilot may eventually publish my review but it will have gone to bottom of the pile. Then again most people are not persistent and Trustpilot.com rely on that.

It's all very well about fake product reviews - now sites like Trustpilot.com are revealing another murky side of the consumer review business. Balance is being shifted towards the service providers where sites will only show glowing reviews about service providers.

Soon consumers will not be able to trust most online reviews.