Trustpilot is a digital platform that allows users to provide reviews for businesses from which they have purchased a product or service or contacted customer care. Customers give a star rating (one to five) and make comments about their experience with the firm.
The reviews allow consumers to assess a firm’s reputation while also providing businesses with insight into how customers perceive the organization.
About Trustpilot
In 2007, entrepreneur Peter Holten Mühlmann founded Trustpilot, a corporation located in Denmark. Its purpose is to establish a rating system for shops and service providers that will assist prospective customers in making better purchasing decisions and allow businesses to improve their customer experience. It has grown into one of the world’s largest online review services, with over 300 million reviews of 1.17 million websites as of September 13, 2024.
Trustpilot, headquartered in Copenhagen, has 900 people and offices in London, Edinburgh, Scotland; New York; Denver; Melbourne, Australia; Hamburg, Germany; and Milan, Italy.
The company was launched on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in March 2021, with the initial public offering (IPO) raising £473 million (about $665 million), the highest IPO on the exchange in over a decade.
Trustpilot Group PLC. “Announcement of Offer Price: Offer Price Set at 265 Pence per Share.”
How Does Trustpilot Work?
Any Trustpilot user can provide a star rating for businesses where they have made a purchase or had a service encounter.
The platform combines the individual ratings to calculate a total TrustScore ranging from 1 to 5. A 5 equals “excellent,” whereas a 1 represents a “bad” experience.
However, the TrustScore is more than just an average of the business’s previous reviews. The company’s algorithm is influenced by:
- Time span—Recent evaluations are given more weight than older ones.
- Frequency—The more frequently that companies collect their reviews, the more consistent their TrustScore will be.
- Bayesian average—Companies with fewer evaluations are more likely to have significant swings in their ranking. To offset this, Trustpilot includes seven reviews with a 3.5-star rating to help balance the overall score. When the company receives additional reviews, the initial 3.5-star ratings have a smaller impact on the TrustScore.
In addition to the star rating, buyers can provide comments about their experience with the company, ranging from product quality to order fulfillment and customer support.
Creating a Profile and Writing Reviews
You can establish a free profile using your Facebook, Google, or email address. Customers may also receive a Trustpilot invitation from a business they recently utilized. By clicking on this link, a profile is instantly built using the personal information you have already submitted to the company.
However, consumers do not require an invitation to post a review for a company with which they have interacted. After logging into your Trustpilot login, you may use the search option to find the business’s profile and offer comments.
Businesses can flag any reviews that they believe are suspect, in line with Trustpilot’s goal of presenting ratings from actual customers. These flagged reviews are then evaluated by Trustpilot to ensure that the author followed its rules.
How Trustpilot Makes Money
Trustpilot operates a freemium business model. It is free for customers to post reviews and for businesses to gain basic features. However, firms who require more advanced services must pay a monthly fee.
On the one hand, firms can receive up to 100 automated review invites every month for free, as well as basic review statistics. According to Trustpilot, 90% of firms who receive evaluations are non-subscribers.
On the other side, paying business clients can send out more review invites every month and have access to artificial intelligence (AI)-generated analytics, which the company claims can provide deeper insights into the customer experience. They also receive marketing tools to assist them promote their reviews, such as widgets displaying their TrustScore and an image generation tool for social network profiles.
Trustpilot’s “standard plan” starts at $225 per month, however extra modules, such as limitless review invitations and location-based review analytics, increase the cost.
3.3 million
The number of fake or harmful company reviews that Trustpilot removed from its platform, according to its second annual transparency report, released in 2023.
Criticisms of Trustpilot
Despite its widespread popularity, Trustpilot has received allegations that its client firms occasionally receive phony good reviews or purposely flag negative evaluations that could hurt their TrustScore.
These concerns have compelled the corporation to become more transparent about its client practices in recent years. In 2019, for example, Trustpilot introduced a new “transparent flagging” tool that allows customers to see how many reviews a particular company has highlighted.
It has also used automated fraud detection technologies to help discover violations of its flagging procedures.
In 2021, the firm presented its first transparency report, which stated that it has eliminated 2.2 million fraudulent or detrimental reviews, accounting for 5.7% of all reviews on its site. The majority of these were found and removed using its fraud detection software.
By 2023, the company had improved its impact, removing 3.3 million fraudulent or harmful reviews, or 6% of all reviews.
“It’s very difficult for humans to spot a fake review [unless they are] badly done,” its chief trust officer, Carolyn Jameson, told the BBC in 2021, when the first report was published. “But the machines look at multiple data points, like the number of times an IP [Internet protocol] address has posted a review in quick succession, and patterns in language that might look natural to the human eye but have been repeated too many times in other reviews by the same person.”
Who Can Write a Review on Trustpilot?
Anyone who has purchased or received services from a company is welcome to post a review. To achieve this, you must first create a Trustpilot profile, which is free. Some businesses allow recent customers to leave a review, in which case a profile is immediately generated for new users using the personal information they have already provided to the company.
How Does Trustpilot Make Money?
The company operates on a freemium model, which requires companies to pay a membership fee to access specific functionalities. Subscribing organizations, for example, can issue more automatic review invitations and receive insights created by artificial intelligence (AI) based on consumer comments.
Are Trustpilot Reviews Reliable?
Critics claim that corporations will occasionally attempt to “game” the platform in order to earn better TrustScores. One strategy is for businesses to flag bad reviews that may lower their score, even if those reviews are accurate.
To tackle this approach, Trustpilot has introduced a new “transparent flagging” function that allows users to see how many reviews a company has tagged. The review platform has also begun to produce a transparency report outlining its attempts to reduce incorrect flagging.
The Bottom Line
Trustpilot is an internet platform founded in Denmark that allows customers to post ratings and positive or negative reviews for businesses with which they have done business. These reviews can be useful to other customers. However, Trustpilot, like other review sites, is prone to false reviews, which could jeopardize the platform’s legitimacy.