I am not sure why TrustPilot is viewed as a trusted review system. Their business model appears to be as follows.

  • Allow people to add reviews about a company. Allow them to say anything, even make possibly slanderous, unproven claims if the company has not “taken ownership” – ie, paid for the privilege of replying to reviews.
  • Prior to “taking ownership” there is little or no due diligence applied to whether the reviews are genuine, and/or whether the reviewer has a genuine relationship with the company.
  • Once the company pays to manage their listing(TrustPilot is one of the only review platforms that requires this. Google doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t. Glassdoor doesn’t) then everything changes. Users must prove a “contractual relationship with the company” to leave a review.

So if:-

A. You try to use a website and it constantly crashes? You can’t leave a review, you don’t have a contractual relationship with the company.

B. Your wife buys something online, using your credit card…. See A. above.

C. If a website captures your email, then spams you with junk offerings. See A. above.

I recently left an “Average” review about #Gorilla, after my wife’s delivery contained a miniature pineapple and wilted asparagus, that no human shopper in store would have ever put in their bag. It was immediately flagged for spam and my whole TrustPilot account was suspended.

To get it back? I need to prove a contractual arrangement with Gorilla… which I can’t… as though it’s my credit card being used…. I am not the account owner at Gorilla.  It’s my CC… it comes to my house, I eat it.  But no rights to a review.

It seems to me, that Trustpilot might have introduced especially aggressive(and flawed) automated fake review detection algorithms… and is selling this as an add-on to their larger clients.

The main thing that irks me, is receiving condescending emails from Trustpilot about their “need to be over-cautious in preventing fake reviews being added to their system”. You mean…. Once the company starts paying right? Prior to that, your business model encourages negative/unproven reviews that hurt companies…. so they will have to sign up to respond to them?

So my genuine review is gone, and my whole Trustpilot account is gone. But more importantly, my whole faith in Trustpilot as a review service I would ever recommend to a client is gone as well.

In Future? I will in future be shopping at Flink. We regularly would spend 100EU a week with Gorilla, that’s all over.