How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses

https://medium.com/@ryanbadger/how-trustpilot-extorts-businesses-91ca4b6a6f62

by czue • 4 years ago

281 73 4 years ago

soco• 4 years ago

Rather off-topic: am I the only one being told by Medium "please wait we are checking your browser"? I don't have enough motivation to wait for nonsense so there, I missed a maybe interesting article...

BayAreaEscapee• 4 years ago

I just tried it in four browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Brave) and it worked fine in all of them. Maybe it's just you? Or your IP address?

throwaway744678• 4 years ago

Isn't it a Cloudflare thing, such as [0]?

[0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-U...

byyll• 4 years ago

https://scribe.rip and in this case https://scribe.rip/https%3A/medium.com/%40ryanbadger/how-tru...

SMAAART• 4 years ago

That's the same playbook used by Yelp.

lordnacho• 4 years ago

This is basically correct, and has been pointed out several times. It's like if you somehow had a person standing outside your restaurant telling everyone about their particular dislikes, but to get other people to talk you up, you have to pay someone. And that someone turns out to be the guy who placed all the haters there.

A pernicious business model that lives in the cracks between free speech, advertising, and honesty.

synu2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of how Yelp tortures small family owned businesses. Is this the endgame for any for profit review site like this?

Applejinx• 4 years ago

Might be. I've had the impression that a pretty recognizable name in this field all made up of B-words also functions in this way (not sure they're as expensive or as abusive, but still, same basic deal)

Not what I'd call 'better' and possibly not even 'business' (and to the extent that bureau denotes a government agency, definitely nope). So maybe there's nothing new under the sun here?

I would even go so far as to call this an inherent problem of trust and scale. As soon as the world's too large to experience things like business personally or with your own circle of trusted people, it's desirable to make some way to scale that, and it's inherently a cursed problem that always becomes abusive. (or possibly a cursed problem that more often than not becomes abusive)

lnxg33k1• 4 years ago

I mean scammers can be called companies, but they are still scammers, but I think courts are the ones to contact in order to fight back scammers, no? Like if they are using your company name without permission, isn't it a violation in the first place? I'm sure things can change if enough people sue them?

tailspin20193• 4 years ago

100% agree with the sentiment here. Have seen Trustpilot’s tactics first hand and would liken their business model to a modern day protection racket.

I don’t think this is an inherent flaw in the idea of providing trustworthy third party reviews. I think the flaw is in the specific way that Trustpilot as a business operates. (Ie. Badly)

“Nice reputation you’ve got there. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it…”

thr0wawayf003• 4 years ago

I don’t think this is an inherent flaw in the idea of providing trustworthy third party reviews.

Just for the sake of argument, how would one go about creating a trustworthy third-party review business? Yelp has been accused of similar tactics for years with little pushback. I just don't think it's possible to create an ethical review platform on the internet. Way too much can go wrong.

Either the reviewers are paying you, the businesses being reviewed are paying you, or you're advertising. Advertising is a crapshoot, content creators won't pay to make sure their review gets posted, so that leaves the businesses being reviewed. And if your goal, as the owner of FooBar Business Reviews, is to maximize your profits, these kinds of techniques are going to start looking interesting really quick.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

Just for the sake of argument, how would one go about creating a trustworthy third-party review business?

clients would in some way have to be the people getting reviews of things. It would be more of an agent type tool that would go out and find things that fit the particular clients' wants. It does not admittedly seem like something that could work without a number of other things being added to it to make people want to pay for reviews.

synu2• 4 years ago

Maybe some kind of circle of trust? I would trust reviews written by my contacts more than internet randos. People they know a little less, and beyond that not really at all.

I think the problem is that if you make it into a business it messes up all the incentives, but if you don't make it a business there isn't an incentive to put time and effort in to combat spam, lawsuits, and so on. Maybe a big open source undertaking, like Wikipedia but with reviews?

creaghpatr• 4 years ago

As a buyer, I just take into account this reality when evaluating reviews. There is still useful information to be found, but the sentiment and comments I never extrapolate to the whole user population. Pretty typical for companies to incentivize positive reviews on these sites too, which is fine with me but also something I take into account.

projektfu• 4 years ago

In theory you could be paid by customers for helpful reviews. Consumer Reports, for example.

I think this is the Angie's List model but I don't know how that is working.

I am concerned about the EBSCO model where business are ranked and then pay to be advertised as top offerings. It seems like it might not necessarily choose good businesses. Often their research is based on some kind of survey.

User-generated content for free leads to the Yelp/RipOffReport (and TrustPilot?) model.

tailspin20193• 4 years ago

I just don't think it's possible to create an ethical review platform on the internet.

I definitely agree that it's a hard problem, but I would be wary about saying it's impossible. This shouldn't be rocket surgery!

And if your goal, as the owner of FooBar Business Reviews, is to maximize your profits

What is that wasn't your goal? Perhaps such a site could be a non-profit...

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

I don't think you can create a for-profit business that is trustworthy here because the incentives are too messed up.

You could do an open non-profit structure where all reviews can be analyzed, including "removed" reviews (have a second data feed that is raw, with the appropriate disclaimers").

techlover14159• 4 years ago

This is a hard business problem. I believe the only way is to have this business inside of another business entity where reviews are not the profit driver but contributes to value of the entire business.

That's why I see only Google Reviews to be in the best position in this category. It is not perfect but way way better in terms of incentives etc. compared to Yelp and its ilk.

It's primary value for Google is the huge moat that it provides against Apple maps where Apple is dependent on the crappy Yelp reviews. I say crappy in the sense of terrible incentives as mentioned in the OP I am replying to. This poisons the whole review system of Yelp and Apple maps by association.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

I don’t think this is an inherent flaw in the idea of providing trustworthy third party reviews.

I don't know, have we figured out a way to have trustworthy credit rating agencies, or trustworthy journalism of any other kind? The incentives for providing information lie in manipulating that information for profitable effects. That's why nominally informative media must be schizophrenically supported by being paired with the open manipulations we call advertising.

nradov• 4 years ago

The credit rating agencies are trustworthy. The vast majority of credit file data is accurate, and their various scoring algorithms are good predictors of default risk. There are of course some false or erroneous records reported by creditors, but those area tiny fraction of the total.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

I remember, a number (probably a large number -pre WWW) of years back, 60 Minutes, doing a section on the BBB (Better Business Bureau). They indicated that the BBB operated in an almost identical manner.

LorenPechtel2• 4 years ago

I think it's inherent because they need to monetize it to stay in business.

If you want a trustworthy review system you need something more like Consumer Reports--the user pays a subscription, the product company is not involved. I doubt anyone can get the inertia to make that work.

Distozion2• 4 years ago

It probably is the end game for any review website. Your client usually dictates the business model to a degree.

At this point, TrustPilots business model is essentially reputation laundering.

If you pay them enough, they will use their mostly neutral reputation on the consumer side to launder your potentially shitty reputation to a more positive one. It's not like the average consumer knows any better and I would not be that surprised that having a positive score on TrustPilot is not the decision maker for a customer, but having a very bad one - is a disqualifying factor. Hence the reputation laundering scheme...

r00fus• 4 years ago

Pretty depressing that all review sites are potential scams. Do you feel there's any way that regulation or oversight could improve this?

mschuster91• 4 years ago

In Germany, we have the government-founded Foundation Warentest which has been known to provide high-quality and independent reviews for decades [1]; additionally our media such as the Heise publishing house (who have co-authored the industry agreement on how to run product reviews [2]) runs their own test series on products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest

[2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Verbraucherschutzmin...

bengale2• 4 years ago

An issue we had with trust pilot is that we got a bunch of our users to give us reviews, and then trust pilot cut 40% of them based on whatever they have going on in the backend, they couldn't tell us. That for a small company is quite a valuable thing to lose tbh, they claimed they reached out to those people but ones who we are close with said they received nothing. They gave us no pathway to prove they were legit review, just deleted.

Left a pretty bad taste tbh, trust pilots only suggestion was to use their email setup where you CC them into customer comms and then later they email the customer themselves to ask for the review. Just seemed like a way to tie us in deeper with them.

Nextgrid2• 4 years ago

trust pilots only suggestion was to use their email setup where you CC them into customer comms

That and their insistence to use a JS-based widget instead of just plainly copying review text smells like spyware. If it was my company I'd give them the middle finger and a C&D for using my brand's assets (logo, etc) on their site.

kionce4• 4 years ago

Huh, I didn't realise they can be so predatory. Did you switch to something else after this?

bengale2• 4 years ago

Sadly, no. We're actually going to pay them for a bunch of their marketing tools because, as shitty as it is, customers really do respond well to seeing reviews on there and they trust them more than testimonials on our site.

I thought their prices were crazy initially, but the amount of times we hear "oh I saw your good reviews on trust pilot so we decided to go with you". Just got to suck it up and pay the toll.

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

This bit:

If Trustpilot does not own the reviews, how can grant (and more importantly deny) how you use those reviews?

is readily answered by their terms:

"You hereby grant us the worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right and license to publish, display, reproduce, modify, create derivative works of and commercially exploit any material, information, notifications, reviews, articles or other types of communication (hereinafter referred to as the "User-Generated Content" or "UGC") which you create on the Website as a Registered User. We may freely use and transfer the UGC and disclose the UGC to third parties."

andrenotgiant• 4 years ago

I was surprised by the "TrustPilot doesn't own the reviews" section.

It seems like the important word in the legalese you posted above is "non-exclusive."

Say a user wrote a review on TrustPilot, and copy/pasted it to an email to the business. Then the business posted the review from the email on their website. Are they now violating TrustPilot's TOS?

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

Say a user wrote a review on TrustPilot, and copy/pasted it to an email to the business. Then the business posted the review from the email on their website. Are they now violating TrustPilot's TOS?

You might want to get a release before putting it up, and being right doesn't mean Trustpilot knows you're right. Might make that blue box defamation, but that'd be a long, uphill battle against a well-funded opponent.

lovasoa• 4 years ago

"non-exclusive". It's not because trustpilot has the right to use the review themselves that they can prevent the business being reviewed from using the review.

SnowHill9902• 4 years ago

You win them by ignoring Trustpilot and by injecting fake reviews for your domain so that they are unable to extort you.

declnz• 4 years ago

Wow this left me a bit depressed. Are there any good third-party review systems out there then?

mdasen• 4 years ago

I'd say there isn't and there can't be simply because of the economics of it.

When you're using Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/TikTok/etc., you're opening it many times a day and seeing dozens and maybe hundreds of ads. When you use Yelp, you're going to the site with a specific intent and trying to leave very quickly. You visit Yelp once a week or once a month and you try and use it as little as possible.

No one is doom-scrolling a review site and seeing ad after ad after ad. They're going to the review site, finding something, and leaving fast. So they simply don't get the kind of traffic that you can monetize into a giant business. But they have something that is valuable to businesses: their reputation. So you try to monetize that, but that's difficult. You don't want to let businesses pay to remove negative reviews so what are you selling them? Also, what lies might your salespeople be telling businesses that you're selling them? Are commission-driven salespeople telling businesses that paying will get bad reviews removed?

Angie's List worked off a different model where people paid to get access. That meant that they didn't have to look to businesses for payments and the reviews came from someone "real" enough to have a credit/debit card and have paid them money. However, it looks like they've pivoted their business model and it's no longer a paid service (and now called Angi).

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Yeah, the financial incentives don't line up correctly.

You'd need something like a paid service that's backed by a guarantee (some credit cards basically offer this for the high-end cards; concierge service that will recommend a restaurant (that takes the card, of course) and if you complain to them afterwards they'll make it right or refund the cost).

But for most things people don't even bother - everyone knows gyms are scammy with cancellations and people still sign up, for example.

pydry• 4 years ago

Which? magazine maybe.

Consumers are generally not primed to pay for reviews and when they dont pay they become the product.

MafellUser• 4 years ago

Can you fight fire with fire? Can't you spam trustpilot with 5 stars reviews for your own business? Can they delete all of the spams? If you don't pay them to get 'verified' then drown out any bad reviews with good ones. Looking at how garbage their spam filters are it's not impossible.

klausjensen• 4 years ago

This is exactly what lots of businesses do. Trustpilot claim they can weed them out, but from what I have seen, they're noget very good at it.

mwexler• 4 years ago

Is there a business model for reviews?

Consumers continually say they want and use them, trusting some type of collective wisdom of folks willing to take time to give a review, assuming some honesty and relevance (reviewer has same needs, experience, and use pattern as I do for the item).

Yet, like price engines before them, consumer demand alone doesn't make success (some might also say that reviews are a feature, not a product, but table that for now).

From Zagat to Angie's list, the BBB in the US, TripAdvisor, yelp, 4square, plus a zillion others (along with on-site reviews powered by Bazaarvoice and others)... So many have come and gone. Amazon reviews are gamed, unclear what drives "Google Reviews", blog reviews have faded...

Did social kill them? Maybe, but the few people who respond to a "Hey, is X any good" on any forum or group seems less helpful than these past offerings.

I've wondered about these "come and gone" tools for a while, since price engines and reviews to leverage collective knowledge were hallmarks of internet 1.0 lore, and it seems like we failed at really delivering on those hopes. Still difficult to find the lowest price on items, and still difficult to get a clear read on product quality or value... And restaurants and other service offerings are still harder.

Any thoughts on what commerce model would work for reviews to be unbiased but collective, more than just the Consumer Reports model of few experts and some surveys?

DoubleGlazing• 4 years ago

Validating the identity of each reviewer. If they post something slanderous then the business owner should then be able to get a warrant/court order etc to force the site to reveal the reviewers identity. So long as anonymous posting is allowed there is no way to have a truly reliable platform for reviewing anything.

IDing users wouldn't be too hard to implement. There are plenty of businesses that provide instant ID verification services, many of the new online banks and money transfer apps use these services. The two issues would be cost and the fact that the number of people using review sites that do this would be pretty low.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Customers want a 1-5 star rating that says "yes buy" or "no don't buy" - they rarely actually want reviews.

Even with all the gamed reviews on sites like this and Amazon, if you spend the time you can usually figure out what's up, but it takes time.

kionce4• 4 years ago

That's an interesting point and I agree to an extend, but sometimes I do look for mentions of a particular feature or use case, and in those cases a review that covers those points are more useful.

So unless the review cater to me personally by covering those points, I usually prefer a more detailed review (or a large number of reviews/discussions by Googling in the hope that someone covers those points).

LorenPechtel2• 4 years ago

Yeah, what I find works pretty well with Amazon reviews is to look at the bad reviews and see what they're complaining about.

Often it's garbage (this won't do X--hey, if you had paid attention you would know they never claimed it would do X!) or irrelevant (it's not the fault of the product if it was late, damaged in shipping etc) and sometimes it's just a tread-with-caution (I've seen a lot of that on Amazon--customers burned by combined-inventory or bogus stuff). If it's legitimate gripes you've found something to avoid.

kionce4• 4 years ago

In my experience Reddit works quite well, when it works (i.e. when there are people to engage with you)

My current thinking is that you need the reviewers to have their reputation on the line somehow when they review something. There are quite a few options to do this algorithmically, happy to chat if it's something you are interested in too.

jafitc• 4 years ago

I agree with most of the article but displaying a static 5-star image on your website when your real rating is 4.6 stars (should be displayed as 4.5 star image) is rightly called out as disingenuous.

If you really want it to be efficient display a static "cached" image of the rating and swap it for the iframe once the image is loaded and displayed. This ensures fast response time and accuracy of the fresh rating at the same time.

rsbadger• 4 years ago

That’s actually a very good point, when I made the static image our rating was 5 stars, as the only negative review had been removed (because the user was complaining about not getting emails from us, but they had just given us the wrong address so easily fixed) we had that review flagged, but it was eventually added again by trustpilot so the score was reduced a bit. I’m still trying to get that user to update their rating as they’ve been using shoprocket happily since they entered the right email address!

mytailorisrich• 4 years ago

For consumers to use and trust a reviews website like TrustPilot, that site has to demonstrate the they play tough with companies because I think the most important thing consumers are looking for is somewhere where negative feedback is published unaltered.

As soon as word that negative reviews are removed you're dead as a review site.

The flip side is that I suspect that people make the effort to leave a review when they are unhappy so reviews are likely heavily skewed negatively unless the company joins the site and actively requests verified reviews from its customers.

flemhans2• 4 years ago

TrustPilot has been around for ages and you can remove negative reviews there.

I don't think people realize or care.

yalogin• 4 years ago

I have always thought companies like BBB and Trustpilot are scams. They don’t about consumers as the companies are their customers. They are the one they target and get money from. So I believe with them all bad reviews can be wiped out for a fee

amluto• 4 years ago

I think a decent amount of this is a problem with contract law. Google should not be able to require agreement to their terms to update a map entry or use webmaster tools. Yelp, Trustpilot, etc should not be able to enforce their terms on businesses that are reviewed. Amazon and Youtube should not be able to impose their terms for usage of brand and IP protection tools.

stormdennis2• 4 years ago

Maybe someone should do a review of Trustpilot on Trustpilot?

There's a company I used to be customer of, with a free tier but who act in an underhand manner to their paying customers and for quite a while they've been getting bad reviews from people warning about their dodgy practices. Free-tier users are occasional users in the main because if you use it a lot you're pretty quickly getting 'commercial use' detected issues. However in the last six months they'be been guilting those free-tier users into giving glowing reviews and their positive review count has soared while the negative reviews from paying customers has been drowned out. So in this case, Trustpilot is also useless for 'real' customers.

reiichiroh• 4 years ago

What company?

mikkelam• 4 years ago

Maybe someone should do a review of Trustpilot on Trustpilot?

Did you read the article? The reviews of Trustpilot are mentioned.

stormdennis2• 4 years ago

I only read part of it. I'll read that part now thanks

inetsee• 4 years ago

I am wondering whether a business being abused like this could trademark their business name, then sue TrustPilot for trademark infringement? Can anybody here who knows more about trademark infringement comment?

xfz• 4 years ago

The article nearly lost me at the start:

whether we liked it or not, we were now listed, and anybody could leave a public review that we have no control over

Why should a business have control over public reviews? Unless, that is they are libellous or otherwise in breach of some law, in which case the business has a fair case against the publisher.

However...

I feel from personal experience that TrustPilot is a huge scam, having had my genuine review suppressed by one of their paying customers. It's a huge loophole - dispute the review to get it off the front page, by the time it's reinstated, it's further down and they've had a chance to harass the customer to get it changed (incidentally, when companies do that I tend to drop another star if possible and edit the review saying so.)

It's also a privacy nightmare for anyone shopping online (at least here in the UK) if you use different email addresses for each company, because you have to opt out every single time. And if you don't leave a review, the send a reminder (as though it's somehow my job to leave reviews).

I ended up blocking their domain trustpilotmail.com in my email service, and if I see the Trustpilot logo on a company website, I will look for an alternative provider.

devit• 4 years ago

Feels like there's a big problem with the assumption that reputation would curb that behavior.

The usual common sense concept is that if there was even the suspicion that a business like Trustpilot would abuse their power, their reputation would be so tarnished that they would not only not do, but absolutely make sure it was almost impossible for the perception of abuse to happen.

But instead, it looks like nothing happens when they flagrantly breach trust, so it looks like in practice you can't really trust any company at all.

aerosmile• 4 years ago

People are comparing Trustpilot to Yelp, but having worked with both I can tell you that Trustpilot is far more evil for one simple reason:

  Trustpilot optimizes their SEO to rank for search terms that include the "negative review" phrase.

You can see that quite plainly both in their source code (search for "negative") or empirically by observing their rankings for "[company name] reviews" vs "[company name] negative reviews." I'll let your mind extrapolate from here all the fun powerplay scenarios that result from this company strategically positioning itself to be the magnet for all your most vocal haters.

Once Trustpilot has your profile up on their site, they will quickly start ranking for the "negative" phrase. You will be tempted to squash down those negative reviews by redirecting your positive reviews there, which will then also give them higher ranking for all of your review-related phrases - including the negative one. At this point you're locked in - without your intervention, your average rating on Trustpilot will always be lower than on any other service, and in order to counterbalance that, you will be helping Trustpilot's SEO more than any other service. Game set match.

What to do? I would suggest four main principles:

1. They will eventually get your profile, you cannot escape that. But what you can do is create a profile yourself that will be crippled in SEO (eg: wrong TLD, or slight mispelling, perhaps an extra word, etc). You might have to take several swings at this, but the goal would be to come up with a name for your company that i) ranks for your correctly spelled name in their internal search, but ii) is not competitive in the global SEO race with other companies that have your correct spelling.

2. Pick a different review service that's more honest and will work with you on a good faith basis. I found the BBB to be the most business-friendly of all of them (a bit surprising, I know). They just simply don't operate as a VC-run business that has to grow fast at all costs, and as a result, they won't turn on your like other services do (eg: it's in the services' interest to keep the content on the site, and the BBB will take things down more aggressively than any other service I know). Once you pick your canonical 3rd party review service, make them the #1 in SEO for your name by ensuring that they always have an order of magnitude more content than any other service.

3. You might be pressured to send content to Trustpilot to make up for the bad reviews. Do as little of that as possible, and each time you do that, send 10x more content to your chosen service.

4. Some people (usually those meaning to inflict the most harm) will always choose to leave their 1-star reviews on an external site so that they cannot be taken down. But you can definitely lower that volume by making it exceptionally easy for people to leave a review on your own site. That approach is far more favorable because you have a lot more options to turn the sentiment of the reviewer from negative to positive (assuming you're willing to do some custom coding). You'll still need a 3rd party review service (eg: Yotpo) so that your ratings can show up in Google Shopping etc, but you can collect those by sending all your purchasers that standard "review your purchase" email. If they leave a bad review using that service, you'll have the full context and will be able to react accordingly. Apart from that email, make sure that people can leave a review on your site without having to verify their purchase. In my experience, a substantial portion of customers doesn't realize why unverified reviews are discouraged and often not even available, which drives them to Trustpilot. So regardless if you're using Yotpo or some other service (most of which don't allow unverified reviews), make sure that a customer can click on a "review this product" button right on your site. I'll let you figure out 1) how to make this happen, and 2) what to do if in that case someone selects a 1-star review (hint: put your best foot forward right then and there).

jadence• 4 years ago

This reminds me a lot of Jason Fried (of 37signals, now known as Basecamp)'s complaints about Get Satisfaction back in 2009.

Get Satisfaction, Or Else...

- article: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else

- discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540

Follow-up on "Get Satisfaction, Or Else..."

- article: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1661-follow-up-on-get-satisfa...

- discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543431

flemhans2• 4 years ago

There's a reason Apple has such a bad score. They won't pay the Danegeld.

I remember back in the days when they'd call us up and say they could fix us a nice score if we subscribed

How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses

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