Is Trustpilot worth the money?
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Brett,
Thank you so much for your time, that's really helpful.
Cheers,
Robert
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Based on my experience asking customer for reviews using an external authority like TrustPilot have a higher redemption than just sending out a review request using your own brand. For the best results (again in terms of redemption) the review request should be sent out using a sender email address from your organization, and be personalized, but it should be clear at all stages it's an external authority who is collecting it and giving the customer the guarantee it's managed objectively.
Said that, I don't particularly like TrustPilot, I don't know if they changed things, but when they approached me:
- there was no option to import existing reviews
- you was not the owner of the reviews and you could not download them (to keep them if you decide to cancel the contract with TrustPilot)
- there was an upfront fee while competitors had not,
- the sales guy was pretending their widget would have magically made star rating appear on SERP, which is not true.
Once you sign with them, and they set up your business page on their website you get a do-follow backlink from a DA69 website, which is nice, but that's the only SEO benefit you get.
The SERP star rating depends on the schema org markup, if you markup your pages appropriately, it may show up, TrustPilot reviews has no influence on google decision to show star rating for your pages in SERP.
Different story for seller ratings in AdWords, in this case TrustPilot or any other review platform who has a partnership with google will influence your seller rating, and star rating will appear if your adwords account and review match AdWords requirements for seller rating.
As for Conversion Rate, in my experience, showing TrustPilot badge improved CR between 1.5% and 2.5% (depending on website), tests where run changing nothing else, just adding the badge and the review widget, quite far from what they promise.
So I would suggest to choose a review platform and use it in place of an inhouse solution, for the purpose of maximizing redemption. Again, in my experience, using an external provider improved redemption by 3X factor.
But I would look elsewhere for some other platform than TrustPilot.
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Have you run any test on your own to measure CR improvements due to TrustPilot or any other review platform?
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Hi!
Thanks very much for your response, that's great. Have you had any experience with any other platforms?
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I am currently using this one: http://www.feedaty.com/eng/
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Happy to help!
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We started using ShopperApproved on our retail sites less than a year ago and now have lots of reviews for each of our sites.
They have an API that you can use to publish schema code automatically created for your site and products. We waited until we had 1000 reviews on our busiest site and published the code. Review stars appeared in the organic SERPs within a few days. Now we are looking good compared to competitors.
We publish their widgets that show most recent customer comments. They often show comments made by customers today. I believe that it has helped our conversion rate and the review systems gives us a chance to learn what our customers think of the service and products that we provide. We have made a few improvements based upon customer feedback.
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Hi--
I can't speak to Trustpilot in particular, but we have had good success with a different review provider, Yotpo. It has given a bit of lift to our conversion rate, plus we have picked up some business directly from people returning to the site from their reviews.
The rating show up in the organic listings for most items and the reviews show up on the Adwords ratings along with our Google Trusted Stores reviews (I know you're not using Adwords, but thought I would let people know).
One of the features I really like is that most people can just reply to an email to send in the review, which I suspect leads to higher review rates.
Ken
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We spent some time looking at Trustpilot. As the leader in our industry, we were surprised to discover more than 100 positive reviews for one of our competitors who is notorious for poor service. When I say "poor service" I'm not just passing along my personal opinion. These folks were identified in the press and all over the web as being untrustworthy.
Most of the reviews posted regarding this particular competitor were unusually positive in their tone and offered no detailed information about the customer's experience. Each reviewer appeared to have written just one review on the TrustPilot website. Comparing the tone, writing style and content we concluded that there must be a serious leak in the verification process at TrustPilot and that the reviews were fake.
We raised these concerns with TrustPilot who wrote back with a rather canned response. Ultimately, we opted not to pay for the ability to post fake reviews. We also discovered this article from 2013 in The Register which confirmed our suspicions:
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Hi,
Thanks for responding that's really handy. Sadly, you are not the first person to tell me about this which is why i asked the question. I think perhaps it's not worth the £150 a month. It's strange though because some huge names are using trust pilot which is what drew me in to start with.
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This post is deleted! -
Let me throw in my 2 cents.
- is there any added SEO benefit to trust pilot?
No, there is not a "boost" in organic rankings that we know of. However, the latest Google Quality Rater guidelines does look for reviews. You can find all kinds of info here. I read that whole guideline and it sounds like Google will soon start incorporating 3rd party reviews into their algorithms soon if they haven't already done so.
- would our star rating show up on our organic listings as we don't run any adwords campaigns (we are happy with our ranking in the organic listings).
You are talking about Merchant Reviews (or Seller Reviews) vs Product Reviews. These are two different things. One is as a seller as a whole like "fast shipping", "customer service sucks", "awesome company", etc. The product reviews are specifically for a product (which show up in Google Shopping and in Organic.
- what happens when google and trust pilot fall out and bin the partnership?
SOL.
Since you're asking if Trust Pilot is worth it (you have to pay $4800 upfront for the year), look at the alternative Shopper Approved ($39/mo month to month 60 day free trial).
BOTH are great companies.
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Hi everyone!
Quick response to your second bullet point, Massimiliano:
- It might have been an update since your post, but you can export all of your reviews from TrustPilot. I recently did it and it brought everything including review rating, title, description, name, email address, date, source, and a lot more.
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[Spammy comment removed by forum moderator.]
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I'm currently on the look out for an outsourced review system. TrustPilot looked very expensive, so I've discounted that from my research already.
The site in question is a high value, low volume lead generator. It's B2B. Most of the review sites seem very e-commerce / B2C based. We simply don't need the number of monthly review requests that are offered by many of these services. But we do need it to integrate with our custom CRM.
I'm looking at Feefo - because it appears to offer custom price plans based on your requirements. They are also UK - based, as are we. No idea if that is especially relevant.
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We signed up for Trustpilot a year ago and feel it is not worth the money at all. They made a lot of promises to get our business but many of them were not kept (some were not their fault, such as google changing the requirement for seller ratings in adwords from 30 reviews to 150), but others were within their control. We kept discovering that features we thought we had signed up for were only available if we paid a lot more money for a higher plan. We are very unhappy with Trustpilot and don't recommend them unless you are a huge company with lots of money to spare.
Now we are trying to figure out who to use next. TrustSpot seems interesting. . .
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I've been talking to TrustSpot. They are very responsive. I have some specific needs and they went out of their way to meet them. They are also much better value than TrustPilot. I'm mid site-rebuild at the moment, but TrustSpot will be added once the new site is live.
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As a Trustpilot user it is true than some companies will try and game the system in the short term. However I would suggest that you are better 'in' Trustpilot with a relatively high score eg 9.0 (which is indicative of very good and attentive customer service) even if you have a fake reviewer sitting above you, than not being in TP at all... Also you can report each individual review of your potentially faking competitor. TP will site up and listen, especially when you start to collect reviews and become 'valuable' to them..
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Update: I've visited the TrustPilot site many times since I wrote my first comments. Things haven't changed. In fact, I did a competitor a favor and reported dozens of reviews tagged as "verified order" in which all of the reviews were written about the company's website, not their service! Wow, 5 stars for the website. Actual review quotes: "It was easy to navigate". "I will visit again". "...this is the best website".
In addition, the reviews were also very poorly written with lots of grammatical errors and typos. To me this clearly indicated that they were fake. So much for the "verified order" tag.
It boggles my mind that Google continues to partner with TrustPilot. They must be making money on it somehow.
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Nice sales pitch.
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