Trustpilot.co.uk – Sorting The Good Companies From The Bad
As internet users become more and more cautious of where they spend their cash in light of the economic downturn, the bigger the impact of website and product review websites in the purchase process. Who will you trust Dell, or some smaller firm selling desktop PC’s online?
Well we’ve had a look at Trustpilot, and this decision might become a whole lot easier. This innovative UK startup have launched a reputation monitoring service based on user comments and reviews, which are then presented to users through their website and their browser app which overlays a trust rating on top of Google results.
Checking out user reviews for a website becomes as easy as reading the colour of an icon that changes from red to green will give you an indication of how trustworthy a given company is, and by placing your pointer over that icon where additional information is displayed.
The information provided includes the percentage of approval the company has, the actual number of reviews as well as a “TrustScore”
Check it out at Trustpilot.co.uk.
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Jules:
November 23rd, 2008
8:50 am
Hmm, the site is currently down. Wonder if their list of reputable companies can point them in the way of reputable hosting? 😉
On a more serious note, the general problem with this business model is that it’s very easy for the company to end up providing financially driven results. Take a look at most “hosting review” websites and you’ll see that the top rated hosts are often the ones who paid for the placement and rating. I wonder of TrustPilot will end up going down the same path?
Chris:
November 23rd, 2008
12:42 pm
Interesting comment Jules, I can get to their site but you raise an important point. Quite a few review sites start with good intentions and then start biasing their results / reviews based on financial incentives.
I think that this is the very thing startups like Trust Pilot, and many others are trying to address with human voting / ranking. Looking at their proposition at least it looks like the website is free for both users and merchants, and that merchants are displayed in relation to the percentage of good vs bad reviews. Which gives a chance to the smaller players providing better service to shine I would hope.
What are your thoughts, do you think better service will emerge from these services? And are the search engines going to take such items into consideration in future SERP rankings?
Jessica:
March 5th, 2009
6:29 pm
Hello to all 🙂 I can
Dave:
July 5th, 2009
11:38 am
I think this idea is brilliant. It’s an idea I’ve been discussing with a lot of friends for almost a year and I really think it can be a multilmillion dollar business. I think trustpilot might be doing it backwards though. Because their reach is small, the information is more valuable to the marketer than it is the consumer. If I were to launch a similar technology, I wouldn’t worry about generating feedback, I’d focus on gathering the feedback that’s already out on the web, sorting it so it makes sense, and selling that information to the advertisers.