Trustpilot is a consumer review platform that collects and publishes reviews alongside business data.
By providing a global community for consumers and businesses, TrustPilot allows consumers to voice their opinions about purchases while giving companies a platform to respond to concerns or issues that reviewers voice. The main review categories on the site reviews are product reviews, service reviews, and local reviews. The platform relies on a scoring system of between 0 to 5 stars. The average score for the business, service, or product depends on the number of reviews compared to the stars.
How is Trustpilot used?
Trustpilot has two primary uses for most of its users – consumers and business users.
- TrustPilot For Consumers: Offers free accounts for consumers to sign up to read and write review reviews for businesses globally. Although the signup process for consumers is free to use with a small amount of information needed to write a review on a company, they try to combat spam and fake reviews with their terms of service agreement. Trustpilot focuses on authentic review processes for consumers and businesses and regularly evaluates reviews for integrity.
- Trustpilot For Business Owners: For business owners, a free version is available. However, the features of the free version are somewhat limited and include claiming a business page and inviting a limited number of customers to review their business. The company’s primary revenue stream comes from standard plan options purchased by companies worldwide. Business plans, starting at $200, provide more added features than the free version. Furthermore, the site puts enhanced customer engagement opportunities solely to their businesses that purchase advanced features.
What are the benefits of Trustpilot?
One advantage is that this platform can help consumers make better and informed purchases to meet their needs. When purchasers are better informed, they feel a greater value in their buying habits. Additionally, TrustPilot also emphasizes with businesses the importance of customer engagement impacting their brand. Using this review platform as a company presents greater brand accountability for businesses to address issues that increase customer retention.
Alternatives to TrustPilot
TrustPilot was founded in 2007 and received over 39 million reviews in 2020 alone. However, it is not without competitors in the business and consumer review platform areas. Competitors include Reviews.io, BirdEye, and YotPo, which provide similar features to TrustPilot. These competitors’ pricing and features may differ between them, but all address the same goal—to further strengthen the business-to-consumer relationship with valuable consumer feedback and human-verified reviews to reduce spam and fake reviews.
