A lot of people, when shopping online for parts or anything else look to reviews to get a sense of how good or bad the company or person that they are buying from are like, are they good or bad. But, is what you find true?

What prompted us to look at this over the past few years is that the difference in ratings between different review platforms can be pretty stark. You can go from one extreme to the other, from an overall one- to five-star review. Such polarisation seemed unlikely.

All the stuff kicked off about fake reviews on Amazon.

Then, for a while, we got bombarded with companies offering their services (for a fee, obviously) to get bad reviews on the likes of Google taken down, Trustpilot and so on, and we thought, how?

You also see properly dodgy ones that will post fake positive reviews.

Then it struck us, well if they can do that then how can anyone trust any reviews they just glance at?

The short answer to that is, you can’t. 

Reviews As a Weapon

Partly we looked at this as some people leaving a “review” were hacked off because they ordered special order stuff and couldn’t send it back, as they were told when they ordered it, failures that weren’t justified and some they just don’t like our attitude. All of which is fine but you’ll normally get the comment/s that go along the lines of, “oh you’re well known for this, you see it all the time in the reviews”.

Yes, because you went looking for others like you to reinforce your view, it’s known as positive bias and well documented by folks that are more familiar with psychology and probably smarter than we are. That’s not to say we don’t understand it.

You see these comments and despair as normally it’s people that go looking for such reviews to try to use them as a weapon to get what they want or, just to try and punish us as they’re hacked off. So they traipse off to TP or wherever and vent on there, maybe it makes them feel better, who really knows?

However, this leads into the next thing that really shook things up.

Update 17/04/2024 – This article on the BBC News site explains how reviews can be used as a weapon

Active Review Service

We used to use Trustpilot (TP) and thing were fine for a time, we had a very high score etc but then we had a few that we felt TP should have removed as they were desperately unfair, some not even about us and they wouldn’t.

Then they put the price up, again.

But this is really important, if you read the extras below you’ll see why, you cannot as a company take yourself off of TP, there is no way to do that. And TP’s moderation of reviews is, in our view, not exactly stellar. And you cannot as a business now direct people to TP for free, they stopped that service, you need to pay for it now.

So we jumped ship to Reviews.IO, which is where things get interesting.

Within a year or two our rating on TP, as TP is the “go-to” place for people to do that above stuff on well because, they can get away with it freely just tanked. There were no new invitations to ask customers to review us so largely none were posted, apart from the disparaging ones.

Of course, we could pay to have them removed but we won’t; we’re too honest for that. We just answer them, often in an almost comedic fashion as once it gets to that stage, it’s often a bit of a joke anyway. And most people with common sense can see that.

Meanwhile, our reviews on the service we are actually using and paying for is fine, very good in fact.

The conclusion is that if you don’t pay, you get hammered. Any company will. Even when things slow down due to holidays, Brexit and so forth, we get a kicking in the reviews while it’s going on, it’s a natural thing to get an ebb and flow of opinions.

You can’t pay for all these services (unless you’re a mega global business with cash to waste) so you will almost inevitably look bad on one or more unless you pony up for these services or, you pay to have poor reviews removed. Or go full criminal and pay for false positive reviews.

Service Industry Reviews

We work in the service industry, and we’re often telling people we sell goods that people didn’t think should break, don’t want to pay to replace and have the hassle of replacing them. Many people looking for parts or services are often hacked off before they even initially get in touch.

We don’t start from a good place.

In service, if you get an 80% or higher positive feedback, you’re doing well. Higher and you’re really doing well and that’s why.

So when we see spares and service companies running with 100% five-star reviews as some claim, we’re a tad suspicious will we say about the validity of that.

Maybe some have found a way to pull it off but, we have no clue how. And we’re good at what we do.

So how much trust would we place in those ratings… not a lot.

Our Advice

Look at the ratings on the service the company is promoting as that will be the one that they are actively sending review invitations to and put more stock in that than any other. Usually you’ll find that being promoted on their site.

So long that is, if it’s one of the trusted ones you know.

If the reviews are all 100% positive, we’d be wary as that’s not right, nobody is perfect. And no company is perfect.

If all this sounds a bit negative, it’s not really we just want people to know the truth about these things, that’s all. We love reviews and do take note of people’s comments, we’ve changed many things over the years because of them usually in a good way.

Mostly though we get very positive reviews as we are good at what we do and we are trying to help people constantly and we’re very proud of that. In the service industry that’s not easy.

Extra Bit – Can You Trust Trustpilot?

Yes and no, as above if the company uses that as it’s active review service then probably you can. If like us it doesn’t then no, you really can’t.

TP emails us every so often (it’s automated) to try to win us back with stuff like this in it:

“The page has over 1,904 reviews which is great, however the page’s score could really use some help to boost its rating. Below is what you’re prospective customers see when they google UK Whitegoods reviews;”

Trying to woo us into paying TP again.

But getting away from TP (which can be an issue as we learned the hard way) had to be done and in the process of that we learned more, to one of these emails we replied with following:

“We used to use Truspilot and no longer do; we use Reviews IO as TP was too expensive and frankly, some of the reviews that were allowed I took great exception to and, again, to be blunt, TP didn’t care.

If I could, I would remove the listing altogether as I do not feel that we should even be on there as we do not use your service and pay you therefore, all you get is the whiners on there now, making the rating from TP of my and many others utterly useless to customers. But apparently, that’s also impossible per TP’s own rules or policies, so that’s on you guys, but it is making your service worse, not better.

As you rightly point out, the result is skewed massively and therefore untrustworthy as a source of information, making it in my opinion, a useless service really as it may well list everyone but, it is by no means a remotely accurate reflection of everyone. And I do not have any inclination to pay you to improve your service.

I am also not at all shy at informing customers of this and why that they cannot trust a reviews service that the company they are looking at is actively using.

When we switched away from TP do you know what the effect was…. none, nadda, not a thing changed for us.

I am quite sure you can read this as a hard pass.”

We doubt that TP is too happy about this opinion but, frankly, we don’t much care.

If you are a business though, before you sign up for TP look very, very carefully at the cancellation clauses and keep them as it’s very likely you will need them later when you want to leave and they try to charge you a small fortune to do so.

Customers think TP is this warm, cuddly “good for humanity” thing, it’s not, it’s a business out to make money. End of story.

Update 2024

TP has stopped their “free referrals” meaning that a business can no longer send out any free invitations to review. 

That means all you will see is people that have deliberately gone looking to leave a review, usually a vindictive reason for it as a form of punishment in our experience or, the odd person that happens across it and occasionally, referred by another service. 

But, the net effect of this is that there is no balance in TPs reviews where the business is not signed up to and paying for TPs service. In fact, we’d argue it is heavily skewed towards the collection of negative reviews. 

If you were cynical, you might even say that this was a deliberate move by TP who did after all stop the free referral program, to attempt to accomplish exactly this. Get businesses to see these negative reviews, panic and pay for their services to redress the balance. But, that’s just cynical, right?