Why you shouldn’t trust reviews on Trustpilot (or anywhere else for that matter!)
What other people think of and how they rate products, businesses or services can be a valuable source of information in helping you decide whether you should buy something and part with your hard-earned money. This can also at times be helpful in deciding if a competition is legitimate, or worth playing in the first place. However, the unfortunate fact is that in reality you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to the overall review scores on Trustpilot, or anywhere else for that matter (I’m only mentioning Trustpilot as it currently is the most popular platform for collecting reviews by the competitions reviewed on this website).
Please carry on reading for six reasons and a real example of why I personally think that giving value to the reviews or overall review score can be a bad idea, but also to learn why I think it’s justified that I’m not using the reviews of the competitions in the review criteria when assessing the competitions (as per the slightly arbitrary Real Score Framework I’ve come up with).
While this post is more of an opinion piece than anything else, I’d like to mention that I have professionally used and managed Trustpilot, YOTPO, Feefo, REVIEWS.io, etc. (and potentially a couple of other platforms I’ve forgotten about) when working for several businesses and brands. Therefore, I’d at least like to think that I know what I’m talking about.
Not all reviews are genuine
The most obvious point that needs to be made is: Not all reviews are genuine. Some platforms are arguably worse for fake reviews than others, and some can be a bit better that may require you to have actually purchased something to even get an invitation and so on… But the reality is that you cannot easily tell these apart from one another all the time; so you cannot and shouldn’t trust reviews to be genuine.
Several platforms also allow you to control how people (or the businesses themselves) can write the reviews in different ways, and some platforms will allow you to upload spreadsheets of reviews that will get imported onto the system allowing for an easy way to mass-produce fake reviews and abuse the system. Even if some platforms are making it more difficult to write fake reviews; there are always ways around these safeguards.
Some reviews may be missing
Depending on the review platform used, it is possible for companies to delete, filter or block the reviews that they don’t want to go into the public domain. Or as in the case of a few platforms I’ve used: There might be some kind of an approval process for publishing the reviews collected. This means that some reviews are more than likely to be missing, and that can greatly skew the average score or what kind of an impression the visitors of a company’s review page will get.
At the end of the day, I believe these review platforms are more in the business of making money and upselling their paid solutions to businesses, than trying to provide a fully transparent and trustworthy review experience for the public. Hypothetically: If there was a review platform that allowed no control over the type of content that gets collected or published, do you think a business would want to pay for that as a service?
The reviews may not be relevant to the business or the service
A lot of the time, you will be receiving a review invitation for making a purchase. For products and services you will use and receive, this is perfectly fine. But what about competitions? More often than not, you might get an instant Trustpilot review invitation followed by your purchase. This means, that there could potentially be a competition with thousands of positive reviews (as long as they have made thousands of sales), but zero reviews from actual winners!
Even worse, some companies have salespeople actively pushing people they have just spoken with to leave a positive review (like in the example towards the end of this post). Would you base your decision whether you should enter or not into a competition based on the fact that if you decide to talk to one of their salespeople they’ll be courteous and smooth talkers? Of course you wouldn’t!
People have the tendency to write positive reviews for a competition at the hopes of winning it
The majority of the positive reviews for the competitions aren’t from the winners, they are almost always from the people hoping to win the competition. It’s only in the human nature to leave good reviews or build ‘good karma’ with the competition in question, in the hopes of winning it. At the very least, if there is even the slightest chance that the competition may be able to choose their winners or block some of their customers; I’d expect for the most of us to believe that we wouldn’t be able to win a competition we’ve left a bad review for.
An incentive may have been used to build preferable reviews
Even if it’s not mostly allowed, this isn’t really that well policed by the review companies in my experience. More often than not, there is nothing stopping from companies from sending out review invitations and to offer even automatic rewards such as discount codes that will be only sent to customers who have written a review. And more often than not, with reviews with incentives (even if there wasn’t a clear ‘requirement’ to leave a positive review); the review will end up being positive.
It’s a numbers game – quite literally!
Even if a company would get bad reviews that are genuine, and these reviews would be visible for everyone to see… That may not matter as much unless you know where to look! It’s very likely, that there may be companies and competitions that are rated ‘Excellent’, but only because the relevant and negative reviews have been overtaken by the sheer amount of nonsensical and mass-produced positive reviews.
Most of us are very lazy, and don’t bother spending hours investigating a review page with thousands of reviews. We might just scan through a few of the latest ones, look at the overall score, and call it a day and make a decision based on that. This does sound like a fairly reasonable thing to do. But if you take into account how easy it’s to mass-produce reviews that might be fake, or not relevant to the actual competition experience… Not so much! Suddenly, you might end up having played a competition that had all the warning signs there to see for the public…. But the negative reviews had been overwhelmed by the mass-production of positive ones that have very little to do with the actual competition!
Example – Good Life Plus’ Trustpilot Reviews
Let’s have a look at Good Life Plus’ reviews on Trustpilot! They have received an “Avoid at all costs” score in my competition review… But they are rated ‘Excellent’ or 4.7/5 on Trustpilot, what gives?!
Let’s start with the negative ones. Below is a sample of some of the latest ones I scrolled through (at the time of writing this post).
The majority of the complaints seem to be about their shady business practices and aggressive and misleading sales tactics, where they appear to be telling people that they have won something, but in an attempt to sign them up and get money from them. That is exactly as shady as it sounds! I’d probably personally burst out laughing if someone called me and said “Congratulations! You have won tickets to a competition that possibly have no value whatsoever! Would you like to start giving us money?”
But it gets worse. From the two out of five bad reviews we can also learn that you are not even able to cancel online! What kind of an online competition in 2024 won’t use allow that? One that does it on purpose. And the real kicker is: On their website they claim that “You can cancel anytime!”. But what this means is that you need to call through at a specific time in the week for a chance to get through to them on the phone! And even if you get through, they will do everything they can to convince you to stay.
Does that sound like an ability to ‘cancel anytime’ to you? See the screenshot below as an example of the messaging used!
Obviously, this is a very bad look for the business. But the sad fact is, I’m sure there are more people who just look at the overall ‘Excellent’ score and miss the important information they should be finding out about the competition, than ones that actually end up reading these!
Here’s another one that sounds very odd and makes the competition sound extra shady… They’ve just told someone that they are able to win an Aston Martin with the free tickets, but that they’ve been entered into the draw on the 30th of October? At the time of writing this (on the 24th of October), the Aston Martin draw is more than 67 days away! And this seems to be a somewhat of a theme with Good Life Plus. They say you are able to win a car with your 7 day free trial…. But the car draws are months away?
At the time of taking the screenshot above, the timers for the cars (and namely for the Aston) were as below:
Now, let’s go to their positive reviews! I won’t share more than two screenshots as they are all basically the same review… The bulk of the positive reviews are just about having had a nice chat with a salesperson, and about winning the worthless free tickets, whilst signing up to give the company money!? Which type of information would you value more personally: The ability to have a nice chat with a salesperson (that has absolutely nothing to do with the competition itself), or what was shared in the negative reviews above!?
You can actually filter reviews on Trustpilot to showcase how many of the reviews repeat the same words about the phone calls and the smooth sales staff! If I’m putting in some words that at a quick glance appear to be repeated by these similar reviews… We get to almost 5 thousand reviews out of the 8 and a bit thousand reviews!
Finally, the screenshot below is the real kicker of all the kickers. You could say that I’ve saved the worst for last. Please read the screenshot below carefully, and think about what kind of business practices they have in place.
Right? Unbelievable! They are happy to have their smooth-talking sales people stop people who are struggling financially from canceling their subscription! Are you kidding me?!
If you think I’m being harsh, I really recommend checking out my Good Life Plus review in which I go more into detail of my personal experiences with the competition, but also share my findings of my review investigation.
Conclusion
The unfortunate fact is, that platforms like Trustpilot enable the mass-production or collection of reviews for the promotional purposes of the businesses, and if businesses give Trustpilot more money and sign up for their services – they get even more control of their profiles. The unfortunate end result is, that you shouldn’t really consider the review pages as a form of trustworthy information, but rather a part of the company’s marketing mix.
I hope I’ve convinced you to not trust the reviews the competitions may have collected on Trustpilot, or at the very least be a tiny bit more wary of the reviews you read online. I’d urge everyone to give more weight to trusting themselves and common sense, their close friends and families – i.e. real people. Not some potentially paid-for-nonsense that’s only purpose might be to push a service or a sale on you.
– T