With over 88% of online buyers relying on online reviews to make buying decisions, it’s a no-brainer that you should have a solid reputation management strategy for your business.

One strategy you can use is to collect as many Trustpilot reviews as possible.

With over 1.1 trillion ratings and reviews being displayed in Google’s search results annually, you should highly consider getting these reviews as potential customers searching for your business or products get to see reviews beneath your products or business name, and this significantly increases trust, making more people confident buying from you.

Trustpilot reviews are also visible on the Google Ads platform via seller ratings. This makes a significant impact because, according to Google, when you have the reviews and ratings on your Ads, you have a 17% click-through rate (CTR), which increases your sales.

With Trustpilot coming with plenty of goodies, there is no reason you should be left behind.

And the good news is that it’s easy to collect these reviews, as all you need to do is to ask your customers to leave their feedback. Some of the ways you can do this include:

Talk to them: If you talk to your customers via phone or chat, let them know that a Trustpilot review will be valuable to you and your business, so they should highly consider reviewing you. To make it easy for them, send them a link to your Trustpilot profile.

Send them an email: After a customer has bought from you, send them an email thanking them for the purchase, then request them to leave feedback. Again, send them a link to your profile. Don’t give them the burden of searching for your business name.

Have a trust box on your website: You can embed a trust box showing your collected reviews. People like being part of a community, and when they see the number of people who have already reviewed your business, they will most likely be compelled to leave their feedback.

As you embed the trust box, ensure it’s clickable and sends your customers directly to your Trustpilot profile.

Share a postcard: If you regularly send packages to your clients, you can include a postcard in one of your packages bearing a link to your profile.

To make it easy for the customers to review your business, include a short guide showing them the steps to follow to leave their feedback.

As you are requesting reviews, be professional in your language. You also should be fair, neutral, and unbiased.

Remember that you shouldn’t give your customers any incentives in exchange for a review.

This means that you shouldn’t give them discounts, loyalty points, coupons, money, or even gifts. They should involuntarily leave their review without being motivated.

Can Trustpilot reviews be deleted?

Yes, they can. Since Trustpilot reviews are user-generated, they can be edited or deleted at any time by the person who wrote them.

Trustpilot can also delete a review if it violates its guidelines. If you feel a review goes against a reviewer’s guidelines, get in touch with Trustpilot, and the content integrity team will review the review and determine whether the review breaches the rules. If it does, the review will be deleted.

Trustpilot has fraud detection software that can detect suspicious reviews and removes them if it feels that they aren’t supposed to be there. Some situations that might make the software delete the reviews include:

If it feels that a person left the review with a conflict of interest. This can be you, your employees, your immediate family member, or your competitor.

If plenty of reviews were left from your computer, iPad, or any other of your devices

To prevent your reviews from getting deleted, play by the rules. This calls for you to collect the reviews genuinely without incentivizing or manipulating your customers.

Are Trustpilot reviews reliable?

To answer this, we need to look at how Trustpilot works and the measures it puts into place to make the reviews as genuine as possible.

One way it works to ensure that only genuine reviews remain on the site is to provide the review flagging feature that allows businesses to flag reviews it feels go against the rules.

As a business owner, you can flag a review if you feel that the review:

• Uses offensive language.
• Mentions the name of an individual
• Describes the functionality of the bought product
• The experience occurred over 12 months ago

Another way that Trustpilot makes the reviews reliable is to have a smart bot that identifies fake reviews (both positive and negative) and removes them.

Now that Trustpilot puts these measures in place, does it mean that the reviews on the platform are reliable?

Well, like any other system, Trustpilot has its shortcomings, and it can be manipulated. For example, it has been shown that Trustpilot removes 33% more negative reviews than positive ones.

This is most likely because businesses are more likely to flag negative reviews, and since the reviewers don’t have proof that they bought from the said business or aren’t interested in investing time and resources to prove the legitimacy of their feedback, their honest negative review is removed from the platform.

This means that a business can easily remove a legitimate negative review and only have positive reviews that put it in good light.

As a reader, exercise caution when reading Trustpilot reviews. Yes, there are many genuine and helpful reviews on the platform, but it’s also possible to come across some that aren’t too genuine, and it’s up to you, as the reader, to gauge whether to trust the reviews.

As a rule of thumb, avoid a company that only has plenty of positive reviews left within a short time.

You also should avoid a company whose reviews are left by people without a profile picture or who have the same profile picture.

Watch for grammar and sentence construction as you read the reviews. Do the sentences make sense? If they don’t, it’s wise to stay away from that company.

Where to buy Trustpilot reviews

Buying Trustpilot reviews is one of the ways business owners try to manipulate Trustpilot reviews.

As much as the Trustpilot bots work tirelessly to remove these fake reviews, some pass through and skew the ratings in favor of the business.

Since you can partly get away with buying reviews, should you do it? Absolutely not.

This is because while you can cheat the system and publish fake reviews, prospective customers can easily see through the reviews and tell whether they are genuine.

You should note that the people you pay to write the reviews put little effort into them. In most cases, they use poor grammar.

Others leave cliché sentences such as “Good company,” which add little to the reputation of your business.

To maintain the reputation of your business, avoid buying reviews as much as possible. Instead of buying reviews, focus your energy on asking your customers to leave feedback.

As mentioned above, don’t offer your customers an incentive for a review, as they won’t be honest with their feedback.

For your business profile to stand out, ask your customers to be as detailed as possible when giving their reviews so that people reading can benefit the most from it.

Being detailed also prevents the review from being removed by the Trustpilot bots.

Why Trustpilot removes reviews

Trustpilot reported that it removed 2.2 million reviews from its platform in 2020. These reviews were outright fake or harmful to businesses, representing 5.7% of the total reviews left on the platform.

The same report said that Trustpilot automatically deleted 1.5 million reviews using its fraud detection software, while about 660,000 reviews were manually taken down.

Trustpilot will remove reviews if:

The review was flagged and proven to be violating the review policy. Some companies will flag a legitimate negative review to protect their image. While they could have gotten away with it a few years ago, now it’s hard as Trustpilot undertakes thorough inspection before deleting the review.

It has been detected as fraud by the detection software. As mentioned above, Trustpilot has fraud detection software that detects if a review is genuine. It does this by establishing a trend in the review. For example, if two people leave the same review, the software will pick this up and delete the review.

Trustpilot will also delete a review if requested by the publisher. The person who published a review can edit and even delete it anytime they want.

Can you leave fake reviews on Trustpilot?

If you are a business owner, it’s tempting to publish as many positive reviews as possible about your business so you skew the ratings in your favor, right?

If you are wondering whether you can publish fake reviews, you should know that you can do it, but chances are Trustpilot will pick up on it and remove them, which, as you can guess, lowers your reputation on the platform.

Sometimes the fake reviews are so bad that your prospects can easily tell they are fake. When this happens, your reputation drops significantly, and you lose business.

The same way you can publish fake reviews is how unscrupulous people can harm your reputation by leaving negative reviews. Three main types of people can try to harm you with negative fake reviews:

A competitor looking to spam your business with bad reviews

A disgruntled customer might have the feeling that you slighted them. For example, a customer might have received great service, but if they feel you overcharged them, they might go to Trustpilot and leave a negative review.

A customer making up a review hopes to receive compensation to remove it.

To protect your reputation, regularly visit your Trustpilot profile and go through the reviews. If you encounter fake negative ones that might harm your business, flag them and let Trustpilot know.

If you feel negative reviews are genuine, get in touch with the reviewer and try to solve the issue with them.

They might remove the scathing review if they are happy with your measures to contact them and apologize for the unpleasant experience.

Sometimes the fake reviews are positive, but you should be wary of them too. As mentioned, people reading these reviews aren’t dumb and can tell those that are genuine.

If you feel the positive reviews are doing more harm than good, let the reputation managers at Trustpilot know about it so they can remove them.

Can Trustpilot reviews be traced?

Yes, when a person organically reviews your business, you can see their review, username, country location, and their profile picture they provided.

If you are a business owner and invited a customer to leave a review, you can trace the review using the invitation and match the review with the invitation.

Being able to trace the review is vital, as it helps you know if the review is genuine. For example, if you provide your services only in America, then you find a review from India; that’s an automatic sign that the review is fake.

So, as mentioned above, always regularly inspect your negative and positive reviews and ensure they come from real people. You don’t want to ruin the reputation you have worked so hard for, do you?

Parting shot

Trustpilot is an excellent reputation management platform. As more people rely on online reviews to decide whether they want to work with a given company, creating a Trustpilot account is more important than ever.

As you collect reviews from your customers, be professional and don’t pay them for a review.

Like with any other review platform, people will always try to hurt you, so regularly inspect your review page and ensure it’s not laden with fake and harmful reviews.

When you come across fake reviews, flag them, let the Trustpilot staff know about it, and ask them to remove them to protect your valuable reputation.