Trustpilot Review

What is Trustpilot?

Trustpilot is a customer review platform, designed and created with the client and their goals in mind. Trustpilot focuses on transparency to ensure trust is built and retention is sustained. It achieves this by giving businesses the tools needed to collect reviews, acquire new customers, foster relationships, and extend customer reach.

Competitors

Trustpilot faces a variety of competition in the review platform market, specifically from Shopper Approved and ResellerRatings, both of whom maintain a strong market presence. All three companies offer very similar services, pricing structures, and features.

• Shopper Approved is an all-in-one customer review platform boasting over 17,000 clients, and a guarantee that customers will triple ROI in a year.
• ResellerRatings is a well established competitor, with a list of high profile clientele and the largest syndication network of any service.

Pricing

TrustPilot’s business model includes:

• Structured plan approach to pricing, with the basic plan being free of charge.
• The company also offers Lite ($400/month), Pro ($700/month), and Enterprise (customized) packages with pricing specific to each client.
• Each pricing plan offers increased value, but without a concrete cost to evaluate beforehand, it is difficult for companies to compare their options without signing up for the service.
• Trustpilot does offer a 14-day trial that gives customers the chance to test out all features with the exception of the “unique links” feature.

Ease of Use

With the basics out of the way, onto the important question, how does the platform handle? On the bright side, as their promotional information boasts, “in the time it takes you to make a sandwich, you can have Trustpilot fully up and running.”

• The UI for the platform functions with the user in mind while remaining visually appealing.
• The navigation is relatively straight forward with categories and sub sections featured on the left position of the page.
• There is a well rounded statistics sections, and the addition of various features such as the Trustbox added overall value.

Advanced Tools and Core Features

Trustpilot’s features are standard within the industry, including a set of standard options including:

• Search engine ratings, review monitoring, integration capabilities, and social sharing, among others.
• One feature that stood out though was the TrustBox feature which allows users to configure various “TrustBox” widgets that can be embedded on your website.
• Offer integration with common e-commerce and marketing management systems such as Salesforce and Magento, and Shopify. If you are looking to compare e-commerce platforms in addition to customer platforms, check out this review of Shopify versus Magento.

Competitive Advantages

It is difficult to say with full confidence that TrustPilot maintains a competitive advantage over its competitors, mainly due in part to:

• Minimal difference in the service offering aside from the pricing plan and minor feature configurations.
• The company has gained a large amount of traction, a 270% growth since 2013 to be exact which is very promising.
• What can’t be valued through tools or features, Trustpilot has managed to create an advantage by the quality of service they have offered to clients.

Downside

At a surface level glance, the biggest downside to Trustpilot’s service is their lack of up front pricing, which may not only cause some discouragement for potential customers seeking features or tools at a specific price point.

• Although there is a 14 day trial period, a fortnight is not long in the world of search engine optimization and customer reviews.
• This timeframe likely won’t show very many results for a company, and make the one-year contractual obligation much more of a risk.

Verdict – Commitment-Phobes Beware

At the end of the day, Trustpilot does enough to hold its own amongst the various seller rating extensions out there. They manage to provide an encouraging level of transparency with customers in regards to service issues, but client specific pricing and the 12-month minimum commitment is cause for concern; especially considering there are options out there with similar offerings and favorable pricing. Is it worth taking the leap and trusting TrustPilot? For those weighing their options, the 14-day trial can’t hurt and the company is beginning to show signs of being a very promising service for those seeking to improve understand customer opinions, acquire and retain customers, as well as broaden market reach. It is important to weigh your options before committing to TrustPilot or any other review software. Get to know the B2B e-commerce platform landscape to find the solution that best fits your business goals.

Full Disclosure – Nuanced Media has recently gone into a partnership with Shopper Approved. All research was done previously of this relationship as we wanted to remain as unbiased as possible to give you the best and most accurate information about these Seller Rating Extensions.