Writing in Trustpilot's 2021 annual report, Trustpilot founder and CEO Peter Holten Mühlmann said the company wanted to become "the most used and most trusted global reviews platform".
Following a successful IPO and a year in which it saw total cumulative reviews rise 39% to 167m and revenues increase 29% to $131.4m, the Danish-founded firm is well on track to achieve the former, but how about the latter?
For its status as one of the leading review sites in the UK and Ireland, Trustpilot has faced criticism for the amount of fake reviews on its platform and the control it gives paying businesses over which reviews are given prominence.
Established by Aarhus University student Mühlmann in 2007 to ensure his parents wouldn't be scammed when shopping online, Trustpilot secured more than $110m in outside funding in its first eight years of business as it quickly scaled, hosting 400,000 new reviews per month in 2014.
Anyone can post a review of a business on Trustpilot by setting up a free account or logging in using their Facebook profile, and businesses can collect and respond to reviews for free, although paid plans offer marketing and analytics.
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Trustpilot said it detected and removed 2.7m fake reviews last year, up from 2.2m in 2020 and equivalent to 5.8% of all reviews in 2021. The majority were removed automatically by its fraud detection software, but it also has flagging tools for users and a team of fraud analysts.
Furthermore, it issued 121,000 warnings to users submitting fake reviews, and 1,423 cease and desist letters in a show of the seriousness with which it is responding to the issue.
"As more businesses engage with their customers on the Trustpilot platform, the more useful it becomes to consumers and businesses, reinforcing the viral network effects," Mühlmann said in the report.
"Hence, trust and transparency lie at the heart of what we do; consumers need to know they can use and rely on our reviews platform for reassurance that they are dealing with trustworthy businesses."
As the company continues to grow, 23,000 of the 84,000 businesses on Trustpilot are subscribers paying to manage and derive insights from reviews, and the company will want to attract more paying firms.
Trustpilot says that consumers and businesses can report reviews if they believe the reviews are in breach of the company’s guidelines. All reported reviews are assessed in the same way by the Content Integrity team, regardless of whether or not a business has a paid subscription, according to Trustpilot.
“Other than reviews reported for being harmful and illegal, all reviews remain visible on the platform while we investigate the reports,” says the company.
“We also do not accept any misuse or abuse of our reporting tool by those that may wish to distort the perception of their reviews. Should a business continually misreport reviews or should they behave unusually by trying to report too many reviews too quickly, we take action in line with our Action we Take policy. This rule is in place to prevent attempts to distort the perception of a business through removal of negative consumer reviews from the platform.”
Photo: Peter Holten Mühlmann. (Pic: Trustpilot)
