Recently,
Trustpilot published, for the first time, its Transparency Report (here). This report concerns Trustpilot's activity in 2020. Trustpilot is an online platform where consumers and businesses can share feedback
(and respond to it) through online reviews. The importance of online reviews in
consumer decision-making is undeniable, and information on them allows us to
better understand how and why consumers use reviews. From a consumer law
perspective, it is important to assess how the information conveyed through
online reviews impacts the conclusion of consumer contracts. The biggest
concern in this regard is the proliferation of fake reviews, often written by businesses
to harm a competitor’s reputation or to boost its own reputation. Perhaps most
importantly, consumer law is (and should be) concerned with how online platforms design and
manage online review mechanisms.
In
this context, Trustpilot’s report provides a rare insight into the collection
and processing of online reviews, given that most platforms do not reveal
information on this. While most of what the report contains can also be found in Trustpilot’s guidelines on online reviews (available on their website), some
interesting information is revealed. In 2020, Trustpilot received around 38,000,000
reviews. Trustpilot removed over fake 2,000,000 reviews, which corresponds to
almost 6% of all reviews submitted in 2020. Most of the removed fake reviews
were positive reviews (4- or 5-star reviews). On average, Trustpilot’s
fraud-detection automated systems review 100,000 reviews per day. Additionally, in a clear effort to increase transparency, the report explains what factors are taken into account when calculating the
score of reviewer satisfaction: time span, frequency, and Bayesian average. Remarkably,
Trustpilot even justifies the choice of certain methods. For instance, Trustpilot
claims it uses a Bayesian average to guarantee that businesses with fewer
reviews are not unfairly punished for it. Besides, Trustpilot informs that,
even though they have a freemium model in place, 92% of businesses who use its
platform do it for free. Trustpilot refutes claims that it favors businesses that
subscribe to the paying model, by revealing that paying businesses have an
average review star rating of 4.39, while non-paying businesses have an almost equal average
of 4.38. These numbers also show how the average star rating is quite high,
given that the rating goes from 1-5. In fact, Trustpilot reveals that 71% of their
2020 reviews gave the highest score possible to a business. As said, insights
like these – particularly originating from the online platform itself – are quite
rare, so reading this interesting report is highly recommended.
