I read the text of these reviews. Sometimes the reviewer had unrealistic demands. If this worst case is acceptable, I proceed. If it is a choice between competitors, it often comes to the least bad option.
If there are no reviews under 5 stars, I'm suspicious. If a company replies to reviews, I mentally flag it as doing reputation management - not something you tend to need do when providing a service your customers love.
It is amazing how many nightmare companies have 4-5 star trustpilot reviews.
On Yelp you can buy placement in search results (or on other restaurants' listings in the "Nearby" or "Similar" sections) but they won't remove negative listings for pay. It's certainly possible that individual sales reps will offer that service if they are desperate to hit sales or bonus goals, but Yelp won't actually do it, since the review review team is separate from the sales team.
Source: Personally interviewed nearly a hundred local businesses on behalf of the local Chamber of Commerce.
Nearly impossible if you're a non-paying business on Yelp.
Yelp is a scam, but you pay the piper because their local SEO is too good.
The BBB you might be referencing about is the BBB of LA, which no longer exists and this 2015 article mentions: https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau...
That BBB was then merged into the Silicon Valley BBB, a totally different set of people and operations.
A company I once worked for required employees to post positive reviews of its app, as a condition of employment.
This started shortly after I left, so I'm grateful I never had to deal with that.
They were pretty terrible people. Always talking about how they were going to "get rich and leave all of you behind".
Edit: I speak from personal experience as a small business owner, described in more detail below.
They say that, but they decide which reviews are legitimate, and they're more likely to decide that positive reviews are legitimate, if a business is paying them.
On the other hand, my experience pre-pandemic was that Yelp had the only reliable database of local USA businesses' hours of operation (there is probably now no way to know other than phone calls).
In fact, I know a business who complained he got more calls from Google trying to update their maps database than he got from real customers!
So THAT'S what all the humans at Google are up to, while their bots are busy locking legitimate user and developer accounts!
https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...
How cute. You think that these are humans calling from google. No biological human has represented google by phone since the 90s. It is all androids and chatbots.
Do you have any evidence of that?
I have several unsolicited 5-star reviews for my business that have been flagged as "not currently recommended." Yet despite fighting off their sales reps for years my business is the best rated business in my city in my category.
Based on my experience, the Yelp hate is just sour grapes from businesses that are reluctant to bend over backwards to make every customer happy.
Not too many business that do that stay in business for long. "The customer is always right" if not taken with many grains of salt will bury you when you get just the right customer (who will directly reference the mantra).
One key to making it work is to invest in long term relationships with your clients. A transaction with a client you have an established relationship with is much less risky than a transaction with a stranger.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149078
Not sure if the policies have changed since then, but I am inclined to believe him.
But I second this. Yelp won't remove legitimate reviews, even for paying businesses. You can pay for priority in search listings and to show up in the Similar and Nearby sections, but that won't help you get negative reviews removed.
As I speak, there are 2.5 star restaurants being promoted in every search I do for nearby restaurants. If Yelp removed the negative reviews as people claimed, they wouldn't be at 2.5 stars right now.
(It's true that some individual sales reps claim Yelp will do this if you pay them, but those are individual sales reps trying to hit a sales or bonus goal.)
On the business side all I’ve heard from Yelp Business was that they will let more bad reviews slide thus lowering your rating if you do not pay for their protection racket. Also, paying them gives good reviews that would otherwise be rejected now allowed as acceptable.
Maybe those businesses were not paying for the “premium” service tier that includes Yelp sending a photographer to your business to then create a video for you with an annual plan.
I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps. It’s difficult to trust online reviews.
That's definitely wrong, as my Yelp profile has zero friends and no profile picture, and all of my reviews are still up, when viewing the businesses logged out, across multiple devices using different IP addresses.
I have managed restaurants and talked to several Yelp reps.
I have spoken to restaurants on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce investigating this issue, and found no evidence that these claims are true.
I've had my legitimate Yelp reviews shadow-removed (I could see the review on the computer it was made on, but not others). So they absolutely did at one point remove/hide reviews.
-person with actual experience
It might be true, but a claim that undermines the entire business.. warrants at least a link or an anecdote.
Yelp etc needs the average review to be somewhat useful so people actually trusts the Star ratings. However, they can still accomplish that while distorting a significant number of reviews.
The simple fact Yelp lets companies pay to highlight a favorable review is IMO enough to destroy their credibility. Worse they directed customers through GrubHub for an unearned commission which is as far as I can tell simple fraud. But, that’s not what people are alleging here.
That is certainly not off-topic in this context. The horrid behavior (or business model) of TrustPilot is relevant (and immoral), and should be known.
Every time I see one of those "4.2 / 5 stars on TrustPilot" banners, I'll start thinking about the extortion money to keep hiding those negative reviews; what a scam..
The diff between 1.8 and 4.2 business is that the latter sends mass emails to the customers saying "write us a nice review on TrustPilot, and maybe you'll win a $50 gift card". (Although, in case of the app, we just asked nicely, and many people clicked the banner and went on to give 4* or 5* ratings in the store, for free).
Having said that, if company doesn't care about 1.8 rating and has no actions to change, it's probably a bad sign...
I figure that this gives my negative review some credibility, and it also helps the good businesses.
I wonder if actually enforcing this might help things. If someone can't find anything positive to say about five other companies, I don't think I'm interested in their negative review.
I wish I could give TrustPilot a 1 star review right now :-)
Maybe I am missing the context of big businesses, but I will often write a good review of a company (say on trustpilot) I have used, with no reward to myself. Even well known ones. The most recent example being Scan the hardware retailer in the UK. I have though also done it for reward too, so I am not completely altruistic!
Seems like any form of reviews — Amazon, Yelp, TrustPilot — or even independent reviews (that are often given a product in exchange for “their honest review”, can’t be trusted anymore.
Someone will find a way to game the system.
We’ve gone from being ignorant, to being informed, back to being ignorant again — or worse, ignorantly mislead.
Nice business you got here, would be a shame if someone said something bad about it online. You know we can make that go away...for a price.
On the other hand, sites that let you remove bad reviews or showcase good ones are running a 21st-century protection racket.
I just had a look at their pricing page and it doesn’t seem to say anything about this.
Maybe a screen shot would do if it’s something you only see when you have the plan?
They also say "Curate your Trustpilot Company Profile Page through ... adding authentic content". The term "authentic content" is code for "positive reviews", because you'll be able to flag any negative reviews as inauthentic.
And of course you can also look at reviews of Trustpilot itself from third parties, i.e. websites where Trustpilot doesn't have a paid/boosted account, for instance: https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/trustpilot
> Thanks for your review on Trustpilot. > >Based on your review, Curve would like a little more information about your experience. This will help them write a more useful >reply to you. It'll also help them verify that you’ve had a genuine experience with their business.
>Of course, it’s totally up to you what you share.
"verify" vs. "totally up to me" are different things.
I don't think this is true. If this was true, then any sane business would pay the $400 and have a decent record on TP.
There are several big brand retailers in the UK who don't pay Trustpilot; you can tell by how many negative reviews they have manged to amass.
Another 'benefit ' of paying Trustpilot is that you can have gold stars underneath your search and ads listings. Google seem happy to to be part of the scam too.
The BBB pioneered this business model. Yelp perfected it. This is just another flavor for another market.
There 100% needs to be regulation around any kind of review site. If you can pay and change how the reviews look it is 100% corrupt and shouldn’t be allowed.
>If someone leaves a negative review of your business on TrustPilot, you can have it taken down
no, they can flag it but neither that nor the money they pay as subscription has any direct effect on the review being taken down, this solely lies on the discretion of moderators according to the terms of usage.
>they can prioritize the negative review to be shown above the positive ones
no, like hackernews trustpilot has a a scoring mechanism that is quite easily explained and also reflects on what is being shown, look here: https://support.trustpilot.com/hc/en-us/articles/201748946-T...
>It's a shocking lack of integrity
trustpilot has the most open and transparent platform for reviews, bad actors get marked publicly no matter if they are companies(free or paying) or reviewers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/yelp-accused-of-bullying-bu...
https://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-yelp-20130420...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/yelp-blames-greedy-law...
Yelp's sales people can be aggressive, and it wouldn't surprise me if a rogue employee deceived a prospect to close a sale, but there is no way to pay to win. Yelp also does flag legitimate positive reviews sometimes, but the alternative is to be like Amazon where half the reviews are fake.
You can allege anything. Whether the allegations are true is another question. You only have to read the various lawsuits that have passed on this issue to see how flimsy these business owners' cases are.
It would be so easy to demonstrate that you could pay Yelp to remove reviews, if the capability exists. Someone would have done so by now.
All of the following can be true:
-Yelp removes obviously false reviews.
-Yelp does not remove obviously true reviews.
-It is better for your business' rating to pay Yelp.
Yelp is the arbiter of what constitutes 'false'. It stretches credulity to believe that Yelp taking payment from a business has no influence on this determination. Even sending paying and non-paying requests down different pipelines could result in more negative false reviews being removed for paying businesses. For instance, spending more time considering whether a review is false might lend itself to ultimately removing more reviews. This needn't be intentional.
So, the question in my mind is whether Yelp deserves the reputation; rather than whether any specific allegation is true in exactly the way it is alleged. If the allegations about their salespersons' claims are true the answer must be that they not only deserve the reputation, but that they built it themselves.
(As a Yelp user, I already consider them too shady to use. Maybe they've changed, but their deceitful links that pushed me to open their app were so frustrating and off-putting I've quit them entirely.)
That's not my experience. Here in the UK at least they display reviews in chronological order, newest first including for "unclaimed" businesses".
Might be wrong, but glassdoor does it too
Removed because it exposes interview process.
They shake down companies involved with them and give add very little of value. If anything, they are harmful to ecommerce as it makes people more skeptical of reviews
It's a shocking lack of integrity, but not surprising, given the business model. Anyway, it's disappointing that TrustPilot gets any publicity for being anything credible.
Edit: A nice little touch is at the bottom of their website that says "See what our customers are saying about TrustPilot", with a hand-picked selection of reviews... from TrustPilot! About TrustPilot! Chef's kiss.
Edit 2: This is not to say that Trustpilot's intentions aren't necessarily good, and they may even be striving to provide neutrality. But the problem is that their business model is, by its very nature, antithetical to neutrality. And of course Trustpilot is not the only review site that has this issue, but it's definitely a site where this issue is glaringly apparent.