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Trustpilot removed 3 reviews from my business stating they were not sure if they were legit. This wouldn't be a problem, especially if they weren't legit. Thing is, when I reached out asking them explaining that I request each customer to leave a review and asking about the removal (I was also not sure if they were legit since they just said "3 reviews" instead of including links, screenshots, or text copies of the reviews with the names of the reviewer (information that would be public if the reviews had still been life)) they didn't provide any info on the reviews, but instead said that if they were legit, that they reach out to each person and "If any of them dispute our decision to remove their review and can document that they've had a genuine buying or service experience, we always reinstate their review on Trustpilot."

They removed the reviews flat out, without contacting me or as much as reaching out to the people who left the reviews first to see if they wanted to say, "Yes, I left that, here's my order receipt" or whatever it is that they want to show a legitimate experience with my company. Kind of a shoot first ask questions later approach which isn't cool when dealing with reviews that are priceless to a small business like mine and can be the difference between a new long-term client and a lost customer.

The problem here is that most customers don't leave a review. If someone gets an email asking them to after an order is complete and they happen to like it enough to click on a star and type out a quick review, then that is more than we can expect from the average customer - any business owner reading this understands this. So, for them to be saying that a customer would have to 1) get the email from Trustpilot and care enough to not just trash it. 2) Read the email to understand what is going on. 3) Dispute their decision that the review was fabricated 4) Go read their support article to find out what documentation they need to send in. And 5) Go back to my website and take screen shots or forward an order confirmation email or whatever proof it is that Trustpilot wants to verify the legitimacy of their interaction with my business. Anyone reading this, customer or business owner, should understand that next to no one is going to do this just to preserve some review that they were barely willing to leave in the first place. I don't have their stats, but I imagine of all of the reviews that they remove, there are a fair chuck that were actually legit, and of that fair chunk, they might get 5-10 people out of every 100 real reviews who actually jump through the hoops required to have their review go live again after it is wrongly taken down.

As a business owner, if someone left a review on my business that was fabricated, I should have an option to report that. As a customer, if you see a review that you believe is fabricated, you should be able to report that. If they believe for some reason that it is fabricated, then shouldn't I as the business owner also be able to shoot over an order confirmation email / screen shot / PayPal transaction verifying their purchase reason being, I am the one person who would reasonably be willing to jump through their hoops and deal with this process in order to retain those 3 reviews (or any of the legit ones at least).

Maybe the worst part of all of this was the incompetence of the support people I dealt with when questioning this situation. After one email reply, they totally lost the concept of the ticket, and sent me a canned response about how I can get my review verified if I've had a review that I've left removed and a link to their article on what kind of evidence I would need to send in. I don't have a review that has been removed, I am a business owner. You know this. My account that is tied to the email I am emailing you from is a business account. You can see the previous 2 emails (my initial query and their first response) you can see that this is about 3 reviews that were removed from my business.

I received several (7) 5-star reviews after starting my Trust Pilot profile, adding their performance indicator that shows how many stars my business has on Trust Pilot to the homepage of my website, and sending all of my previous customers from the past 30 days a quick email invite to leave a review. After receiving seven 5-star reviews and no other reviews lower than 5 stars - I had an overall performance of 4 stars. I'm not sure if this is just because their trust score' doesn't want to say 5 stars even when every customer who has left a review says 5 stars until the business is established'. On Facebook or Google My Business seven 5-star reviews would result in a 5-star rating. I am not sure what the number of 5-star reviews is before it will show more than 4 stars, but for a small business getting 7 reviews is already quite an achievement in my opinion as I talked about earlier it isn't particularly easy to get customers to leave reviews for an online business.

I'm not sure if this is worse than everything else or not, but it has been a tipping point for me: I recently received a review that was "organic" meaning that they searched on Trustpilot to find my business' profile. This review which was left by someone who has never had an interaction with my business, who was leaving a review about a different company, on my profile, and it is still there. Trustpilot has not flagged it as fabricated. They have not asked them for evidence that they had an interaction with my business, and they do not allow me as the business owner to suppress it until the customer does provide that evidence when I know that it is fabricated (or really just left on the wrong profile) even though they are perfectly willing to suppress reviews without having any information about a particular situation. It's a 2-star review by the way, and it's dragging down my rating even more than the incorrectly presented 4-star rating that I had when I had 100% 5-star ratings, and I now have a 3.5 star performance rating shown on my profile, which is now yellow instead of the green that at least I was given when I had a 4-star rating (all 5 star reviews).