Along with Choice, people use trustpilot to determine the quality of goods and services.
But I think fake reviews are not being addressed properly by these review sites.
On trustpilot
If you go through Youi insurance you will see thousands of reviews. That on the surface gives it a great trust pilot rating.
But if you look most are single person reviewers giving a 5* rating for the amazing experience they had. That drown out lots of single star reviews complaining about the poor level of service when they try to make a claim.
I then looked at some of the people that had more than one review
Lynette Konkol has 3 reviews of which 1 is Youi and the another is Parcelpoint
and
Julie Shaw has 2 reviews of which one is Youi and the other is Parcelpoint
WHAT A COINCIDENCE
of all the companies in the world that she could have reviewed they both gave 5* positive reviews to the same companies.
Clearly these are fake reviews
I would expect trustpilot to be checking for fake reviews otherwise trust pilot will not be trusted.
They have lost my confidence. But I think it requires more of an investigation
So my view is that trust pilot needs to up its game to remove fake reviews and YOUI Insurance should be avoided given that they are clearly paying for positive reviews to hide all the bad reviews they are getting
Hi @JeremyDucklin, welcome to the community.
It looks like you aren’t the only one with that opinion…
If you look at Trustpilot for Choice, it possibly gives one an indication of how reliable and whether one should accept their reviews…
Shonky to say the least. It is worth reading the reviews posted as most, if not all, have no relevance to Choice’s activities.
Trust Pilot’s rating on itself would be 
out of
It is not necessary for them to pay for the good reviews. They could ask their staff and staff families to do 5* reviews. There are no checks possible to filter out, or detect, such reviews that I can think of.
Where a person has just 1 review then they should not be counted or their review needs to be assumed to be fake.
As I mentioned in my original Post.
When there are just a few reviews check to see where else they have reviewed and if they match other review locations then both reviews are removed. See my original post, where 2 people both reviewed Youi and parcelpoint with 5* reviews, too much of a co-incidence for me.
Artificial intelligence is quite good now and could easily detect this kind of thing.
Not only are they not relevant, they mostly aren’t even for Choice, since most of them are from OS or for a completely different organisation!
Do Australian consumers have any influence over how Trustpilot operates or delivers its services? Trustpilot has a focus on reviewing how a business responds to customers. It’s not an objective resource if looking to compare individual products (services excepted), in the way that Choice does.
Looking to Trustpilot feedback on Hervey Norman, the feedback is polarised with many more one star reviews than 5 star. Very little in between.
Customers may be more likely to complain than provide positive feedback, leaving one to decide from the feedback what it all means?
What does Trustpilot say to consumers?
As a site Trustpilot also actively markets itself to businesses selling products and services.
Is consumer wisdom to look to the total numbers of reviews, be cautious where a business has limited numbers of reviews, and look to other sources for consistency?
I think some companies appear to only have genuine reviews, where they are all listed as verified. This label applies when the purchaser of an item or service is automatically invited to write a review after purchase.
They claim to have a large team devoted to removing fake reviews.
Im not convinced. In that I am no expert and I could spot 2 fake reviews in minutes and with Computer matching it would be simple to see patterns of identical positive reviews.
I contacted them about it, but as with all big IT companies No response
Do you realise that Trustpilot is an online site based in Denmark, with less than 1000 employees, maybe making US $30 million per year?
Not a big IT company at all. Just a review site to be avoided.
