Why Our Only Trustpilot Review Is 5 Stars but Our TrustScore Is 3.7
Stagetimer has one review on Trustpilot. It gives us 5 stars. Trustpilot shows our TrustScore as 3.7.
What’s going on
Trustpilot adds 7 imaginary reviews of 3.5 stars to every company’s score. They say so in their own help pages. Our one real 5-star review gets averaged with those seven, and the result is 3.7.
The idea behind it is fair. One review doesn’t prove much, so every company starts at “average” until real reviews pull it up or down.
The problem is what a visitor sees. Nobody reads “3.7 Average” and thinks “one happy customer plus seven made-up ones”. They think customers are lukewarm. For a small company, the imaginary reviews are most of the score, and it takes dozens of 5-star reviews before they stop mattering.
It doesn’t stop there. Trustpilot gives newer reviews more weight and lets older ones fade. The 7 imaginary reviews never fade. So unless you keep sending customers to Trustpilot, your score slides back toward 3.5 over time, no matter how good your old reviews were.
You also can’t opt out. Anyone can create a Trustpilot profile for your company, and once it exists, you can’t remove it. Ryan Badger, the founder of Shoprocket, wrote about what happened when he showed one of his own Trustpilot reviews on his website. Trustpilot put a public “Consumer Alert” on his profile. Showing your reviews your own way was something only paying customers could do.
Why we don’t care
We don’t chase Trustpilot reviews. We don’t ask customers to rate us there, and we don’t pay for their plans.
We collect what people say about Stagetimer on their own instead: LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, support emails. Every quote is word for word, with the person’s name and a link to the original. None of them were requested.
If you want to know whether Stagetimer works, read those, or try it for free. It takes a minute.