Seminar on Trust Online – Input from Trustpilot

1. Seminar on Trust Online – Input from Trustpilot By Peter HoltenMühlmann, Founder and CEO of Trustpilot

2. Agenda • Intro to Trustpilot • Use of reviews • Manipulation • Efforts to secure genuine reviews • Requests to the European Commission

3. Trustpilot • Worlds third largest company review site (after Yelp and Tripadvisor) • 200 employees in New York, London and Copenhagen • 7,000,000 reviews • Currently 400,000 new reviews per month • 80,000 companies reviewed

4. Business Model • Free open review site • Free for merchants to respond to reviews and use basic services • Paid automation, insights, integration • Transparency • No possibility to buy positive ratings and reviews! • Activity is key!

5. What do you trust these days?

6. Help consumers make better choices Help companies to get good customer service and to be rewarded for having good customer service. Mission: S01E17.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION

7. Reviewsareonlyvaluableiftrusted • Mission statement withoutanyvalueunlesswecansecure and maintain the credibility of the reviews • Trustpilot business model depend on trustworthy information = credibility is extremelyimportant • It is in Trustpilot’s pure interestthatusers (bothcompanies and reviewers) can have faith in reviews; nofaithnouse

8. www.buyareview.com

9. Examples of manipulation • Fake reviews • Cherry picking (only inviting happy customers, incentives) • Gaming guidelines • Legal pressure

10. Highest Standard in Reviews Email Invitation Audit Special Agent ‘Bob’ Report for Investigation Guidelines for use Authenticity Auto-Detect

11. In summary - Reviews are adding tremendous value to the marketplace - Manipulation of reviews will happen and cannot be avoided entirely - “97% who made a purchase based on an online review found the review to be accurate” (The Kelsey Group)

12. Request • EU regulationand harmonization • Strongerlegal sanctionsagainstcheaters • General guidelines to preventfakereviews • Responsibility for content in accordance with the E-commerce directive • The most important thing is to ensure that reviews are expressing a correct overallimage of a business • Objectivecriteria for invitingreviewers

13. Questions?

14. Appendix

15. Who reviews and why? Sharing positive experiences is reviewers main motivation* • 74% state that they write reviews because they want to share a good experience with other travellers • 78% state that they write reviews because they feel good about sharing useful information with other travelers * Tripadvisor

16. Further Reading

17. Quality Assurance Automatic analysis and detection of suspiciousreviews Analysis Component: IP addresses IP geography v. user country v. domain Patterns in email addresses Browser information Social network patterns Fingerprinting ... new components and parameters arecontinouslytested and added.

18. Trustpilot’s support & compliance organisation 15 % of Trustpilot’s employees is dedicated to support and compliance to secure the quality of the reveiws Tasks Handling reportedreviews from users and customers Documentationregardingactualtransactions (”proof of purchase”) Assessingwording in review invitations from customersto securecompliance with (i) company guidelines and (ii) instructions from public authorities.

19. Submitting a review… • Submit emailaddress • Accept Terms • Accept Guidelines for use • Ability to documentpurchase • … however; smooth submission is required to fulfil the purpose of providing a crediblereview platform