Review and rating site Trustpilot has contacted EYE “to add some clarity regarding the 7-10 day time frame for handling the reviewers mistakenly invited by Purplebricks to review its US business”.
A Trustpilot spokesperson based in London said: “A seven-day period is necessary to provide reviewers with enough time to respond to contact from our compliance team.
“We cannot move a consumer’s review around our site without being absolutely sure it should be moved.
“At Trustpilot we follow our guidelines strictly. In this situation our guidelines dictate that Purplebricks must report reviews from UK customers it has mistakenly invited to leave reviews on its US Trustpilot profile.
“The company has done so and a clear notice has been added to every review alerting consumers to the fact they are suspected as being reviews of Purplebrick’s UK service.
“We cannot move a consumer’s review around our site without contacting them and being absolutely sure – that would set a bad precedent. Therefore, our compliance team is contacting the reviewers and they have a seven-day window to respond, as outlined in our guidelines.
“We hope those observing the situation will appreciate the need for us to respect our guidelines and to apply them rigorously.
“We make significant investments in our compliance function with 40 team members working hard to apply our guidelines for the benefit of both consumers and businesses.”
Earlier, Purplebricks told EYE about the UK reviews on its US website: “Purplebricks now operates in the UK under Purplebricks.co.uk and in the US from Purplebricks.com
“Reflecting this, the Trustpilot reviews have, as planned, migrated to the UK site. We look forward to delivering a fantastic service stateside and securing thousands of new brand advocates, to match those in the UK and Australia.”
Yesterday, reviews were still arriving on the US site from UK reviewers, but were swiftly being suspended while they were investigated, the wording being replaced by: “We believe this review should be on our UK Trustpilot site. This is currently under review and appropriate action will be taken.”
We have invited Purplebricks to make further comment.
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.purplebricks.com
Yesterday Purplebricks finished the day at 375p, according to the London Stock Exchange. The volatile shares reached 513p on July 24. Early investors will have made huge profits, with the firm having floated in December 2015 with shares priced at £1.
“We hope those observing the situation will appreciate the need for us to respect our guidelines and to apply them rigorously” (Except, of course, the rules about transferring one companies review to another, and treating reviews equally e.g. Not requiring verification of all non-verified reviews for 5* reviews but, only, having almost all 1* reviews requiring verification)
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TicklePurple do make me laugh when we all know what was really going on.
All credibility totally gone I am afraid.
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We might, AgentV, but the buying public don’t. And to PB that is all that matters.
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Thank you for the dislike Ducky.
Oh, a second one. dompritch must have woken up.
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how do people see who has liked or disliked ?
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Don’t know that you can g4vo17. The Duck & Dom duo is so predictable I just guessed it had to be them.
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TicklePurple have got themselves into a TicklePickle over this one!
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I really can’t see why it takes 7 days to contact the paid review bloggers in Indonesia and ask them not to post for a few weeks. They do work on the internet for Christs sake.
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I feel the situation is slowly being revealed. Trustpilot are starting to wobble, they are blocking people on twitter, feeling the need to justify the action at every turn. Of course the bottom line is….do the public really give a damn about review sites? When i’ve been up against PB on valuations i’ve never once had a potential vendor mention the TP reviews, so maybe they dont put much faith in them anyway.
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Agreed Arthur – there’s only one place that clients notice reviews these days and that’s Google.
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Does anyone else find it odd that Allagents managed to remove all of Purplebricks’ disputed 1* reviews within a matter of a minutes but Trustpilot is taking days to delete all of the disputed 5* ones whilst quite happy to rate PB USA as excellent based on withdrawn, disputed, reviews?
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Maybe AllAgents have more than 40 staff. I find it amazing that TP with all the thousands of reviews getting posted every day have so few staff to deal with this. Or perhaps their technology isnt very good
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Chris, perhaps the difference is that TrustPilot check to see if the review is valid when flagged whilst AllAgents don’t.
“We cannot move a consumer’s review around our site without contacting them and being absolutely sure – that would set a bad precedent.”
There you go, it was actually in the Article.
“At Trustpilot we follow our guidelines strictly.”
You’d be the first to complain if they made a special case for PB when they flag up reviews. I can see the Blog post now “TrustPilot remove reviews on PurpleBricks’ say so”
Now with AllAgent they haven’t treated their reviewers with any respect whatsoever. Who will use the site now if they are going to back down whenever anybody threatens legal action?
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>We have invited Purplebricks to make further comment.
Has nobody considered that reviews are being posted to the wrong site inadvertantly?
Th old address for UK reviews was https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.purplebricks.com . Now this is the address for US reviews.
At first this would have been as TrustPilot says “reviewers mistakenly invited by Purplebricks to review its US business”.
So they followed the link in their invitation email by PB and it took them to the US site.
I have checked and this is no longer the case as I have followed the link in the email I received from PurpleBricks and it says ”
Review Purplebricks UK now.” and the redirect takes me to https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/purplebricks.co.uk
Why are reviews still appearing? Well not everybody adds reviews via the link. If you type “purplebricks.com” into the TrustPilot search then you are taken to the USA review site https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.purplebricks.com
Remember most customers will not be aware of the change in domain. They don’t all follow events and are probably oblivious to the fact that PurpleBricks has started trading in the USA and that there has been a change in domain for the UK site.
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How very convenient!
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Don’t be so logical and rational cyberduck.
its pointless trying to make any sensible argumentw here.
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dompritch134 and cyberduck46
It’s ok for you guys to admit that your matching tattoos of the Bruce brothers were a mistake you know. We won’t hold it against you x
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That should get ‘comment of the week’ FlyingSheep54. Spot on.
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Wonder how they would feel if their ‘high street agent’ bashing comments (when they aren’t even actual customers) on this site were constantly censored and removed?
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Somewhat ironic, only yesterday it was Ros , Nick and John who, according to you, were masterminding a plot to discredit Purplebricks.
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>only yesterday it was Ros , Nick and John who, according to you, were masterminding a plot to discredit Purplebricks
No I wasn’t.
Never mind the quality, feel the width. Or should I say, see how many web page views you can generate. That is the common denominator here.
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that reply was to DimPritch not you.
It’s been noted how while whinging on about stories to generate traffic you can’t help yourself promoting Eye on your share chat site.
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dompritch,
>its pointless trying to make any sensible argumentw here.
I don’t post for the usual crowd. They’ve already made their minds up.
I remember coming to this website to research PurpleBricks when I was a shareholder. All the talk of portaljuggling and the alleged imminent scandal had me very worried about my investment.
My posts are for anybody reading this who hasn’t already made their mind up. I’m usually up early so it’s not a problem posting when the articles are first published.
I’m actually pretty much retired but don’t have as much free time as some of the Estate Agents who post on here though 🙂
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Yeah but, no but…….
Imagine being globally embarrassed by such tiny oversight and having your 3rd continent launch derailed by such basic inattention to detail.
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Yawn, maybe Rod Jane and Freddy will promote your rummage search with an article tomorrow.
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No need, you just did. Thanks!
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Inadvertantly [sic}? A reviews site that gets continents confused? I’ve heard it all…
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“So they followed the link in their invitation email by PB and it took them to the US site.”
But… but… but…
If they followed “their invitation email” as you state to be the case, ducky…
…HOW COME THEY WEREN’T marked as “Verified orders”?
#duckshot
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LOL All Trustpilot have to do is quickly look through their own database of the country of origin of the reviewers who are signed up with them and instantly remove if they are in the UK Do they need an atlas?
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Don’t be so logical and rational Hillofwad71.
its pointless trying to make any sensible argumentw here.
See what I did there … sorry couldn´t help myself !
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What is worrying with Trustpilot ‘s statement regarding their procedures for removing reviews containing gross errors which aren’t the fault of the reviewer themselves as appears to be in this case could cause irreparable reputational damge of the company reviwed if left for 7-10 days
Perhaps Trustpilot ought to seriously consider amending their procedures for such events ?
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My Review Rating for Trustpilot is 1*.
Its time that reviews site are regulated. Even ducky agrees they are often false or misleading reviews. The purpose of a review site is not for persons making the review, it is for the credibility of reviewed company, to profit from, to the disadvantage of their competitors. The consumer considering that business is often misled (fraud) if the review is false. Just needs one big enough company with the clout to take legal action against a review site under the Business Protection Regulations or Libel. Interestingly many other review sites now prohibit negative reviews or with a wealth warning to the poster because of the penalties. Ironic that Trustpilot brand is somewhat lacking in trust? The story is about Trustpilot failings, the reason given by them and their supporters is only in mitigation for their failing. They still did wrong and the ability to correct their error is somewhat poor.
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Reviews sites ARE regulated, by the Competitions & Markets authority. They just need to get a grip on them.
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Logic says that Purple Bricks USA cannot have any positive reviews yet as that would be impossible given how long they have been trading, therefore Trustpilots rational that they need to contact the reviewers first to let them check where they meant to post is utter B*ll**ks, simply move them back to the UK site and stop abetting PB in boosting its initial US launch
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I have 2 posted reviews on Trustpilot within the last week.
Both are still currently showing but flagged as being challenged. I have not been contacted by Trustpilot about this. Any claim that they are contacting reviewers is patently untrue.
But I think we all knew that the words ‘Trustpilot’ and ‘completely untrue’ would feature quite close together.
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Monty Python again
Dead Parrot !!!!
No misselling here to see !!!
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“We cannot move a consumer’s review around our site without being absolutely sure it should be moved.”
Are Trustpilot [unprintable]? Do they not know that PB only launched in the US last Friday? Do they not know that PB are selling houses not socks? Those ‘reviews’ should never have appeared in the first place. A shocking indictment of yet another ‘independent review site’.
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“We cannot move a consumer’s review around our site without being absolutely sure it should be moved.”
Then Trustpilot should hide these reported UK reviews for seven days until they are absolutely sure they are correct and relate to the correct business. Alternatively, they should add a note to each of these reviews stating they are in the process of ascertaining whether they refer to a service provided in the UK or US, as they are doing with the new reviews.
Whatever their guidelines (not rules, but guidelines), Trustpilot have a responsibility to users/consumers of their review website.
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