Reviews are a mess

Yeah, it has been a mess! I agree. The transition has not gone the way I had hoped, and the things we were told by Trustpilot have not turned out to be accurate. There was a recent post I discussed it on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/1jlarpk/reviews_gone_on_website/

You can see my reasoning for going this route. Frankly, I was hoping that doing this would take a lot of that off my plate. Having to manually go through ever product review myself, read them all in full to see if there were disease claims, then try to remove the disease claims and keep the spirit of the review was exhausting. Then when I spoke to our regulatory attorney about the FTC guidelines, I knew we had to make a change. Truspilot seemed like the best fit for that, because then we would have no control over reviews anymore. That comes with its own headaches, but at least it would remove some risk and complexity, and be more transparent for consumers. I also hoped that more people would review if it was easier for them to via the email invites from Trustpilot. However, this transition has been more of a headache than anything. Reviews were missing on some products. Reviews were disappearing and showing up on the wrong products. Weird formatted ones. Ones customers clearly wrote with AI...

The really sad thing is part of the reason for moving to Trustpilot was to have our product ratings show up in Google Shopping. You need to use a Google approved review aggregator for that, which Trustpilot is. They told us it would just happen automatically. We didn't need to do anything! Well that was not true, either... You have to have a GTIN, or have the brand and MPN match in the Google Merchant Center. Well we only use UPCs on Natrium products, and we actually hijacked the MPN field on Bigcommerce to give customers the ability to see price per dose on the product pages. So that didn't even happen! Then we just discovered a big reason why some of all this is happening. The catalog is set up for things on a parent SKU level. However, every one of our products are actually ordered using the child SKU, as those control the size people select. Well people have been putting reviews for products, but they have been going under the child SKU they ordered, not the parent! This breaks things, I guess. So we are working with Trustpilot right now to fix it.

Maybe I made a wrong decision in going with Trustpilot. I had hoped it would solve most of the issues, but that has not turned out to be reality yet. It is the most transparent review service available right now, other than Google Customer Reviews. The restrictions they have on the service are more insane than anyone else. That comes with its own headaches for us, but I had hoped the advantages would outweigh them. That has not been proven to be true yet. I am still working with the Trustpilot team and our developer team to see if we can get it all working properly, so we will see.

As for not seeing them, some browsers seem to be blocking the section. Firefox Focus doesn't show them, and some customers have reported that their script blockers and VPNs are causing issues as well. I am hoping we can solve those with our developers. As for making a product review, you have to have actually purchased that product from us, then Trustpilot invites you to review us and the product. That's an attempt to make it more legitimate, so you know that only people that have purchased the product have made reviews. If you are a returning customer of ours, look in your email for a Truspilot one. They should have sent out invites to customers asking for a review. In that, it will let you make a review for one of the products you bought. It won't allow any random person to just manually go to the product page and review anymore, though. That's part of their security/transparency thing. I thought that was a good thing, but maybe I didn't consider all angles.