Community guidelines

For reviewers

Do

• Write only about your own genuine experience with a purchase, a service or an interaction, within the last 12 months.
• Review the right company. If a delivery firm lost the parcel, review the delivery firm, not the shop, unless the shop's handling is what you are describing.
• Be specific and be fair. What did you buy, what happened, what would have fixed it?
• Keep your review up to date. If the company resolves the issue, you can edit your rating and text at any time.

Don't

• Write reviews for money, discounts, freebies or any other incentive, or in exchange for having a problem solved.
• Review your own company, your employer, a client, a competitor, or a company a friend or relative works for.
• Post someone's personal details (full names of staff, phone numbers, addresses, order numbers that identify a person).
• Post hate speech, threats, harassment, discrimination or anything unlawful.
• Post the same experience more than once, or copy a review from elsewhere.
• Use a review as advertising, or to link to other sites.

For businesses

Do

• Invite all your customers to review you, in the order you served them, using neutral wording.
• Reply to reviews politely and factually. A good reply to a bad review is the most persuasive thing on your profile.
• Flag reviews you believe break these guidelines, with evidence, through the report form.
• Show your TrustScore using our official widgets, which always link to the full profile.

Don't

• Cherry-pick who gets invited, or offer rewards for reviews. Both are gating and both lead to sanctions.
• Write or commission reviews of your own business, or negative reviews of a competitor.
• Contact reviewers to pressure them to remove or change a review, or make resolution of a complaint conditional on that.
• Use a reviewer's personal data obtained through TrustProof for anything other than resolving their review.
• Reproduce your score or reviews selectively or in a misleading way.

What happens when the rules are broken

Reviews that break the guidelines are removed and the reviewer is notified with the reason and a way to appeal. Businesses that break the guidelines receive a warning, then a public notice on their profile, then loss of paid features and claimed status. Serious or repeated breaches are described in our annual Transparency Report.

What we won't do

We won't remove a review because it is negative, because a business disputes it, or because the business pays us. We won't fact-check a review's claims; we check whether the review is genuine, and leave the reply to the business.