Here at RealFoodSource we want to make healthy eating affordable, easy and accessible for everyone. Therefore, in addition to this website, you will also find our products for sale on both Amazon and Ebay as we understand many customers prefer to shop on these channels, often due to the reviews. As we’ve been selling on Amazon and Ebay for many years you will find tens of thousands of genuine reviews of both our company and our products on those channels. Customers can see where reviews tie back to a sale. You will see a full 360 degree view of our company on these platforms.
However, you won’t find RealFoodSource on profit making review only websites such as Trustpilot. This is because:
- We believe that paid review sites are open to abuse and no longer offer a 360 degree view of a company’s products and services.
- We think it is unethical that companies are added to review websites without their consent so that bad reviews can be left in a bid to coerce the company to join the review website and start paying for the service.
- Trustpilot itself gets awful reviews on other review sites.
- Poor feedback can get removed once companies pay subscription fees.
- Positive feedback can get removed when companies don’t pay subscription fees.
- Paying for review websites and engaging on them is to increase sales and ultimately leads to the increased cost of food.
Review Websites are Open To Abuse
We believe profit making review website are open to abuse. Many media articles recently have highlighted how review websites are being used unethically with customers being offered free products and incentives to write 5 star reviews. Here are just a few links below with examples. Quite often reviews do not even tie back to an actual sale. We have been concerned about this for some time as we frequently get requests to send free products to people on the basis of leaving a good review. We have never done this. We have also been targeted by many who ask for a full refund of their order or they will leave a bad review. We find this very bad practice and have never wanted to engage on these platforms where this activity is prevalent.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43907695
Companies Are Coerced into Joining Paid Review Website Through Bad Reviews
What has become even more worrying over the last 6 months is we are frequently contacted by review websites to join their sites. As we have refused to do this we have found that more and more bad reviews are being left. The review website have noted to us the reviews and encouraged us to respond to these reviews while also advertising their services. We will not be coerced into joining these sites.
Trustpilot Itself Gets Awful Reviews on Other Review Sites
At the time of writing Trustpilot currently has a recommendation rating of only 10% on other review websites https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/trustpilot. Also the site warns “We’ve identified that some of the reviews on this page have been written by Trustpilot employees’. It is a fair bet that all the reviews by Trustpilot employees were positive, so the genuine rating is far less than 10%. Why would anyone trust a review company with such a poor rating on other review sites?
Poor Feedback is often Removed once Companies Pay Subscription Fees
Subscribing to their review websites paid services allows companies to have negative feedback removed. A quick online search will show thousands of consumers that have had their feedback removed from Trustpilot. Unscrupulous companies can exploit this, by appearing to have a very high customer satisfaction, when they offer a very poor service in reality. Many companies that don’t subscribe have also had their positive feedback removed. The top rated Trustpilot companies are always those that pay, and the lowest rated unsurprisingly are those companies that do not pay. This can be verified by checking out verified reviews on Trustpilot on other review sites such as the one referenced above. Many reviewers also claim positive reviews are removed from profiles of companies that do not pay subscription fees to these sites.
Paid Review Websites Charge Expensive Subscription Fees which Leads to Higher Prices
We understand that for many companies aiming to drive sales, there is a big incentive to score high ratings on these platforms. High ratings is linked to increased sales and being prioritised in Google’s search results (TrustPilot’s partnership with Google mean that ratings are clearly visible in search results). However, we are not driven by profit and sales and firmly believe food should always be sold honestly and at the best possible price. We think it is normal that food products will always have good and bad reviews. Everyones taste is different and what one person enjoys can be very different to another’s so trying to distort the true picture of a food, simply for sales, does not make sense. Furthermore, the reality of joining these sites is that it is a paid service. So for a food company, this is ultimately added in the margin of the cost of the underlying food. We simply want to offer the very best prices on our foods at all times so we can focus on making healthy eating affordable for everyone and do not want to add in marketing margin to cover Trustpilot subscription fees.
We Don’t Always Get it Right and Improving Our Service
At The RealFoodSource we accept we don’t always get it right. Sometimes a product, or our service is at fault, sometimes a customer is not always right. We are a team of humans who do make mistakes! We work hard, and strive to continuously improve our services, so we can always offer natural and organic foods at the best possible prices, while paying our staff above the minimum wage which is prevalent in the food industry (we are a Real Living Wage employer which is very important to us). However, paying thousands of pounds to profit driven, unscrupulous review sites such as TrustPilot, is not something we will be doing, no matter how hard they try to coerce us. If you want genuine reviews of our company, go to eBay or Amazon, rather than the review sites that we do not engage with.
No doubt publishing this post will result in even more negative reviews on TrustPilot, but the many thousands of satisfied regular customers that continue to come back to us, confirms our belief that, like our eBay and Amazon feedback rating, we offer a great service to over 99.9% of our customers.
