There are 2 main factors that determine whether you should leverage Trustpilot to grow your D2C eCommerce brand or not:
- Your brand size/power
- Your main customer acquisition channel
Let’s go over both of them.
If you prefer to watch, a video version is here:
Brand Size
If your brand has global recognition and a market cap of over $1B, it’s unlikely that your Trustpilot profile will impact your growth. For example, Amazon:
However, if you have fewer unique monthly visitors than Trustpilot, you should care about your Trustpilot rating.
The majority of you reading this article would fall under this bucket, as only a handful of companies have a higher amount of traffic than Trustpilot. Have a look at their stats:
Trustpilot is ranked among the 1000 most visited websites, so if you’re not there yet, you might as well take advantage of the traffic channel they built to grow your brand.
This leads me to the next factor...
Customer Acquisition Channel
If you have at least 50% coming from Google (organic + paid), Trustpilot likely impacts your brand perception.
Let's look at one example below:
Most of Tirebuyer’s non-direct traffic (new visitors) is coming from Search.
Now, let's see what their branded search result looks like:
As you can see, the second result after the main website is Trustpilot.
And this is considering that their profile is not as active, with only 300+ reviews.
So what do we learn from this?
Google prioritizes a brand’s Trustpilot profile when a person is searching for reviews, and shows it right after the main website. All because Trustpilot is the biggest third-party platform in this context.
If we change the search criteria “reviews brand” 90% of the time Trustpilot page will be first. This doesn’t matter even if a brand has more Google reviews like this example:
The Google Reviews profile still doesn’t get ranked. This is surprising given that Google does prioritize their own data other 3rd party website most of the time, however when it comes to reviews, Google ones are mostly relevant for local business and locations rather than online ones.
But let’s go back for a second to the main question: “What is the impact of Trustpilot rating for new visitors?”
That is one thing that we can't answer with certainty.
However, if you are measuring your traffic sources & conversion rate of those visitors, you could estimate this by taking the conversion rate of Trustpilot referred visitors and multiplying it based on how many visitors have likely been exposed to your profile snippet in Google search results.
This is outside of the scope of this article to create a model of this kind of evaluation, but we might come back to it in the future.
At the end of the day, it will still be up to you to decide if the investment of keeping your rating satisfactory is worth it.
Apart from these main factors, there are a few other points that could also be significant in terms of how much Trustpilot impacts your brand awareness / reputation.
Your customers’ location & language
Even though English is the predominant language where Trustpilot has most influence, It isn’t spread evenly. For example, if we look at Trustpilot’s website in Canada, it has only 1M visitors per month.
While the UK website, has a whopping 14M visits per month, even though the population-wise its only x2 more of Canada
And if we look at Trustpilot’s main (.com) website, the traffic by country is even more interesting:
UK traffic is larger than the US even though the US eCommerce market is bigger by a factor than the UK one.
This shows that US consumers are less likely to be impacted by Trustpilot, while for the UK, it is very relevant, especially when you have the majority of them coming from search.
In general, we can say that Trustpilot has the biggest market share in Europe (no surprise, given it's a Denmark-based company).
So, if you have customers who are in the EU, it's likely that they will look at the Trustpilot profile if they don’t know your brand yet.
AOV (average order value)
The size of the purchase determines how much reviews influence buying decision. The larger the purchase amount and the more unique/original the product is, the more likely new customers will research it and look for social proof.
For example, it's unlikely someone will search a Trustpilot profile for toothpaste, even for an unknown brand. However for something like an e-bike, people would look for other customers feedback before they make a purchase decision.
Alternative social proof
Now all this doesn’t mean that you have to use Trustpilot specifically to impact your eCommerce brand growth.
You can also use alternative review platforms that have public profiles, like Reviews.IO.
Let's look at how they compare to Trustpilot:
Yotpo is another alternative. However, important to note that you can’t put Yotpo in the same category as Trustpilot.
Even though Yotpo has quite a bit of traffic, most of it is not related to customers searching for reviews, as they don’t have a public listing like Trustpilot.
Yotpo can still shows the size of their business customer base, but not a public listing like Trustpilot.
As you can see, the closest platforms with public profiles don’t even come close to traffic size, and even when they have more reviews than Trustpilot, they are unlikely to outrank them.
Here is an example:
Again, it depends on how your target customers make a decision, and in some cases, it might not matter that your primary review profile is not first. However, I would be concerned if it's not ranked at least on the first page.
Conlusions & Summary
For most D2C eCommerce brands Trustpilot is still relevant in 2025.
It brings the majority of Search traffic, even though the metrics will vary on your brand size, channel and customer location.
For someone in the UK, the impact might be a couple of times greater than in the US.
It boils down to if Trustpilot has an influence on new visitors that are making a buying decision, and that will impact your own decision if you want to invest in improving your Trustpilot profile in 2025.
If you do decide to go all in improving your Trustpilot score & getting more positive reviews on your Trustpilot profile without paying for premium subscriptions, then consider StackTome.
You can even try it for free for 14 days here.
Happy review gathering!
