Can We Trust TrustedCompany?

TrustedCompany has just sealed a USD 1 million of Series A funding from three major investors. The fund is obtained to enhance their ideas by protecting online shoppers from the possibility of getting scammed based on consumer reviews. Nevertheless, after paying a visit to the platform and analyzing the posted comments, we were forced to grow our suspicion towards the startup. Can we really trust TrustedCompany?

TrustedCompany was established less than a year ago, in November 2013, and headquartered in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The services are similar to what Indonesia’s Polisi Online has to offer, but anyone may contribute a review of particular e-commerce platforms to TrustedCompany's database.

Sadly but true, this factor might be an advantage, as well as disadvantage, for the startup at the same time. How can we trust TrustedCompany when it values Indonesia’s e-commerce giants as one of its lowest performers?

User reviews, which becomes the only source of information that TrustedCompany relies on, is our root of suspicion. Imagine this: users can freely give any review they want without having to validate or even verify their words. It only takes a simple step of registration to fully write their reviews, be it positive or negative ones.

This contradicts what the startup posts on its FAQ page. There, they nicely states that users who want to post their reviews about particular e-commerce websites must confirm their order ID to validate their membership in the reviewed websites. Well, it’s all lies! We saw our friend freely posted pretty much everything without having to validate anything. That’s why we really doubt that the reviews posted on the platform are really written by "ordinary" customers.

In fact, we found out that most of the reviews posted there were well-organized. As journalists who have dealt with language almost our entire time, we can tell that those "nice and neat" piece of writings didn't come from common "ordinary users".  You can see an example of such reviews below.

Another TrustedCompany’s weakling was its words to give strict supervision to the reviews to avoid any harmful possibility. This was explicitly stated by its internal team on its FAQ page. Nonetheless, the truth is far afield.

Moreover, TrustedCompany’s way of ranking e-commerce startups has drawn another doubt. As you may see below, five top platforms according to the startup are less ‘appropriate’ than the ones listed as its lowest five. One of those least performers was even the one crowned as one of most successful e-commerce websites in Indonesia by a research center.

To be honest, we expected TrustedCompany to be much more credible than it is now. This is based on our appreciation towards the startup’s noble intention, which is to protect the Indonesian e-commerce consumers from online fraud. However, it seems that TrustedCompany has yet put itself in a level where we can trust it. Thus, we sincerely wish that the startup can prove that we are wrong.

[Illustration: Shutterstock]