How to Get More Trustpilot Reviews and Use Invitations Correctly

How Trustpilot invitations work

Trustpilot's core model is the service review invitation: you, or an integration you've connected, send a customer an invitation tied to a specific order or interaction, and Trustpilot handles the review request and collection on your behalf once it can verify that interaction. Trustpilot's current rules require invitations to be tied to a genuine purchase or verified interaction with your business — you can't invite someone who never actually did business with you, and bulk-importing a generic contact list for invitations is against their terms. Running Trustpilot invitations alongside Google means every customer who completes an order gets both, through whichever integration you've set up, rather than picking one platform per customer.

Trustpilot also calculates a TrustScore for your business profile, built from the volume, recency, and distribution of the reviews you collect. The exact weighting Trustpilot uses isn't fully public and has changed over time, but the practical takeaway is consistent: a steady stream of invitations that reflects your real order volume moves the score more reliably than a one-time push to collect a batch of reviews and then going quiet.

Set up invitations correctly

1. Connect a real order or interaction source

Trustpilot verifies invitations against actual business activity — most commonly through an integration with your ecommerce platform, CRM, or order system, or through Trustpilot's own invitation tools. The invitation needs to reference a specific, verifiable interaction, not just a name and email pulled from a general contact list.

2. Time the invitation to delivery, not purchase

Send it once the customer has actually received the product or experienced the service. Sending immediately after checkout, before anything has shipped, almost guarantees a review with no real opinion behind it — "ordered, haven't received it yet." For physical goods, that usually means a delay tied to your typical shipping window; for services, it means tying the send to a completion event the same way you would for any other review-request channel.

3. Keep the invitation message compliant

Trustpilot restricts what you can say in the invitation itself — you generally can't ask customers to leave only positive feedback, offer any incentive for a review, or imply that leaving a review is required to get support or a refund. The invitation should simply ask for an honest review of the order or interaction, full stop.

4. Add the Trustpilot widget to your own site, too

Invitations drive new reviews; a widget on your site surfaces the reviews you've already collected to people who are already looking at your products or pricing page. The two work together — the widget doesn't generate new reviews on its own, but it gives shoppers who are already close to buying one more reason to trust what they're seeing.

Timing: when to send the invitation

For ecommerce, a common approach is two invitations: an early one tied to delivery, asking about the ordering and delivery experience, and a later one tied to product use if the product itself needs time to evaluate. Trustpilot's own guidance generally favors giving the customer enough time to form a genuine opinion over rushing the ask — check their current documentation for any specific minimum delay they recommend for your business category.

What a compliant invitation email includes

• A clear reference to the specific order or interaction ("your order #1234" or "your appointment on [date]").
• A direct link to leave the review — Trustpilot generates this per invitation.
• A neutral ask for honest feedback, not a push toward a positive one.
• No incentive, discount, or conditional language tied to leaving a review.

If you're building out your request templates for any channel, our review request email template is a reasonable starting point to adapt for a Trustpilot invitation email layer, keeping Trustpilot's content rules in mind.

Why Trustpilot alongside Google, not instead

Trustpilot and Google serve different moments and different audiences. Google is checked by people searching locally — "plumber near me," "best dentist in [city]" — and ranks review count and recency into local search visibility directly. Trustpilot is checked by people evaluating a brand before purchase, especially online: ecommerce and SaaS buyers often look specifically for a Trustpilot score as a trust signal before entering payment details, in a way they wouldn't for a local service business. A business that sells online and also has a physical presence — or serves local customers who later compare brands online — benefits from both: Google for discovery, Trustpilot for the purchase-stage trust check.

There's also a practical, less obvious reason to run both: they capture different customers. Someone who trusts Trustpilot as a review source might never think to check Google for a brand they only interact with online, and vice versa for a customer who defaults to Google for everything they search for. Running invitations on just one platform means you're only ever visible to the half of your audience that already prefers it.

Industries where Trustpilot matters most

Ecommerce, SaaS, travel booking, insurance, and other primarily-online purchases lean on Trustpilot heavily, because the business the customer is evaluating doesn't have a storefront they can walk past — the review profile is one of the only trust signals available before paying. Local, in-person services, like a dentist, a landscaper, or a mechanic, get comparatively little benefit from Trustpilot specifically, because customers in those categories are searching Google Maps and reading Google reviews instead.

Running both from one trigger

Operationally, there's no reason to run two separate manual processes for Google and Trustpilot. The same order-complete or job-complete trigger that kicks off a Google review request can also kick off a Trustpilot invitation on its own timeline — a different delay if Trustpilot's review window should differ from Google's — with the same single-reminder and opt-out rules applied to each channel independently.

Respond to what comes back

Trustpilot, like Google, lets you reply publicly to reviews, and a calm, specific reply to a critical review does more for a prospective buyer's trust than a page of five-star reviews with no replies at all. If a review points to a real problem, fix it and say so in the reply. If it's inaccurate, Trustpilot has a flagging process — but that's for genuine policy violations, not reviews you simply don't like.

Measuring whether it's working

Track invitation volume against order volume first — if you're only inviting a fraction of eligible customers, that's usually a connection or trigger problem before it's a response-rate problem. From there, the same response-rate thinking that applies to any review channel applies here: watch your own trend over time rather than chasing an external benchmark, and if response rate drops after a change, check timing and message content before assuming the channel itself stopped working.

Common mistakes that get invitations rejected

• Inviting someone who never completed an order or interaction with you.
• Sending the invitation before the order has shipped or the service has happened.
• Asking only satisfied customers to leave a review — a version of gating that Trustpilot's terms specifically prohibit.
• Offering a discount, refund, or other incentive in exchange for a review.
• Reusing the same invitation template across unrelated products without tying it to the actual order.

FAQ

Do I need Trustpilot's paid plan to send invitations?

Trustpilot offers a limited free tier and paid plans that unlock higher invitation volume and automation — check current plan limits before assuming the free tier covers your volume.

Can I invite the same customer for every order?

Generally yes, tied to each new order or interaction — but don't send a fresh invitation for an order that's just a continuation of one you already asked about, like a subscription renewal, since that reads as asking the same person too often.

Should I run Trustpilot instead of Google if I can only manage one?

For a local service business, Google first. For ecommerce or SaaS selling primarily online, Trustpilot often matters more at the point of purchase — but most businesses that sell online also show up in local or branded search, so running both pays off once you can.

Will inviting every customer hurt my TrustScore if some leave critical reviews?

No — and trying to avoid that by only inviting customers you expect to be happy is exactly the gating behavior Trustpilot's terms prohibit. A profile with a handful of critical reviews alongside a strong overall average reads as more credible than a suspiciously perfect one, to buyers and to Trustpilot's own detection systems alike.

Run Google and Trustpilot invitations from the same place. See Tailwind pricing.