Somnolent

Carrie-Ann Skinner, PC Advisor
Nov 13, 2008 3:00 pm

Trustpilot has launched a free toolbar designed to let web users know if e-tailers are trustworthy.

Once the toolbar is installed, net users will see a green, yellow or red icon displayed in the righthand side of their browser. The icon is determined by reviews of the e-tailer by other customers. Trustpilot created a database of more than one million reviews of over 17,000 e-tailers.

This database has been used to assign a rating between 1 and 100 to every vendor. The higher the score, the more likely a vendor is to achieve a green icon rather than amber or red.

The traffic light signals will also appear next to search results when Google is used to search for a particular vendor.

"Many people use a search engine to determine whether or not they should purchase from a company. The problem is that you get millions of results -- and it takes forever. The idea with TrustPilot is that we collect all the information and give one easy overview of it," said Peter Holten Muhlmann, CEO of TrustPilot

Compatible with Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (all versions including IE8) and Opera, the Trustpilot toolbar is available to download from Trustpilot's website now for free.