Google’s new Seller Ratings threshold lowered to 100

Google seller ratings are an automatic extension that is displayed globally to customers to help them find businesses that offer quality services.

Up until now, the current score that was generated for a domain was comprised of data from global sources into a single score. The extension appeared automatically if a business had 150 unique reviews, and a 3.5/5 rating or above. But this has now changed.

Two things.

First of all, Google will begin displaying Seller Ratings on a per-country basis to better reflect your customers’ experience in a specific country.

Second of all, Google has lowered the Seller Ratings threshold of reviews required to 100 per country, instead of 150 global reviews. The reviews from users in a particular country will only contribute to the company’s rating in that country.

This is now live in English speaking markets and more countries are coming soon according to Google.

• Go to the following URL: https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/metrics?q=example.com&v=2&c=xx

• Replace "example.com" with your domain (without "www.")

• Replace “xx” with a country code (us, dk, fr, en, de, gb, se etc.)

Firstly, you will need to maintain a high standard of service, so that your average review score is above 3.5/5.

Next, you’ll need to be collecting enough reviews. You will need to have at least 100 reviews in the last 12 months in a given country, for your business to be eligible for GSR in that country. This means that you need to send invitations to your customers to invite them to review your services.

If your conversion rate for review invitations is around 10% or more, you need to be sending minimum 1,000 invitations per year, per country to collect more than 100 reviews.

If you’re sending more than 2,000 invitations per country every 12 months, you should be safe (assuming your response is above 5% and your score is above 3.5/5).

If you’re sending less than 2,000 invitations and/or have a response rate of less than 5%, you will need to take action.

As a Google Review Partner, and as review platform with more than 50,000,000 reviews on almost 250,000 domains worldwide, we’ve looked into our data to help estimate the effect of these changes, assuming that customers are only using Trustpilot reviews.

We have looked at all domains who have collected verified reviews in the last 12 months using Trutspilot's invitations service and have estimated the effect of changes in GSR rules to these.

We’ve excluded domains with below 100 verified reviews, as these don’t qualify.

As seen above, this is great news for companies with 100 to 149 invited reviews per year range, giving them the opportunity to gain GSRs when it was previously out of reach. Indeed, about 73% of them should qualify for GSR in at least 1 country where they didn’t before. Every domain that qualified under the old rules should be able to qualify in at least one market now.

When looking at companies with 150 to 249 reviews, we estimate that around 94% will keep their qualification in at least one country, and only around 5% will lose it completely.

Please note, GSRs can be obtained by collecting feedback from multiple sources, so we can only speak about reviews that have been left on Trustpilot.

However, according to our data, we believe the following is an educated and directional guess on how these changes will affect most companies.

We estimate that 7 times more domains are likely to gain GSRs in at least 1 market than lose GSRs in all markets. However, that is looking at GSRs as a binary Yes/No question. The changes will make it much more complex to navigate for companies.

Here’s our research:

Our data suggests that many companies may lose GSRs in multiple markets.

Example3.com above has 10 countries with just 1-10 reviews and will therefore lose GSRs in these countries. However, countries with only one review/country suggest that reviews aren’t really important in these markets, therefore, losing GSRs shouldn’t be a problem to them.

As mentioned in the previous section, you need 100 unique reviews per country within a 12 month period, and a rating of 3.5/5 stars or better.

Reach out to your Trustpilot customer success manager to see if there’s anything you can do to increase your number of reviews.

If you’re not collecting enough reviews and not sending enough invites a year, you’ve come to the right place!
Indeed, at Trustpilot, we like making life easier for you and your customers! That’s why we’ve developed invitation templates with dynamic content that let you personalise and customise your emails.

Our platform includes a wide range of invitation methods that support every type of business and helps you get as many reviews as possible, thanks to our automated system. Indeed, every time someone purchases something from you, Trustpilot sends an email invite on your behalf, allowing you to build up your number of reviews, and therefore qualify for Seller Ratings.

Trustpilot’s optimised review invitation templates and Reminders have an average response rate of 11%. If you use both, you should only need to send 1,000 invitations yearly to potentially qualify for Seller Ratings as you should be collecting +100 reviews for that country.

Please bear in mind that collecting 100 reviews for a specific country doesn’t guarantee you will acquire Seller Ratings. This is up to Google.

If you think your customers might miss your first email, worry no more! We’ve got you covered with our invitation Reminder template. A Reminder is sent to customers who didn’t write a review (you can set the delay). These can increase your conversion rate by up to 35%.

If you’d like to hear more about how Trustpilot can help you collect more than 100 reviews, check out our support centre, or request a demo today!

If you have more questions about the new Google Seller Ratings feature, please get in touch with the Google Ads team.