Platform guides

Trusted Shops reviews: certification, costs and data you get back

3 October 2026 · JustReview

Trusted Shops reviews are the ratings and comments that buyers leave for an online shop that holds a Trusted Shops membership, usually after an invitation sent once their order is done. They feed a public profile, the Trustbadge on the shop’s own pages and the trustmark certificate with buyer protection, all of which the shop pays for under one contract. The grade you see is the average of the last twelve months only, and in our data the reviews stopped being shown as the shop’s own once its membership ended. That second point is the one most guides leave out.

JustReview imports Trusted Shops reviews into website widgets, so we hold a record of every shop that has ever connected a Trusted Shops ID to our service: twelve shops, the first in September 2020. On 3 October 2026 we checked each of those IDs against Trusted Shops itself, through its public API, its badge script and its profile pages. Four shops are still active. Eight are not, and what remains of their reviews on Trusted Shops differs from shop to shop. Below is how the platform works, what it costs as far as anyone outside a sales call can tell, and what the numbers show.

How Trusted Shops reviews work

Trusted Shops is built around a trustmark for online shops, and the review system sits inside that wider membership. Here is what we could verify on live profiles and in the API on the day we measured:

Two rows in that table cause most of the confusion. The grade and the count do not describe the same set of reviews, and the profile itself depends on the membership being active. Both are covered below, with numbers.

What Trusted Shops costs

There is no public price list. The Trusted Shops pricing page shows three packages, each with a “Contact us now” button instead of a figure. What the page does state, as of 3 October 2026:

The practical reading: Trusted Shops is an annual commitment, priced per shop, and two features merchants often assume are standard sit in higher packages. Google Integration, which carries the ratings into Google Shopping and Google Ads, is included from Pro. Product reviews, as opposed to reviews of the shop as a whole, come with Premium or as a paid add-on. If your goal is star ratings on product pages, ask for the package before you ask for the price.

The grade uses less than half of the reviews on the counter

The public quality API states its own window, activePeriodInDays: 365, and returns two counts for every shop: the reviews inside that window and the total. For the four shops in our data that are still active, the gap looks like this:

We then opened two of these profiles in a browser to see what a buyer is shown. The German one printed “3,283 reviews since 21.08.2024” above a grade of 4.69 and a set of star bars reading 84%, 9%, 2%, 2% and 3%. Those bars match the 1,657 reviews from the last year in the API almost to the decimal; they do not match the full count above them. The UK profile behaved the same way.

None of this is hidden. It is simply easy to misread. A shop with a strong history and a weak last year shows the weak year, and the opposite is true too, which makes the grade a fair picture of the present and a poor record of the past. The older reviews still count toward the total, and they are the first thing a new widget connection cannot reach, as we showed in our test of the 365-day API limit. If the two numbers on your profile and your widget disagree, why review counts do not match walks through the usual causes.

What the review data looks like when you get it back

Membership includes access to your reviews through an API, and that is where the detail behind the grade lives. Three things stood out when we went through it.

The three criteria repeat the overall rating. Every review still arrives with separate marks for delivery, goods and service. In the 40 most recent reviews of the four live shops, ten per shop, all 40 carried the same mark in all three criteria as in the overall rating. The shop-level summaries were the same: for each shop the three criteria averages equalled its overall grade to two decimal places. If you were hoping to learn whether buyers complain about couriers or about the product, those fields will not tell you any more. The comment text is the only place where that detail survives.

Comments are becoming optional in practice. Across the 2,442 Trusted Shops reviews in our database, the share with no written text has risen from almost none to more than half:

The mix of shops changes from year to year, so we checked the four shops that were with us in both 2021 and 2022. The share rose inside each of them: from 2% to 48%, from 4% to 34%, from 20% to 46% and from 35% to 42%. The live sample agrees: 19 of the 40 newest public reviews had no comment. For a shop this means about half of its future reviews will be stars without text, which matters when you choose how to show them, a point we return to in what a star rating distribution really tells buyers.

Replies are uncommon but visible. Eleven of those 40 recent reviews carried a public answer from the shop. The API returns replies together with the review, so a widget can show them.

What happens to your reviews when membership ends

This is the finding we did not expect. Of the twelve shops that connected Trusted Shops to JustReview between 2020 and 2024, eight are no longer active on the platform today. For all eight, the public API answers with the error IRRELEVANT_SHOP and the Trustbadge script for their ID no longer exists. What a buyer finds when looking them up differs:

We do not know why each shop left. It may have been a cancelled contract, a failed recertification or a closed business, and the API does not say. The time between the first and the last review we received from these shops ranged from under a year to five and a half years. What the data does show is that for every one of them, the reviews collected during membership no longer appear on Trusted Shops as that shop’s reviews. Together they make up 78.8% of all the Trusted Shops reviews we have ever imported.

Three practical points follow for anyone signing a Trusted Shops contract:

• Export your reviews while you are a member. The public API stopped answering for every shop that left, and the 365-day window means a late export misses the older years anyway.
• Take the trustmark off your site when you leave. The Trustbadge script vanishes by itself, but a static seal image or a “certified by Trusted Shops” line in your footer does not, and a trustmark marked invalid on the profile is a promise you no longer keep.
• Ask what reuse your contract allows. Whether you may keep quoting reviews collected under a membership after it ends is a question for your contract with Trusted Shops, and we would not guess at it for you.

Check the link to your profile

If your site links to your Trusted Shops profile, test the link. Profile pages now live on the domain of your target market: trustedshops.de/bewertung for Germany, trustedshops.co.uk/buyerrating for the UK, trustedshops.pl/opinia for Poland. The generic trustedshops.eu/buyerrating link, which older integrations, ours included, stored for every shop, returned a 404 for all twelve IDs on 3 October 2026, including the four live ones. The working address is inside your own Trustbadge script, so copy it from there.

Keeping Trusted Shops reviews on your own site

The reason to show Trusted Shops reviews through us is that we keep every review we import while your membership is active. The profile grade moves with a rolling year, and the API serves only that year. Our Trusted Shops reviews widget builds a history that grows with every nightly import and sits on your own domain, next to Google or any other source you connect, which we explain in how to embed several review sources in one widget. Each supported source and what it needs is listed in supported review sources.

Two caveats. A new connection starts with the last 365 days, because that is all the API hands over, so earlier years only come in if you connected while they were still inside the window. And a widget cannot replace the trustmark: buyer protection belongs to the membership.

Trusted Shops is included from the Plus plan at EUR 9 a month, with a 7-day free trial; every plan is on the pricing page. Create your account, connect the Trusted Shops profile you manage, and compare the imported count with the “last 365 days” figure rather than the all-time total.

How this was measured

All checks ran on 3 October 2026. We took every Trusted Shops connector in the JustReview production database that holds a shop ID, twelve in total; four older records without an ID were left out. For each ID we called the public quality endpoint and the public review list of the Trusted Shops API, requested the Trustbadge script, and requested the profile page on eleven Trusted Shops domains (de, pl, co.uk, at, ch, fr, nl, it, es, eu, com), opening the pages that answered in a headless browser. Review counts, the share without text and the replies come from the 2,442 Trusted Shops reviews in our database and the 40 newest public reviews of the four live shops. Shops are not named because they are our customers. Prices are quoted from the Trusted Shops pricing page on the same day. Twelve shops is a small group that chose to connect a review widget, so treat the departure rate as what we saw, not as a rate for Trusted Shops as a whole.