TrustScore & shop trust: what reviews do at checkout

Around 70% of all carts get abandoned, and a visible, real review profile addresses the most common reason at unknown shops: missing trust.

The scale: the Baymard numbers

The Baymard Institute maintains a meta-study across dozens of investigations into cart abandonment. The average has sat stably around 70% for years, and part of that is plain browsing with no intent to buy. At shops the buyer does not know, though, what decides is the instant before entering the card, when the question comes up: is this store legit? That is the moment a visible TrustScore works in, or its absence does.

Visible all the way into search results

The effect starts before the shop: Google shows seller ratings directly in search ads and documents in its own Ads help that these rating stars increase ad click-through rates. A credible review profile therefore sells twice: once in the search result, once at checkout.

Why "verified" is the differentiator

In 2022, the European Commission checked websites for their handling of reviews in a coordinated review sweep: at 55% of the examined sites there were doubts whether the reviews were genuine. That is the context every shop competes in today, because buyers now assume fake reviews are around. In practice it means reviews attached to real orders, whose origin a checker can follow.

The mechanics: recency and continuity

A TrustScore is not a one-off project. It lives on continuously fresh reviews from real users: a score with regular inflow reads as a living shop, a frozen one as a risk. Lutendo testers run through your real order flow, that is order, delivery and where relevant also returns, and write what they experienced. The checkout numbers in our page widget are deliberately marked as illustration; the numbers in this article are the documented ones.