Advertising complaint against window firm dropped

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has ruled that a  window firm’s reviews were genuine after a complaint was made that testimonials were not.

A website for West Yorkshire Windows, seen on 21 August 2018, included a number of reviews under its Reviews tab. A complainant challenged whether the testimonials were genuine and took the issue to the ASA; which has since said that the complaint could not be upheld.

The ASA said: “West Yorkshire Windows said that the testimonials were from their Trustpilot page. They provided information from Trustpilot that verified the identity of the reviewers, along with the time that each review was posted and the purchase that the customer had made before leaving the review. West Yorkshire Windows also provided a copy of an invoice for one of the reviews which showed that the purchase that had been made could be matched directly to the review that had been posted to Trustpilot.

“The ASA considered that consumers would expect the reviews featured on the website to be the genuine views of customers who had purchased their products. The complainant was concerned that because several reviews featured similar wording they may not be from genuine customers.

“However, we considered that the evidence West Yorkshire Windows provided demonstrated that the reviews were genuine, because it included the times that the reviews were posted, the products purchased, contact details for the reviewers and an invoice to match one of the reviews signed by the customer. We concluded that the ad was not misleading.”