TrustedCompany.com, an e-commerce review site for emerging markets including India, has raised $1 million in Series A funding led by Tengelmann Ventures, with participation from 500 Startups and Asia Venture Group, reports TechCrunch. The company plans to use the funds raised to strengthen its Southeast Asia presence and enter new markets like Brazil & Africa. Launched in November 2013, TrustedCompany aggregates reviews on e-commerce sites across various categories like electronics, baby products, daily deals, fashion products, and travel among others. Users can search for any company name of their preference and browse through reviews for that specific site. It claims to have listed over 50,000 companies on its platform at the moment. Strangely, we noticed that the site offers several listings for a single domain sometimes, each of which has reviews about the site. For instance, Flipkart has six different listings, each of which has a different rating and a different trust score. This could confuse consumers on which reviews is legitimate and which one is not. One can also submit their own reviews by signing for the service via Facebook or email. Interestingly, as of now, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in place to verify if a user is an actual customer of the website or not. The company does claim to take measures against such reviews and tells users to contact them, although the link provided is broken at the time of writing this article. For Businesses: Listed companies can be “claimed” by owners after verification which can then interact with its reviewers for free. The companies can also sign…
