Was looking for an honest and reliable gas engineer. Had lots of problems with them in past so tried Rated People a website where ‘We have thousands of recommended tradesmen across the UK’.

As soon as I posted the job this guy rang up pushing to come an quote for the job. Was a little unsure so asked him how much it would cost to quote. He told me it was completely free. Ok – nothing to loose.

He turned up the next day. Looked at the boiler and quoted £309 for the PCB with £90 for fitting vat inclusive. Sounded high so I said I would consider it and get another quote. The story changed and I was pushed into paying £30 for ‘diagnosing the problem’. I demanded a VAT receipt which he couldn’t supply – just a scrappy bit of paper with cost and job.

Rang Rated People to complain. Was told there was nothing the could do and that I should just post an honest review of the tradespeople on their website.

A gas engineer friend of mine costed the part for me at £160 + vat and told me it’s a 10 minute job. Total cost £250 vat incl.

I wrote a simple, factual review and rated the firm with a single star.

Next day the tradesman calls up offering to refund the £30 as long as I withdraw the review. Told me he ‘get’s lots of business through the website.’

Wondered about the ethics of not warning prospective customer and rang Rated People to discuss it.

The review had already been removed because ‘no work was undertaken’.

Rated People are funded by tradespeople paying for customer leads. Very dodgy.

Any suggestions as to what I should do next? Wonder what Trading Standards would have to say.

Found this Guardian article online.

The whole job has been removed from ratedpeople.com.

Forgive me for the rant but can’t help feeling this all a bit dishonest. Avoid!

Was looking for an honest and reliable gas engineer

A gas engineer friend of mine

am i missing something?

He works for a big company who charge very high rates. Was also busy.

He works for a big company who charge very high rates. Was also busy.

Your post suggests neither of these are the case 😕

From Guardian article:

The website says that its fair and unbiased ratings system allows customers to select tradespeople independently.

Finding a good tradesman is never easy. These websites sell a service to the builder, gas fitter etc so they will do what ever to protect their customers. I am always very wary of such sites. As you have found what they promise and deliver do not seem to quite match.

As for your bolier man quoting inc VAT when it sounds like he may not even be registered. Is he Gas safe, was Corgi.

Yeah only real way is to ask around friends/neighbours, those sites generally charge the supplier a fee to be listed so it’s in their interest they keep them happy and they aren’t going to be happy with negative reviews so the whole model is flawed. However if you charged the consumer to access the site no one would ever go there so it’s lose-lose.

No getting around the fact that Rated People are being paid by the trade.

Guardian article says it all really.

@ njee20

Costing a part is five minute phone call.

A dishonest cowboy can (and often does) cost more than an expensive large professional company.

You might as well use Yellow Pages and a pin in that case.

I had a poor experience with this website too, had some kitchen fitters ring about quoting for a job, none turned up. Eventually got a mate’s brother around after I mentioned it in passing.

If you have a friend/neighbour/relative you can call on, always do that. It’s a lot more reliable.

+ 1 for speaking to people

Ive found all sorts through speaking to folk i go riding wrh .

Ive not been local to the area very long so finding reliable tradesmen/garages/ wood sources has been a trial but a combination of asking neighbours , on here and out on rides has seen me good so far.

Dodgy.
I use checkatrade.
Rightly or wrongly.
We had a big argument recently when we were told by one company we needed a new bolier at £2k.
When the next guy, said no just a service,and got the thing working perfectly, I complained about the first guy.
The first then complained about the chap who serviced it, saying a sevice was unsafe !!
The independent gas checker came round,and said work was fine.
Seems all three guys knew each other.
The view of the service guys was that no one wants to properly service anymore and he was not surprised to find us being told new boiler only.
Ho hum..
Pays to ring around.
The service guy got a review from me that is sure..

yep, it’s painful. I think the trick is to write a negative review in such a way that it won’t get pulled but ordinary folks can understand to avoid.

I had a review of a printer pulled from a big site once and when I rand to complain they said ‘we have a relationship to maintain with the supplier’ 🙁 . I rewrote it slightly milder and it got to stay and now when I read other reviews you can sort of read between the lines to see where there are problems.

Had the same problem with a restaurant review site as well. Review didn’t go up until I complained :(.

+1 for friend/neighbour/relative

I’m missing the same thing as Jam bo???

Haha leffe boy i had that on trip advisor – then they put it up with a comment calling me a liar – me and the 30 other bad reviews on your trip advisor page love…..if only i found it before i booked

This was my review:

‘Wayne rang almost immediately after I posted this job. Felt I was being pushed into accepting but he said the quote would be free so I had nothing to loose.

After spending ten minutes on the boiler his quote sounded high so I said I would get comparative quotes. He then demanded £30 for ‘diagnosing the problem’. I reluctantly paid and asked for a VAT receipt. All I got was a piece of notepad paper.

A gas engineer friend of mine says the parts should cost much less than was quoted.’

Suspect ‘review guidelines’ are a get out clause.

same with ebay. You can’t even leave negative feedback for buyers any more even if they are complete arseholes and mess you about.

The review had already been removed because ‘no work was undertaken’.

Perhaps they could explain what you paid £30 for then?
http://www.ratedpeople.com scam fraud ?

It cost the tradesman 20 quid a month plus 20%vat and extra for each lead provided.

What we as qualified and experienced tradesmen need is a rated customers website where we can rate customers on their service,

free tea,

an accessable toilet,

parking on their drive,

kids who are under control, and dont cry at the noise, dont steal your tools, try and pick up power tools, put toys and junk on the stairs,

dogs that dont try and bite you, and the when they do, the customer says he has never done that before, and seem genuinely surprised when you walk off the job, saying ive never done that before

Parners who dont have domestic rows in front of you,

Customers who pay on time,

things that can fall of shelves or walls moved before we arrive,

and quite a few other things.

If such a website did exist it would be flooded with us proffesionals tellng it as it is, all anonymously of course, you wouldnt want to slag a customer off in front of their neighbours/family, and humiliate them would you.

But saying that we have some wonderful lovely customers a lot who are freinds, and older ones get biscuits or chocolates at christmas.

I know where project is coming from

My brother in law was a chippy and the not being paid thing was horrendous

But I think OP has point. A rating site should be just what it says it is..

Project +1.
I run a NTAB(*) surchage on my jobs.

(*)as in No Tea And Biscuits!

I can’t believe you paid the £30!

I changed the PCB on my boiler, BTW. Ordered the part through plumb center, and took 10 mins to fit. £100 total cost. And I am a technical dunce who usually fits a bike part, then fits it again when it either falls off or I realise it’s in the wrong way.

I can’t believe you paid the £30!

+1

As long as fools pay this having previously been told there’s no charge they’ll carry on doing it.

The whole system is total Bo**ox in my very humble opinion. Most punters don’t realise that tradesmen are paying to pick up the jobs. “Conflict of interest” doesn’t come close 🙁

D.

Rated People? Stay well away, in my experience.
Engaged a recommended plumber who was basically incompetent. Failed to complete the job properly, caused various bits of damage to the house and the stuff he was supposed to be fitting, and then threatened me when I refused to pay him the full amount he invoiced for.
I gave him an honest, factual review (no ranting) which he responded to by calling me a conman.
Trusted word of mouth is the only recommendation worth having.

Yes, I wouldn’t recommend Ratedpeople.com. Scam, fraud? Not sure but certainly a conflict of interest and I feel like I’ve been duped.

Coming from NZ I was so surprised at the excellent consumer protection in the UK. What a contrast with tradespeople. We’ve had so many bad experiences I won’t bore you with them but it’s a scandal.

No wonder elderly people get such a hard time.

just to add one more experience – my other half found a roofer through one of these sites – I can’t remember if it was ratedpeople, trustedtrader or another site.

He didn’t do the work as agreed in writing in advance, and crucially failed to provide proof that the work had been done either (we needed photos of before and after as that part of the roof isn’t visible and he agreed to this as a condition of the overall work).

When we asked him to go back and get the “after” photos he was very rude, and when we withheld 50% of his invoice amount until a photo was produced the roofer’s girlfriend started to email and text us with texts that were frankly, bordering on being pretty abusive.

When the final payment was made we wrote a review that just stated the facts of our experience. The website rejected the review and when we called them they basically said on the phone that although they had received similar feedback from other clients on the abusive style of communication but couldn’t allow reviews to be published that referred to that as they were potentially defamatory and could therefore not be published under the site’s rules.

To be honest these “trusted trader” websites where the trader pays are always going to kowtow to the trader’s interests as that’s where the money lies so I don’t really put much faith in them that the reviews will be balanced.

I’m so glad I do all my own electrics, plumbing, boiler maintenance….

just to complete the loop of shame:
Here is the spammer from Rated People trying to convince us that they are not a fraud or a scam or a con, but they are highly professional: http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/rated-people-highly-professional-company

To complete the picture:
there was a new member joined the forum this morning to start a fresh thread about the company above. Despite never having posted here before, they came to a mountain bike forum to praise that company for help in supplying a gardener. Coincidence?

Hope no forum rules have been broken, if so I apologise in advance, but the opening post of the new thread is copied below due to it’s relevance to this thread. I am making no comment as to the authenticity of the post, but hopefully it can be left so that others can make their own conclusions.

Rated People – highly professional company

sampemberton – Member
I would like to highly recommend using Rated People. I ventured onto their website through lack of contacts for garden maintenance. As a single woman, I felt the best way forward would to have a rated tradesman.
Rated People didnt let me down.
Paulfrom Bennetts in Surbition answered my ad within an hour.
Really friendly and hard working. He did a fantastic job to my garden and I was extremely happy with the cost.
I would recommend using Rated People to everyone and will be using them again!

Edit: as alfabus says first^^^

Love the attitude of the tradesmen above.

It’s customers who are the menace and it’s down to them to provide tea and biscuits!

Customer service? Forget it. Turn up late or not at all, over charge for everything, muck around (drinking tea!), do a rough job, damage things, demand payment in cash then bugger off.

Compared to my home country, the service is very, very poor. Office of Fair Trade need to crack down on the industry.

Thankfully, there are a few reliable and honest tradespeople about.

(smug) lots of my recent work has been through word of mouth referral and repeat customers (/smug) 🙂

I’ve never really got the whole expectation of tea thing. If I get it, all well and good. If not, I’ve got a flask.
Relating to that though, one customer sticks in my memory. I arrived in the morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee from the fancy coffee maker and was offered a tea or coffee. Ooooh yes please I ll have a coffee thanks.
Two minutes later she handed me a cup of instant dishwater. 👿

I have the opportunity to scam people all the time by hiding stuff/ using cheaper materials etc but don’t. These things, apart from being a crap thing to do, can come back to haunt you.

I looked at a fitting recently where the chimney had been ‘relined’ by a local builder 8 years before. There was a metre of flexi liner poked up the chimney (upside down!) and cemented in. I’d love to have heard the conversation when the customer called him 😆

More often than not I find myself doing little extras, an example being sticking down some loose slates whilst on a roof. People are very thankful for stuff like that, I know I would be. It takes me 5 mins to do but is worth a lot in terms of reputation.

@bedmaker you’re the kind of guy the industry needs more of! Good on you.

Debmaker at work earlier

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-7f7vVCqvI[/video]

😀

can a premier user get with the tagging on this thread 🙂

Free tea, biscuits and parking? How many employees in other fields get that? Suck it up princesses.

I always provide tea, biscuits and snacks for builders, sometimes buy them lunch. I figure it cuts both ways, you want good service, you need to be a good customer. Always pay within 48hours of invoice as well.