A note before you start
Trustie does not give legal or regulatory advice. Only you (and your compliance advisor, if relevant) know what rules apply to your specific products, your specific jurisdiction, and your specific business. What this feature does is give you the tools to implement whatever guidance you’ve already received. The examples and defaults in this tile are just examples; the words you put into your own review form should come from advice that fits your business.
If you’re selling products where customer reviews could create advertising-compliance risk and you’re not sure what your obligations are, talk to a compliance professional in your field before configuring this. Trustie is a reviews tool, not a source of regulatory guidance.
Who tends to use this
Shops whose product categories commonly come with advertising rules around what customers can say in reviews. Common examples:
- Supplements, nutraceuticals, vitamins
- Cosmetics and skincare (where some claims can move them into therapeutic-goods territory)
- Health practitioner product lines
- CBD, hemp, and adjacent categories
- Medical devices
- Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, gambling, financial services
Whether these apply to your shop, and what the specific rules are, depends on your jurisdiction and your regulator. What Trustie handles is the mechanics: making it easier for you to guide reviewers and flag phrases you’ve decided to watch for.
What goes wrong without it
The easy assumption: “just let customers write what they want, we’ll moderate.” That works for most shops. For shops where certain customer phrases create advertising-compliance risk, the failure mode is predictable: a well-meaning customer writes a glowing review, the review contains a phrase your regulator doesn’t want associated with your product, it auto-publishes, it gets indexed, and you have a problem.
The problem isn’t the customer — they’re being honest. The problem is a review system that treats every review the same whether it’s for a t-shirt or for a product with advertising rules attached.
Most review plugins offer generic moderation as a toggle. Regulated-category shops need something more specific: guidance before the customer writes (so most customers never write the risky phrase in the first place), and flagging at moderation (so the risky phrases you missed still catch your eye).
How Trustie handles it
Turn on the trustie.regulated_products feature, then on any review form mark it as regulated. The regulation editor is one modal with four things you fill in yourself:
- Intro message. A short paragraph telling the reviewer this product has some rules around what can be published. Written in your voice. Whatever your compliance advice says is appropriate.
- What reviewers CAN say — examples. Shown with a green tick. You decide what these are based on your regulator guidance.
- What reviewers CAN’T say — examples. Shown with a red cross. Again, these come from your compliance advice, not from Trustie.
- Flagged keywords. Phrases that, if a review contains them, should be surfaced prominently in the moderation queue for you to eyeball before approval.
Trustie does not pre-populate these with “compliant” wording. The defaults are examples that you should replace with your own.
What the customer sees
When a customer opens the review form for a regulated product, the guidance notice appears prominently: shield icon, your intro paragraph, the green-tick CAN-say examples you configured, the red-cross CAN’T-say examples you configured, and a reassurance at the bottom — even if the customer’s review text ends up not being publishable, their star rating and other answers are still shown on the site.
That reassurance matters. Honest customers who might otherwise feel rejected if a moderator holds their text see that their rating still contributes to the shop’s aggregate.
Most honest customers, reading clear examples of what they can and can’t say, adjust their language without needing any further prompt. The ones who write phrases you care about anyway are caught in the next step.
Keyword flagging for moderation
The flagged keywords list you configure per form is the mechanism that catches risky phrases. When a review on that form is submitted, Trustie scans the body for each keyword. Matches land in the moderation queue with the matched phrase highlighted, so the moderator sees exactly what triggered the flag and decides in context.
Matching is a simple case-insensitive substring check. “cure” catches “cured” and “curing”; it also catches “obscured” if you’re not careful with your list, so keep the keyword set specific.
A customer writing “my doctor diagnosed me with X and this product helped” is doing something different from a customer claiming the product itself diagnoses or heals. Human moderation, supported by the flag, is how that distinction gets made.
Typical keyword lists
The kinds of lists shops actually configure (yours will depend on your category and compliance advice):
- Therapeutic claims (supplements, skincare, health products): cure, cures, cured, treats, treatment, heal, healed, diagnoses, prescribed, side effect, symptom relief.
- Customer-service triggers (any shop wanting to triage service problems via reviews): “never arrived”, “damaged”, “wrong size”.
- Obscene or abusive language: the words you don’t want on your public site.
- Competitor mentions (if you want to know when reviews name competitors): the brand names you care about.
Each form carries its own list. Forms that don’t need keyword flagging leave the list empty.
The feature is a notification layer; you still moderate every flagged review manually.
Assigning a regulated form to your products
Forms are assigned to products three ways: a specific form for a specific product (product-level override), a form for a whole category (category-level — e.g., a “Supplements” category uses the regulated form), or the default form for everything else. Most shops set the regulated form at category level.
Are you considering Yotpo, Bazaarvoice, or a regulated-industry SaaS?
Yotpo and Bazaarvoice at enterprise tiers offer regulated-content workflows with automated policy enforcement, multi-moderator sign-off, ML-backed claim detection, and audit reporting specifically designed for regulator requests. They function this way: reviews pass through their platform’s policy pipeline before publishing, with automated scoring and routing.
Industry-specific review SaaS products for pharma or medical devices exist too, typically priced for enterprise and tightly coupled to regulator-specific compliance frameworks.
Trustie Pro’s regulated mode functions this way: human-guided workflow where you configure the guidance and flagging based on advice you’ve received, and your moderator makes the call on each review. Not automated decisioning. Not ML. Designed to be the right shape for small and mid-size shops that need sensible guardrails and know their own regulator context, not for enterprise compliance operations.
Frequently asked
Do I need a lawyer or compliance advisor to configure this? That’s your call, and it depends on the stakes in your category. Trustie gives you the editor and the flagging tools; the wording of your intro, the CAN/CAN’T examples, and the keyword list should come from whatever compliance guidance is appropriate for your business. For higher-stakes categories, running your configuration past a professional advisor is a good idea. Trustie can’t tell you whether you need one — that’s what an advisor is for.
Does Trustie ship with compliant wording? No. The defaults in the regulation editor are example placeholders to show you what the field does, not legally validated text. Replace them with your own.
I’m not in Australia / the UK / the US. Does this still work for me? Yes. Trustie has no built-in knowledge of any specific regulator. The tools (guidance notice, keyword flagging, form assignment, moderation workflow) work the same way regardless of jurisdiction. Your compliance advice determines what goes into them.
Can I enable it just for certain products, not a whole category? Yes. Form assignment works at product level (override), category level (most common), or default. Most shops set the regulated form at category level and use product-level overrides for exceptions.
Does the guidance notice appear on the product page, or only the review form? Only when the review form is open. The notice guides the person writing, not every product-page visitor.
Is there an audit trail? Only when the audit log is switched on (it’s off by default to keep the database small). Once enabled, review approvals, rejections, edits, and responses are logged via the audit log with who did what and when — useful if you ever need to demonstrate your moderation process. See the Audit log feature for details on enabling it.