What do you dislike about Capterra?
I am a Software Vendor and a few months back I created a profile on Capterra.com and Capterra UK is part of the same company and has the same policies) and because the profile was not complete i got in touch with them and asked them to unpublish the profile and they said that they would not unpublish it and leave the incomplete profile online and live.
CONCLUSION 1: Capterra "knowingly" publishes incomplete information about companies on their website.
I then logged into my account trying to find the "unpublish" button which was nowhere to be found.
The way they design the signup process for vendors is also design in a way so you as a vendor do not have full control over the profile.
I then asked them to remove the incomplete profile and exchanged approx 15 emails with them and they claimed:
"In accordance with standard reviews industry practices, we do not remove listings for software products that are currently available for purchase. The reason for this is that our mission is to provide software buyers with all available information, in order to help them make an informed purchasing decision."
CONCLUSION 2: Capterra leverages our intellectual property and uses our name and brand on their website against our will.
it can be concluded that this is a subtle form of intellectual property data theft justified with some mission which is NOT endorsed by us as Vendors.
Capterra enforces this procedure onto our company and brand although we have expressed, in writing that we wish for the profile we have created to be removed from their website.
Furthermore,
The decision to be removed also stems from their whole biased approach to review collection.
What they basically do is BRIBE review writers by giving them a 20$ amazon gift card in exchange for a review.
CONCLUSION 3: This is an UNETHICAL BRIBE paid for, unknowingly, by the Vendors themselves which have to pay money to get the top spots in the search results.
The other VERY SHADY tactic they employ is to ask you to give them your customer email list so that they can email and bribe your customers for you.
We did not send them our customer list and i hope that businesses do not do this ever as most probably they use those email lists to cross-market competing products to your list.
I come to this conclusion simply because of their UNETHICAL borderline intellectual property theft stance of "forcefully" taking brand names they did not build and which generate searches to their site FOR FREE and go ahead and are well happy to publish incomplete and not researched information on their website.
This approach can have damaging results for the brands and Capterra is very well aware of this and that is the reason why they urge you to complete the profile while they start hitting you with calls to upgrade your account and pay them to get higher into their listings...
All of this while they BRIBE reviewers with gifts which in return, for the most part, will write biased reviews about the products featured on their site.
CONCLUSION 4: Capterra harms Software brands, like ours, because they publish incomplete and incorrect data about our company on their site and this is harmful to our intellectual property, company, and brand.
This is another reason why Capterra is deeply biased as a source of information because it is incomplete, not up to date and incorrect.
Forcing a company to have such an incomplete profile on their site and not giving users the ability to unpublish profiles is borderline intellectual property and data theft. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
