Let’s make online shopping more transparent

Have you ever noticed how most of the reviews on brands’ websites are five stars? Or how reviews in magazines only tell you what you should buy? Every place reviewing products on the internet has the same goal: to get you to purchase.

We’re different.

Our goal as consumers isn’t to buy everything, but to buy thoughtfully. And to do that, we need trustworthy reviews of products from other people who’ve tried them. That’s why Thingtesting is here: to create a platform where we help each other buy better.

Come here to research brands before you make your own purchases, and share your reviews to help your peers buy better, too.

Help us bring more transparency to online shopping

Our mission

Learn about the problem with online reviews today and how we're working to make online shopping more transparent at Thingtesting.

Read about our mission

Our transparency pledge

Non-curated

Reviews on Thingtesting aren’t cherry-picked or curated. We publish every review we receive.

By real people

Instead of verifying purchases, we verify individual reviewers. Everyone on our platform is a real person.

Vetted for bias

We request that reviewers share any affiliation with a brand they’ve reviewed. If they’re an investor, friend, employee, or otherwise related to the brand, they flag their review for potential bias.

Published instantly

Brands sometimes leave bad reviews unpublished. On Thingtesting, every review goes up as soon as it’s written.

Held to community standards

All reviewers, including Thingtesters, are expected to follow our community values .

Affiliate practices

We use 100% of any fees we earn from affiliate to keep Thingtesting alive and pursue our mission to fight problems with online reviews. We are militant about editorial independence, the decision of what brands get featured is completely separate from affiliate conversations. We also use our affiliate data to surface the best possible recommendations in our community’s mission to help people buy better, not more.

The Thingtesting team — Some of the Thingtesting team together in Copenhagen for our 2022 offsite.

Our story

Thingtesting was born as an Instagram account where our founder Jenny Gyllander personally reviewed internet-born brands. That was in 2018, when direct-to-consumer brands were beginning to appear at hyperspeed, repackaging commonplace items with a point of view. But, were these products actually “better”?

In its first year, the Instagram account grew to 25k+ brand discoverers looking for honest, unpaid reviews of brands. That popularity signaled a need for more transparency in the world of online shopping — a task too big for one person alone. That’s why, today, Thingtesting has grown into a platform where shoppers can research and review purchases. Our aim is to provide a place to share candid experiences that help other shoppers buy better, giving brands the feedback they need to do right by their customers.

Join us as a reviewer today!