From first glance to forever: How Rare Carat earns consumer confidence with Trustpilot
Snapshot 📷
Opportunity
Addressing consumer distrust surrounding one of life's most symbolic purchases: an engagement ring!
Approach
Building a transparent shopping experience with expert advice and proven credibility
Impact
#1 ranking in the jeweler category on Trustpilot, strengthening brand authority
5.0
Trustpilot star rating as of September 2025
3,000
reviews
98%
5-star reviews
High pressure? No problem
Hitting ‘Add to Cart’ is a big deal on an expensive jewelry purchase. For Rare Carat - one of the largest online diamond retailers in the United States - that pressure helped produce a real gem. “With engagement rings being the biggest purchase for most customers, trust isn’t optional; it’s everything,” says CEO and Founder Ajay Anand.
“Rare Carat was founded from my own struggles looking for an engagement ring for my wife - my then soon-to-be fiancé,’ says Ajay. “I knew nothing about diamonds, or jewelry, and like most other consumers, I found it extremely challenging to navigate that shopping experience.” This inspired Ajay: “There had to be a more transparent and trustworthy way to shop.”
Despite the competitive and opaque landscape, Rare Carat saw the trust problem clearly, and partnered up with Trustpilot to solve it.
Trusting the process
Ajay describes Trustpilot as a ‘business asset.’ “We continue to invest in Trustpilot,” he says. By inviting every customer to leave a review, Rare Carat built a growing base of over 3,000 reviews and a near-perfect 5.0 TrustScore.
They don’t stop at collecting reviews either. Rare Carat integrates Trustpilot across the customer journey. TrustBoxes and review snippets appear on the homepage, product pages, search results, checkout and even in email and SMS communications.
The results are clear: “We have tested removing these elements, just to get a sense of what the impact is, and we have a 4% lift in sales when we integrate Trustpilot elements along the buyer’s journey,” Ajay says. It helps them stand out in a market where, as Ajay puts it, “Not a single new player has reached scale.”
Diamond clarity
Rare Carat is a jewelry retailer that has grown primarily by putting exceptional energy in customer service, end-to-end. “To gain the trust of a consumer to spend the most money they’ve ever spent on the internet, and hope and expect that something well-made comes back to their door, is a real leap of faith,” Ajay says.
So to achieve real transparency and reassure consumers, they needed to go beyond reviews with limited visibility such as with Google Reviews. Reviews with no central profile page, and no way to connect feedback to verified orders, just wouldn’t work. To build a scalable, credible presence, they turned to Trustpilot.
“It was really from the first months of the company that we engaged with Trustpilot,” says Ajay. “The internet being saturated with fake recommendations from paid affiliates, we wanted to bet on real customer feedback.” They collected verified reviews and embedded them throughout the buying journey to reassure customers at every step.
Now, with over eight years of verified reviews, Rare Carat has built a long-term footprint of trust. It’s helped them drive real and measurable impact, including a 4% lift in sales when Trustpilot trust signals are present in the buying journey.
Professional advice, friendly delivery
For 90% of Rare Carat customers, an engagement ring is the most expensive purchase they’ve ever made online. For a digital-first challenger brand like Rare Carat, Trustpilot has been critical in bridging the trust gap for consumers who might typically rely on a brick-and-mortar store. Ajay admits: “[Traditional jewelry stores] are right there, you get the product in your hand before you pay, and if anything goes wrong, you know exactly where to find them. Many have been around for decades, and that’s a tough battle to win. Prospective customers don’t always realize the savings that are possible by buying online, without sacrificing on product quality.”
To combat any consumer hesitation, Rare Carat leverages Trustpilot’s social proof and third-party validation, and delivers an exceptional customer experience with a human touch that’s reflected in its Trustpilot reviews - 98% of which are 5-star.
In their reviews, Rare Carat’s customers consistently report satisfaction with the quality of both diamonds and settings, describing them as elegant. They also often express their appreciation that every consumer chat connects them with a GIA-certified gemologist. They’re “just telling people what they would tell their best friend,” says Ajay. He also personally reviews feedback received via Truspilot, staying accessible to customers, making this friendly quality a core competitive advantage.
It’s all part of the bigger picture: “It's important to be able to create a footprint of trust around us that’s not just us saying good things about ourselves, but to have a third-party like Trustpilot giving a voice to thousands of customers who’ve been able to come back and leave both positive and negative reviews.”
Diamonds are forever
Rare Carat has focused on building a business backed by consumer trust, with the help of Trustpilot: “Achieving the number one ranking in the jeweler category on Trustpilot is a milestone we’ll be highlighting in press and marketing. When we started, we didn’t realize how valuable Trustpilot would be to our business, but it’s become an asset that continues to grow in value over time,” says Ajay with a smile.
This is just the beginning of how Rare Carat is reshaping the jewelry market with trust at its core. Looking ahead at the partnership between Trustpilot and Rare Carat, the future is very bright. Sparkling, even.