Why a taptugo rating means something
Anyone can leave a review. Almost nobody checks whether they were ever there. We do — and here's exactly how.
The trouble with reviews
You already know this bit. A review can be left by someone who's never set foot in your shop. By a competitor. By someone who meant to review the place next door. By an account created ten minutes ago, or by a farm of them sold by the hundred.
And when it happens to you, there's not much you can do except report it and wait.
The problem isn't that people are dishonest. It's that nothing in the system ever asked for proof.
What's actually inside the plate
Your plate holds an NTAG424 DNA chip. It's the same class of secure chip used in contactless payment cards and passports — not the pound-a-piece tags in tap-to-review stickers.
Here's the difference that matters. A cheap tag holds a web address and hands out the same one, unchanged, to every phone that comes near. Anyone who taps it once can read it, write it to a blank tag, and hand out working copies.
Your chip doesn't work that way. Every tap generates a fresh cryptographic signature — a different one each time, produced by a secret key sealed inside the chip during manufacture. The key never leaves the chip. It can't be read out, not by us, not by anyone with a phone.
When a tap reaches us, we check that signature. If it isn't right, the rating doesn't happen.
Copied, cloned, replayed — none of it works
Someone can read the web address from a tap and send it to a friend. Their friend can open it and see your page, but they can't rate you — the signature was already used.
A blank tag can be made to hand out the same address, but it can't produce the signatures, because it doesn't have the key.
Every tap carries a counter that only ever goes up. An old signature is an old number, and we won't take it twice.
There's no realistic way to produce a valid signature without the key.
The short version: to rate you, someone has to physically hold a phone against your plate. There is no way around that, and that's the entire point.
One customer, one rating
Rate a business and you can't rate that same business again for twelve hours. Different business, no problem — it's per business, not a general lockout.
But the real protection isn't a timer. It's that every rating needs another physical tap on your plate, in your shop. Somebody determined to skew your score would have to keep coming back and standing at your counter to do it — and if they did, we'd see it. Which brings us to the next bit.
We watch for what customers don't do
Real customers tap once, on their way past, a handful of times a day. Anything trying to game your rating looks different — and different is something a computer is very good at spotting.
Every day, automatically, we check every plate for four things:
Taps coming too fast. A burst of taps in a short window, far beyond what a queue at a counter looks like.
A day that doesn't fit. We know what a normal day looks like for your plate, because we've been counting. A day that jumps far above your own established pattern gets flagged.
Scores that are too alike. A run of identical ratings arriving together, when real customers spread across the range.
Taps that look mechanical. The chip counts its own taps, and the shape of that count tells us whether we're looking at people or a script.
Anything flagged goes to a person to look at, not straight to a penalty. Most flags turn out to be nothing — a busy market day, a school trip, a plate that's just gone up and is getting attention. New plates are left out of these checks for their first fortnight for exactly that reason.
And if something is wrong, we deal with it. You won't have to notice it yourself, report it, and wait.
We never hide a bad rating
Some services will offer to filter your customers for you — quietly work out who's happy, send those people to your public reviews, and divert everyone else to a private form you can deal with off the record.
It's called review gating. It works, briefly. It's also explicitly against Google's rules: they don't allow merchants to discourage negative reviews or to selectively solicit positive ones. Businesses caught doing it can lose reviews, and repeat offenders can lose their profile.
We don't do it. Every customer sees the same screen with the same options, whether they rated you a one or a ten. The option to tell you privately is there for everyone — not as a diversion for unhappy people, but because sometimes the most useful thing a customer has to say isn't for the internet.
A rating people trust has to be a rating that could have gone badly. That's not a limitation we work around. It's the product.
What you actually get out of this
A score that's worth showing. When your rating is good, it's evidence rather than assertion — because every rating behind it came from somebody who was standing in your shop.
No more silent damage. Nobody can quietly knock your average down from another town, or another country.
A straight answer. If your rating dips, something real happened, and it's worth knowing about. That's more useful than a number you can't trust in either direction.
from £7.99 a month, plate included.