Top5.nz: The Solar Quote Spreadsheet That Became a Rankings Site

Jan Dunlop’s job is digital marketing. Making businesses look good online, in other words. So when the time came to get solar panels on the roof at home, you would expect the research to be quick. It wasn’t. Every installer’s website was convincing, in the way every website is convincing. The Google reviews helped up to a point, but one company had a 5.0 from a handful of customers and another had a 4.8 from a few hundred, and there is no obvious way to weigh those against each other. Dunlop ended up with a spreadsheet.

“I work in digital marketing, and I still ended up building a spreadsheet to choose a solar installer. That was the starting point for Top5.”

Jan Dunlop, founder, Top5.nz

The installer that won turned out fine. Probably not the best in the market, by Dunlop’s own admission, but there was no way to know that at the time, and that niggle is really where Top5.nz comes from. Most of us hire a plumber or an accountant or a building inspector a few times in a lifetime. We have nothing to compare them against, and they know it.

What You Get on a Page

The site works the way the name suggests. Pick a service and a city, solar installers in Auckland say, and you get the five highest-scoring businesses, then five more under Also Recommended. Each one shows the Google rating, how many reviews it has, a Top5 score and a short paragraph on what customers keep bringing up. Address and map underneath. Up the top there is a note on what to ask before you hire, and a line telling you how many businesses were looked at and when the page was last refreshed.

When we checked, that came to a bit over 8,400 businesses across 57 categories in nine centres, from Whangārei down to Dunedin, with Napier and Hastings counted as one. Roughly 650,000 Google reviews sit behind it all.

The Scoring

How the scoring works is published on the site, in full, on the how we rank page. It is more thought through than sorting by stars. Rating counts for the most, but a rating only carries full weight once there are enough reviews behind it, so a 5.0 from three reviews gets treated with more suspicion than a 4.8 from eighty. Volume counts too, on a log scale, which stops a business with 500 reviews simply steamrolling one with 100. A big share of one-star reviews brings a penalty that gets steeper the worse it is, then eases off as those reviews get older, so a business that has sorted itself out isn’t stuck with its past forever. And recent, steady reviews beat a big pile that stopped growing years ago.

On the Auckland solar page the day we looked, a 4.8 from 321 reviews sat at number one, ahead of a 5.0 from 128. Sort by stars and they would swap. Top5’s view is that the first one has more evidence behind it, and evidence is the thing you are short of when you are picking an installer.

What is not in the formula is money. No advertising, no listing tiers, nobody’s finger on the scale. The only nudge a business can give itself is a small trust bonus for doing free identity verification, which just confirms there is a real person behind the listing. Anyone can do it and it costs nothing.

“People should be able to see why a business has been recommended. We publish how the scoring works, and businesses cannot pay to move up the list.”

Jan Dunlop, founder, Top5.nz

So How Does It Make Money

Fair question, if nobody can pay for a place. Businesses can pay for the bits around the ranking, and only those. Claiming a listing is free and gets your phone number on the card plus a verified badge. A subscription adds a link to your website, a line pulled from your reviews about what customers praise most and a dashboard that shows where your competitors sit and how many more reviews you would need to get past them.

That line is where most directories fold. Once the top spot is for sale the list stops meaning anything, and readers can usually tell. On Top5, a subscriber sitting at seventh stays seventh. They just get a nicer-looking seventh.

Dunlop is careful about what the site isn’t, too. It is not an awards programme. Nobody from Top5 has been out to test the plumbers. It reads what the public has already said, scores it the same way every time and offers the result as a place to start rather than a promise about the work. Rankings refresh on a rolling cycle and each one is a dated snapshot, so the same inputs and the same version of the model give you the same list. Not many “best of” lists could say that.

Good News for the Two-Person Outfit

There is something in this for the businesses as well. Because the score comes from customers rather than budgets, a two-person plumbing firm with a good run of recent reviews can sit next to a company with a marketing department and hold its own. That is not common. We have written before about how many good local operators barely show up online, and a ranking built on their customers rather than their marketing is one of the few things that works in their favour. The only way up is to satisfy more people, which, as incentives go, is about the right one for a rankings site to set.

The review data has turned out to be useful in its own right. Top5 has started publishing research off the back of it. One piece went through 2,420 reviews of 224 New Zealand plumbers and found four out of five complaints were about service or admin, slow replies and surprise bills mostly, not the actual plumbing. Worth knowing whether you are hiring a plumber or you are one.

The spreadsheet was for one roof. Top5.nz now does the same job across 57 categories in nine centres, and shows its working while it does it. If you are about to hire someone you have never used before, it is a sensible place to start, and our own guide to finding a tradesperson covers the checks that come after the shortlist. The rankings are at top5.nz, and the scoring method is there too if you want to check the maths first. Top5.nz is also listed on Business Directory.