Published 2 September 2026
Quick answer: Before you pay a mobility company anything, do four checks that take about five minutes. Confirm the company legally exists on the free Companies House register. Read the review labels, not just the star score. Compare what two different review platforms say about the same firm. And check whether the reviews describe the branch you are actually dealing with, or a head office two hundred miles away. None of these require any expertise, and each one catches a different kind of problem.
Mobility equipment is one of the harder things to buy well. A stairlift or a powerchair is a four-figure purchase, it is often made under time pressure after a fall or a diagnosis, and the person buying is rarely a repeat customer. You get one attempt and no practice. Meanwhile every company you look at has a star rating on its website, and almost all of those ratings are high.
This guide is about how to read what you are being shown. It applies to stairlifts, scooters, wheelchairs, bathing adaptations and daily living aids alike, because the checks are the same whatever is being sold.
Start with whether the company legally exists
Companies House runs a free public register of every limited company in the UK. You can search it by company name, company number or the name of a director, and you can see the registered office address, the filing history, the accounts, the officers and the business activity. It costs nothing and needs no account.
Three things are worth looking at:
- Incorporation date. A company trading under a brand that sounds long-established but incorporated eighteen months ago is not necessarily a problem, but it is worth knowing.
- Previous names. Companies change trading names, sometimes for ordinary commercial reasons and sometimes to leave a reputation behind. The register shows the history.
- Filing status. Overdue accounts or a proposal to strike the company off are visible here, and they matter a great deal if you are about to buy something with a ten-year warranty.
Two caveats that almost nobody mentions. First, Companies House states plainly on its own service that it “does not check the accuracy of the information filed” – the register tells you what a company has declared, not whether the declaration is true. Second, not every legitimate business appears on it. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not registered companies, and plenty of good local mobility shops trade that way. Absence from the register is a reason to ask a question, not a verdict.
A review score is not one thing
The single number on a company’s homepage is an average of reviews that arrived by different routes, and the routes matter.
Trustpilot is the clearest example because it publishes how its own system works. Its help documentation states that any business with a domain can have a profile page and collect service reviews “organically and by invitation”. Both kinds count towards the same TrustScore. So a company that emails every customer a review request and a company that never asks anyone are scored on the same scale, with no distinction in the headline figure.
That is not a scandal, and inviting reviews is entirely legitimate. But it does mean the headline number answers a narrower question than most people assume. It tells you how the people who left reviews felt. It does not tell you how the people who did not leave reviews felt, and it does not tell you who was asked.
Read the labels, not just the stars
The useful detail is one level down, on the individual reviews.
What “Unprompted review” means
Trustpilot marks reviews that were written without the company asking. Scroll a company’s profile and you can see how many of its recent reviews carry that label. A profile where the recent reviews are overwhelmingly unprompted is telling you something different from one where they are not – people went out of their way.
What “Verified” means, and what it does not
Trustpilot says it “may label reviews as ‘Verified’ when we can confirm a business interaction took place”. That confirms a transaction happened. It does not confirm the account of it is accurate: the platform is explicit that it does “not fact-check reviews” and that reviewers’ opinions are their own. Verified means real customer, not verified facts.
What the profile header tells you
Company profiles disclose more than people notice. A claimed profile shows the month and year the business took control of it. A paid subscription to the review platform is also disclosed. Neither changes the score, and neither is a black mark – but a company that has invested in its review presence since 2018 is a different proposition from one that claimed its profile last month, and you are entitled to factor that in.
Why two platforms can disagree about the same company
Look a company up on more than one review site and you will sometimes find scores that are hard to reconcile. Before assuming one is fake, understand that systematic divergence between assessments of the same organisation is a well-documented phenomenon rather than a sign of foul play.
The clearest research on it comes from credit ratings. In a National Bank of Belgium working paper, Patrick Van Roy compared solicited and unsolicited ratings of the same banks and found that unsolicited ratings ran lower by an average of 1.2 notches on a nine-point scale – and, importantly, showed this was not simply because better banks chose to be rated. The mechanism there is information: unsolicited assessments were built on public data alone and were therefore more conservative.
Consumer reviews are not credit ratings and the mechanism is different. But the lesson transfers: who was asked, and on what basis, shapes the answer. Two platforms with different collection methods, different volumes and different audiences will produce different pictures of the same firm. A large gap is not proof of anything. It is a prompt to read the actual reviews on both and work out which population you belong to.
The branch problem
This is the check most often skipped, and for a national retailer it is the one that matters most.
A company with forty showrooms has one national score. Your experience will be delivered by one branch, one surveyor and one installation team. Those vary, sometimes a great deal, and the national average hides that entirely. Trustpilot does support separate location pages with their own scores where a business sets them up, but many do not.
So when you read reviews, look for the ones that name a branch, a town or an engineer. Those are worth ten generic five-star entries. And when you write a review yourself, name the branch – it is the single most useful thing you can do for the next person.
A five-minute check before you hand over money
- Search the company on Companies House. Note the incorporation date, any previous names and whether filings are up to date. If nothing comes up, ask whether they trade as a sole trader and get the trading name and address in writing.
- Open the review profile and sort by most recent. Old reviews describe a company that may no longer exist in the same form.
- Count the labels. How many recent reviews are unprompted? Do any name a branch?
- Check a second platform. If the scores diverge, read the negative reviews on both and see whether the complaints repeat.
- Get the awkward things in writing. Warranty length on the unit and on the battery, what a service visit costs, call-out rates, and what happens if you move house. These are where the unpleasant surprises live, and a company that will not put them in writing has told you something.
Frequently asked questions
Is a company without a Companies House listing a scam?
No. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not required to register as companies, and many established local mobility shops operate that way. What matters is whether you can identify who you are contracting with. Ask for the full trading name and a trading address, and get your order confirmation in writing.
Can companies delete bad reviews?
Businesses can report reviews to the platform, and platforms remove content that breaches their guidelines. Trustpilot states that every review is screened by automated software and that it may not catch everything. What a business cannot generally do is quietly delete a review it simply dislikes. If a profile has thousands of reviews and no critical ones at all, that pattern is worth noticing.
Does a paid review-platform subscription mean the score is bought?
No, and platforms disclose the subscription openly on the profile. Paying for review-collection tools does not change how the score is calculated. It does mean the company is actively collecting reviews, which is context for reading the volume.
How many reviews is enough to trust a score?
There is no fixed number, but a score built on a handful of reviews is fragile – one or two entries move it a long way. Look at volume and recency together: fifty reviews from the past year usually tells you more than five hundred spread over a decade.
What if the company only has reviews on its own website?
Testimonials a company hosts and selects itself are marketing, not independent feedback. They are not worthless, but they should not carry the same weight as reviews on a platform the company does not control. Look for at least one independent source before you commit.
Where to look things up
- Companies House company information service – free, official, no account needed.
- Our UK mobility company directory – company profiles with registration details, published third-party ratings and the date each was checked.
- Our review policy and editorial policy – how we collect and publish reviews, and what we will and will not do.
If you have used a UK mobility company, good or bad, the most useful thing you can add is the branch you dealt with and what actually happened after the sale. That is the part nobody else publishes.
Published 2 September 2026