How VRTO orders what you see.
Stores are ordered by their public Google rating, the number of reviews behind it, and how close they are to you. Nothing else moves a store up or down.
This page states the rule each page uses, in the same terms the site applies it. Listings and rankings on VRTO are never paid for.
A listing is one store, at one address.
Not an advertisement a store bought. A record of a rent-to-own store that exists, built from public business information and from what the retailer publishes.
Where it is and when it is open
The address, the phone number, and the hours. When we do not have a field, the listing leaves it out instead of guessing.
Its rating and review count
The store's public Google rating, always shown with the number of reviews it came from. A rating never appears without its count.
When we last checked
The date of our latest weekly refresh. Details change, so confirm what matters with the store.
Different pages answer different questions.
So they order stores differently. Here is what each one does.
Stores near you
We look for stores within 75 miles of you, keep the ones with a rating and at least 25 reviews, and score each one on its rating and how close it is. Rating counts for a little more than distance, so a clearly better store slightly further out can come first. If we cannot place you, or nothing qualifies nearby, we fall back to the best-rated stores in your state, then the best-rated in the country.
A city or state page
Stores are grouped by the company that runs them, and the companies are ordered by rating, then by review count. A company's rating is its stores' Google ratings combined, weighted by how many reviews each one has, so a 4.9 from 1,400 reviews counts for more than a 5.0 from three. Every store in the city is on the page, so the order changes what you read first, not what you can see.
A category page
Same rule as a city page: average rating first, then review count. On a category page that asks for your location, stores are ordered by distance from the location you enter.
The companies directory
Ordered A to Z, or by number of locations if you switch it. Never by rating. A directory of who exists is not a ranking, and ordering it by rating would turn it into one.
Search results
Searching a place matches cities and shows the ones with the most stores first. Searching a company name matches names and shows what matched. When we know your location and you have not typed a query, results are ordered by distance, nearest first.
When you change the sort
A city page starts on Relevance, which is the order described above. Rating reorders the stores on the page from highest rated to lowest, using each store's own Google rating with no review floor applied, so a store with very few reviews can reach the top. A-Z orders them by company name. All three sort the same set of stores. None of them adds a store or takes one away.
How we pick one store.
Find My Match returns a single store instead of a list, so the rule is worth stating plainly.
We look at stores within 10 miles of you that carry what you asked for, and take the highest rated. Review count breaks a tie between equal ratings, and distance breaks it after that. If nothing is within 10 miles, we widen the search to 60 miles and then 150, and take the nearest store that fits.
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1
Rating. The highest-rated qualifying store within 10 miles.
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2
Review count. Between equal ratings, the one more people rated.
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3
Distance. Still tied, the closer one.
A match is one store that fits what you asked for. It is not a judgment that no other store would suit you better, and you can always browse the full list for your city instead.
Listings are refreshed every Sunday.
A date next to a store is the Sunday of our latest weekly refresh. It does not mean the store confirmed every detail that day, and it is not a promise the details have not changed since.
Every Sunday, and every quarter
Each Sunday we check that every store's Google listing is still live. At least once a quarter we re-verify each store's address, phone, hours and rating against that listing.
A store we have never checked has no date
A record that has never been through one of our checks shows no date at all.
More on where the data comes from and how it is maintained is on How We Collect Data.
No store has ever paid its way up this site.
VRTO is free for shoppers and there is no product a store can buy that changes where it appears. That is the whole point of publishing this page: you can hold us to a rule we have written down.
Start with your ZIP code- Payment of any kind. No store can buy a higher position, and none has.
- A listing fee. Listing on VRTO is free, and paying for a listing is not something we sell.
- A referral. We do not sell them, and no store pays us when we point you to it.
- Membership in anything, ours or an industry group.
- Whether a store advertises with us or talks to us at all.
Stores pay us for the data work. You never do.
One way. Stores and virtual rent-to-own companies pay us to organize, clean, and present their data on VRTO. That is the whole business. We do not sell referrals, placement, or your information, and nothing a store pays changes where it appears on any page. We are not owned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by any rent-to-own company.
We do not sell your information to data brokers or advertisers. Some state privacy laws may treat sharing a match request with the selected store as a sale or sharing. You can opt out through Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.
Tell us about a wrong listing
If a store has closed, moved, or is listed with the wrong details, tell us on the contact form and pick "Update Store Info". Name the store and say what is wrong. We check a report against our sources before changing the record, so a report does not overwrite a listing on its own.
Questions about the order.
If something here does not match what you see on the site, tell us. A rule we publish and do not follow is a bug worth hearing about.
See the stores near you.
Type your ZIP code. Now you know how the list you get back was put in order.