Product reviews for ecommerce, from verified buyers only

1. 1

   Switch reviews on

   Choose reviews of the shop as a whole, or of each product, and how many days after shipping to ask: anything from 1 to 60, a week to start with.

2. 2

   The order ships

   Once the wait is over, the customer gets an email in the language they ordered in, with a link signed for that one order on your shop.

3. 3

   They write it

   Stars, a title and a few words, signed with their first name and an initial. Their email address is kept for you and never shown.

4. 4

   It appears

   With the Verified buyer mark, on the product page, in the average and as stars on product cards, wherever your theme shows them.

Most review apps put a write-a-review form on every product page and then try to filter what comes in. We left the form out. The only way to write a review is the link from the request, so every review is tied to a real order, the Verified buyer mark is true of every one, and a bot has nothing to post to.

The database holds one review per product per order, and one review of the shop per order, so even a forwarded or leaked link writes each review once.

• Each order is asked once, even if the sweep runs twice.
• Cancelled and refunded orders are not asked.
• Orders that shipped more than three weeks before the wait ended are never asked, so switching reviews on does not mail every customer you ever had.
• Products no longer on sale are left out of the request.

Every review lands in the Reviews screen under Customers. You can hide one, for example if it names somebody or is plainly about a different shop, and show it again later. There is no way to edit what a customer wrote, which is what makes the stars worth reading for the next shopper.

EU consumer law forbids showing shoppers reviews nobody wrote, or presenting reviews as coming from buyers without checking that they did. That rules out seeding a new shop with sample reviews to make it look busy, so we never do it.

The only sample reviews in the platform are on theme showcase shops, the demos linked from each theme's page in the catalogue, because a theme has to show what its review sections look like and a demo has no buyers. They are never written to a merchant's shop.

Product pages with reviews carry the average rating and the number of reviews in their structured data, the markup search engines read to understand a product. Whether stars appear next to your result is up to the search engine. Themes place reviews with ready-made sections, so you choose where the average and the list sit on the page; more on that on themes.