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Reviews
Shoppers trust other shoppers considerably more than they trust you, which is deflating but useful. This module lets your customers rate a product out of five and say why, puts those ratings on the product page, and gives you a single screen where you decide what goes up.
Where it lives now. Reviews used to have a sidebar link of its own. It is now a Reviews tab on Shop → Catalogue, beside your products. Old links still work.
Requires the Shop module.
Install the module and there is nothing to build. Every product page gains a Reviews tab, beside Description and Specification, holding the star rating, the reviews themselves and the form for writing one. It is dressed by whatever layout your shop uses, so it looks like part of the page rather than a bolted-on box.
The form itself stays folded away behind a Write a review button, up on the right of the Reviews heading. Most people arrive to read, not to write, and a form sat open underneath every review pushed the reviews themselves off the screen. One click and it unfolds; once a review has been sent the button steps aside and leaves the thank-you where it is.
If you would rather put reviews somewhere specific, three blocks are available in the page builder:
| Block | Where it goes | What it draws |
|---|---|---|
| Product: Reviews | A Product Detail layout | The whole thing: stars, the reviews, the form |
| Product: Rating summary | A Product Detail layout | One line - the stars, the score and the review count. Good under the title or beside the price |
| Shop: Reviews wall | Any page | Your latest reviews across every product. A home page's best friend |
One warning. If you place the Product: Reviews block yourself, set Where reviews appear to Nowhere in the settings, or the same reviews will be on the page twice and shoppers will assume you have been at the keyboard after lunch.
A product with no reviews yet keeps its tab, because the tab is also the only place someone can leave the first one. The rating summary block, by contrast, draws nothing at all until there is something to summarise - "no reviews yet" under every title in a new shop is worse than silence.
Shop → Reviews. Everything that has ever been written lands here, filtered by:
- Waiting for you - written, not published. The number on this chip is why you opened the page.
- On the site - live on the product page.
- Turned down - kept, never shown.
- Everything.
For each review you can Publish, Take down, Turn down, Reply or Delete. Tick several and the same actions apply to the lot, because publishing forty held reviews one button at a time is how moderation quietly stops happening.
Turn down rather than delete where you can. A turned-down review is kept out of sight, which means the same person cannot resubmit the same words and find them live, and you can see what you decided against. Delete is for spam.
Your reply appears directly under the review, labelled as yours. It is the single most useful thing on this screen: the best answer to a three-star review is almost always a good-natured reply beneath it, and everyone reading can see you turned up. Editing or clearing a reply later is a click.
Shop settings → Reviews.
- Publish new reviews straight away. Off by default - every review waits for you. Turn it on and reviews go live as they are written, which is faster and rather more exciting.
- Who may leave a review. Anyone who can see the product, signed-in members only, or customers who bought it. Customers are matched on the email address they ordered with.
- Shortest review you will accept. In characters. Stops "ok" counting as a review. Set it to 0 to accept anything.
- One review per product per email address. Keeps one very keen customer from filling a product page on their own.
- Where reviews appear. The Reviews tab, or nowhere because you are placing the block by hand.
- Show a Verified purchase badge. See below.
- Ask for a headline. A one-line summary above the review. Optional for the shopper either way.
- Reviews shown before "Show more".
Two thank-you messages, in your own words: one for a review that went straight up, one for a review that is waiting for you. Having a single message for both means telling somebody their review is live when it is not, which they will notice.
- Tell this address when a review arrives. Leave it blank for none. Nothing is sent if your site has no email set up.
- Ask past customers for a review. Off by default. See below.
- How long after the order to ask. Two weeks is a fair default.
Shop → Reviews → Import / export.
Download reviews spreadsheet gives you the lot: one line per review, with the product it is about, who wrote it, the stars, the words, your reply and the dates.
It also gives you a line for every product nobody has reviewed yet, saying No reviews yet where the review would be. That half is usually the more interesting one - a list of your reviews tells you how you are doing, and a list of the products with none tells you what to do next.
Product options are left out. A review belongs to the desk, not to the 1600mm oak one with the black frame, so you get one line per product rather than one per combination. Drafts and archived products are in there too, since "has anyone said anything about this" is a fair question to ask about something not on sale yet.
Upload the same spreadsheet and the reviews in it are saved. Type them into the empty rows, or paste in a list you have been keeping somewhere else since before you had a shop that could hold them.
- Rows keep their review id, so a review already on the site is updated rather than added a second time. Clear that cell and the row goes in as a brand new review.
- Sending the same file twice is safe. A row with no id is skipped if the same person has already said the same words about the same product.
- Which product is matched on the slug (the bit of the web address), falling back to the SKU. The product name is there for you to read, not to match on - two things can share a name, and renaming one should not move its reviews.
- Reviews with no status of their own go up straight away or wait for you, whichever you pick before choosing the file.
- Anything it cannot use is listed back at you by row number, and everything else still goes in. A single mistyped rating does not throw out the other four hundred.
- Dates are kept, so a review you collected two years ago does not claim to be from this morning.
Keep files to 5,000 rows. Above that a single upload has more to do than one request is given time for, so split it in half - the second half will pick up exactly where the first left off.
A review whose email address matches a paid order containing that product is badged Verified purchase.
Refunded orders still count. The customer had the thing, formed a view of it and sent it back, which is arguably the most honest review on the page.
What it does not mean is that the reviewer proved who they are - anybody can type a customer's email address. The badge is there to keep a product page honest, not to guard anything, and nothing about it grants access to anything.
The match is recorded whether or not you show the badge, so switching the badge on next year labels the reviews you have already collected rather than only the new ones.
If your shop uses product options (the Shop Variations module), a customer who bought the blue one has bought the product, and their review lands on the product's page along with everyone else's. Three variants of one desk are one review page, not three.
A customer who opens one of their own completed orders finds a Review what you bought box on it, under the receipt, with a row of stars for every product on that order. No hunting for the product page, no waiting for an email.
It asks for as little as it can get away with. Five stars, and nothing else, until one is picked - the headline and the comment box only appear once somebody has actually rated the thing, so an order with five items on it opens as five rows of stars rather than a page of homework. Their name and email are not asked for at all: the shop already knows whose order it is, which is rather the point of it being on their order page.
It only shows on an order marked Complete. Somebody whose desk is still on a lorry would only be reviewing the wait.
Everything else works as it does anywhere else. The review goes to your queue or straight up depending on Publish reviews automatically, your one-review-per-product rule still applies, and anything already reviewed drops off the list. Every review written here is a verified purchase by definition - it came from the order that bought it.
Guests get the box too. Somebody who has proved the delivery postcode on their own order has proved rather more about having bought the thing than a signed-in account holder has. The exception is a shop that has set Who can review to Account holders only, where a guest sees no box at all rather than one that turns them away.
Switched off until you switch it on, because installing a module should never start writing to your customer list on its own.
Turn it on and once a day mid-morning, a while after an order has gone out, the customer gets one email asking how they got on with what they bought, linking to each product. Not one email per item - one per order, however many things were in it. It goes out at 10am through the summer and 9am through the winter, which is the closest a site with customers in more than one country can honestly get to "ten o'clock".
Nobody is asked twice about the same order. Nobody is asked at all if they have already reviewed something off that order - one review is them having done the thing the email was going to ask for, and chasing them anyway reads as a shop not paying attention. It counts whether they wrote it from their order page or off their own bat on a product page, and it counts while the review is still waiting for you to approve it. The first run on a shop with years of history writes to at most forty orders, and the rest go out on following nights, so your sending reputation survives the enthusiasm.
The email shows the order the way your dispatch notes and confirmations show it - a photograph, the name, the quantity and the price, with each line linking to that product's reviews. Under it, on an order you have marked completed, is a Review your order button: it opens the customer's own order page, where they can rate everything they bought in one sitting without hunting through product pages. A guest is asked for the delivery postcode first, the same check as every other order link you send.
Nothing to do on your part, and if you have rewritten the invitation in Settings > Emails you keep your wording - the order table and the button are in the chip list as orderItems and orderUrl when you want them.
The email is deliberately plain and says it would rather have the truth than the compliment. Reviews you fished for read like reviews you fished for.
Two permissions, under Users → Roles:
-
reviews.access- see the reviews list. This includes reviewers' email addresses, so it is not nothing. -
reviews.manage- publish, hold, turn down, reply, delete, and change these settings.
Your shop permissions do not carry over. Somebody allowed to edit the catalogue is not automatically allowed to read every reviewer's email address or to write a public reply in your shop's name. If you want one person doing both, give their role both keys - which is then a decision rather than an accident.
Reviews you have published can be handed to Google Shopping, so the stars show against your listings there. Nothing here does that on its own - it is a switch in the Google Shopping module, which reads the published reviews from this one and serves them at their own feed address.
Only published reviews travel, along with the star rating, the wording, the reviewer's name and the product. Reviews sitting in your queue, reviews you turned down and everybody's email address stay here.
Reviews that came from the invitation emails above are marked to Google as having been asked for after delivery, which is a distinction they care about.
Separately, and with nothing to switch on: with this module installed, each product's star rating and review count go into the hidden description its page carries for search engines and AI assistants. That is what puts a row of stars under your listing in a search result and what an assistant reads before deciding whether to recommend the thing. A product nobody has reviewed publishes no rating at all - a rating with nothing behind it is the sort of thing search engines hand out penalties for. See Shop.
- Photographs with reviews. Not yet. Shoppers' photos need a moderation flow of their own, and half-built it is worse than absent.
- Stars on the product cards in a grid. The reviews live on the product page for now.
- A link straight into the Reviews tab. The invitation emails land on the product page, and the shopper clicks Reviews. If you have placed the Reviews block on the page instead, the link lands right on it.