Product reviews
Let verified buyers tell other shoppers what they thought — off until you switch it on, and nothing shows on your storefront until you approve it.
Off by default
Reviews publish a shopper's own written words on your storefront, so turning them on is your decision, not a default. Switch them on from the Reviews tab on your store page. Switching them off again doesn't delete anything already written or approved — it just stops the write form and hides the list, so switching back on later shows exactly what was there before.
Who can write one
Only a shopper who:
- is signed in with a shopper account on your store, and
- has verified their email address (following the link we send them), and
- actually bought the product in an order of this store that reached Paid or Fulfilled
can write a review of it. A cancelled order, or one refunded in full, doesn't qualify — a partial refund still does, because the shopper kept at least part of what they bought. Buying a different product in your store doesn't qualify either: the purchase has to be of the product being reviewed.
A review shows a Verified purchase marker while the order it was written against is still Paid or Fulfilled. If that order is later cancelled or refunded in full, the review stays (removing it is your call) but the marker disappears — it would otherwise claim a purchase that was reversed. The Reviews tab shows each review's order number and that order's current status, so you can see when this has happened.
Shoppers who can't write a review are told why rather than shown nothing: a visitor who isn't signed in sees a prompt to sign in, and a shopper who hasn't verified their email is asked to verify it.
A shopper gets one review per product. Writing a second one edits the first — it doesn't create a duplicate, and the edited review goes back to waiting for your approval, whatever the old one was approved for. A shopper editing an approved review is told this on the form before they edit: their review is hidden from other shoppers until you approve it again.
Moderation
Every new or edited review starts pending. It is invisible to shoppers — including the one who wrote it — until you approve it in the Reviews tab. From there you can:
- Approve it — it appears on the product page, newest first, and counts toward the product's average rating.
- Reject it — it stays off the storefront. The shopper can still edit and resubmit it, which puts it back in your pending queue.
- Delete it outright.
The queue is filterable by pending, approved and rejected. Pending is oldest first — the review that has waited longest is at the top — and an edited review joins the queue again at the time it was edited, behind everything that was already waiting. Approved and rejected are newest first. The list loads 50 at a time with a Show more reviews button, so every review is reachable however many there are.
Approving or rejecting applies to the review as you saw it. If the shopper edits it (or a colleague moderates it) after your list loaded, your click is refused with a message saying the review changed, and the list reloads with the current text so you can look at it again before approving.
Deleting a product deletes its reviews too; archiving a product keeps them.
What a shopper writes
A rating from 1 to 5 stars (required), an optional title and an optional review of up to 2,000 characters — plain text only. There is no formatting, and no link in a review is ever clickable: whatever a shopper types is shown back exactly as typed, safely. Line breaks and tabs are kept. Invisible characters that can disguise text are handled for you: zero-width spaces are removed, and a review containing text-direction override characters (which can make words display reversed) is refused. The name shown beside a review is their first name and last initial — never their email address and never their full last name.
If a submission is refused — a title that is too long, say — the shopper is told why and the form keeps what they typed, so they only have to correct it.
Search engines
Once your product has at least one approved review, its page carries the average rating (to one decimal place, exactly as shown on the page) and review count in the structured data search engines read — the same markup that can put stars beside your product in search results. A product with no approved reviews carries none: a rating of nothing is not a rating of zero.