Product Reviews on Your Own Store

The question a photograph cannot answer

A shopper on a product page has the photographs, the description and the price. What they do not have is anybody who has owned the thing.

Whether it runs small, whether the colour matches the picture, whether the zip lasted a season: those are the questions that decide a purchase.

The business can answer some of them in the description. Customers answer them more convincingly, because they have no reason to flatter the product.

Reviews on the product page put those answers where the decision is being made.

What reviews do on a product page

• They answer fit and quality in the buyer's own terms.
• They show the product in use, sometimes in customers' own photographs.
• They add the words customers actually use for the product.
• They show that real people buy here, which matters on a small store.
• They warn you early when something is wrong with a product.

The fifth is the one stores tend to overlook. Three reviews mentioning the same loose stitching are a conversation with the supplier, and they arrive before the returns do.

Yours, not the platform's

Reviews left on a marketplace or a social media page belong to that platform. They stay there if you stop selling there, and the platform sets the rules for showing them.

Reviews on your own product pages stay with the store through a redesign or a change of platform, provided whoever moves the site moves them too.

They also sit on the page that is trying to make the sale, rather than somewhere the shopper has to go looking.

Asking at the right moment

Most stores ask too early. A request sent with the order confirmation reaches people who have not yet received anything to review.

The right moment depends on the product: a few days after delivery for clothing, a couple of weeks for something that needs using, longer for equipment.

One request and one reminder are enough. A purchase gives implied consent under Canada's anti-spam law for two years, but the email still needs your business name, contact details and a way to unsubscribe.

Making it easy to leave one

Link straight to the review form for the product they bought, not to the store's home page.

Do not require an account or a password. A link tied to the order identifies the customer, and lets the store show a verified buyer label beside the review.

Keep the form short: a rating, a few sentences, an optional photograph. A question or two about fit or use can help, but a long survey gets abandoned.

A worked example

A small company in Squamish sells merino wool base layers online, mostly to hikers and skiers, from a warehouse behind its shop.

It had reviews switched on for years and very few of them. The request went out with the order confirmation, and several of the reviews that came back were about shipping times.

The store moved the request to ten days after delivery, linked it to the product that was bought, and dropped the login it had been asking for.

The reviews started describing the products. Several mentioned that one top ran small, so a sizing note went into its description.

The critical reviews stayed up, each with a short reply from the owner explaining what had changed.

Showing the critical ones

A page where every review gives five stars looks edited, because it usually is. Shoppers know that products have faults.

A review saying the sleeves are long tells a tall buyer something useful and a short one something important. Both are more likely to keep what they order.

Remove reviews only for clear reasons: abuse, personal information, spam, or comments about something other than the product. Publish those reasons on the store.

Complaints about delivery belong in a reply and a fix rather than on the product page, but they still deserve an answer.

Replying, briefly and in public

A reply under a critical review is read by every later shopper, more than by the person who wrote it.

Thank them, state the facts without arguing, and say what was done: a replacement sent, a supplier changed, a description corrected.

Leave order numbers and personal details out of it. Anything more needs a private message.

There is no need to reply to every five-star review. An occasional thank-you under a detailed one is plenty.

What not to do

Do not write reviews yourself, or ask staff and family to. Reviews that pretend to come from independent customers are the kind of misleading representation the Competition Act covers.

Do not offer a reward only for good reviews, or ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Both produce a page that tells shoppers nothing.

If you offer anything in return for a review, offer it for any honest review, and say so beside the reviews.

Stars in search results

Product pages with reviews can carry structured data: a few lines of code that tell search engines the average rating and how many reviews there are.

Google may then show the stars beside the page in its results. That is not guaranteed, and the markup has to match reviews visible on the page.

Most store platforms can add it. Check that yours does, and that it reports the real reviews rather than an average somebody typed in.

The counter-case

A store with a handful of orders a month will collect reviews slowly, and an empty review box on every product says so.

Hide the review section until a product has its first review, and start by asking about the best sellers.

Made-to-order and one-off pieces suit reviews of the business, or short customer stories with photographs, better than reviews of a product nobody else can buy.

Wherever products repeat and buyers have questions, though, reviews on the page answer them better than anything the business writes.

The order to set it up

1. Turn on reviews with a verified buyer label.
2. Remove any login from the review form.
3. Time the request for after delivery and use.
4. Link it to the exact product bought.
5. Publish your moderation rules on the store.
6. Reply to critical reviews within a few days.
7. Feed recurring comments into the descriptions.

Step three is the one that changes what the reviews say, because a customer asked after using the product writes about the product, not about the wait for it.

Selling to trade buyers on the same store is covered in trade customers and retail customers on one store.

Frequently asked questions

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