Pros and cons for using product reviews app on Shopify

Really love judge.me it's set it and forget it. We barely read reviews, and 99% that come in are 5 star. The platform gets about 10% of customers to leave a review vs. the 5% we were getting from Yotpo with the same text in the review request.

I use Judge.me and love it! You don't have to worry about negative reviews as the app allows you full control:

1. It lets you manage and filter all your reviews.
2. You can delete reviews that you're not happy with.
3. You can set up alerts when reviews come in.
4. You can set up alerts for keywords used in the reviews.

I have received almost no bad reviews so I don't feel like this is a real concern, but I guess it depends on your store and the products that you sell.

Another very important aspect to factor in is that your reviews will appear on Google Shopping, and that's very valuable for SEO.

Negative reviews are just as important as positive reviews, sometimes even more as they present you with the information that you need in order to improve your products, service, and the overall buying experience in your online store. I agree that troll reviews should be deleted from your store, but authentic bad reviews are important for showing your commitment to ethical business practices and also an opportunity to demonstrate your customer service.

You should definitely use a review app in your Shopify store. I've used Stamped.io and judge.me and like both of them. Know that reviews don't always come flooding in, you have to find ways to get customers to write reviews. The review platforms help but you should employ methods to get more, as they're very valuable for the customers' buying decision, creating trust, and improving your store's presence on search engine results pages. Review platforms like Stamped.io, Loox.app and Judge.me enable you to automatically send review requests emails to customers who have purchased. That helps for getting reviews but another trick is to target the people that have already written a review before as they are more likely to write another review than customers who haven't written any review yet.

I use Okendo for reviews on my Shopify store. It's a very good plugin, prices are cheaper than the other apps and it has all the features you need. Don't worry about negative Nancies, they usually don't take a high percentage of the total reviews and you can remove them anyhow. And I do agree that it's very important to receive negative feedback from customers in order to improve. Also, remember that you can turn bad reviews around by saying you're sorry and offering good service. It often creates an even better experience for customers when they see that you're responsive and provide great service.

I agree with everyone that review apps are essential for e-commerce stores, but, and this is a big BUT, only if you have a lot of traffic and sales that will produce a high volume of reviews. You have to remember, and it was mentioned in one of the answers above, that reviews are very valuable for showing what is happening in your store and for creating trust. So if you're just starting out and have very few sales, if you sell very expensive items at a low volume, or if you have few sales for any other reason, your store will receive very few reviews and the review app will give out the impression that your online store is inactive. In other words, if your reviews are few and far between, that may be worse than negative reviews and for sure worse than no reviews at all. So just take this into account, that's all I'm saying. By the way, if low traffic and sales is your problem then you can take a different approach to get reviews. Instead of using a review app, you can create reviews similar to how many websites do. What I mean is that you can show your store's visitors what customers say about your product and service, without having the problems that a review app can create (i.e. showing the date of the review, etc.). So what you can do is contact your customers after they completed a purchase in your store to ask for their feedback. You'll learn a lot from it and whenever a customer is happy and gives positive feedback you can manually upload it to your store. Then you'll have positive reviews without a date, so you create trust and your store still looks active.

I've been using judge.me for more than a year now and it's very good. I'm very happy with how responsive their customer support is to emails.

+1 for Stamped.io. Simple, easy, great support. Def a good investment.

Judge.me works great for us! We removed the option to leave a review directly from the store and send review requests via email post-purchase. So we get reviews only from people who bought our products.

Judge.me is very effective. Great value for money.

+1 for judge.me. Excellent support!

My opinion is that customers want to see negative reviews as well as positive ones. That's what makes it look authentic. Showing only 5 stars reviews doesn't look real. Look at the best selling products on Amazon, for example, they may have thousands of reviews and an above 4.5 stars average per review. This means that even the most popular products get bad reviews. It's only natural and it doesn't stop people from buying these products still. So it's very important that the plugin enables you to respond to reviews so you can offer help and show how good your service is. That will help improve conversion rates more than hiding or deleting all bad reviews.

Our store publishes each and every review, no matter good or bad and we also respond to all of them. That's our policy, this is how we show customers our love, and this is how the voice of our brand shines through. We've turned negative reviews into good ones countless times and turned angry customers into happy customers who later return to buy with us again. So' it's true that every bad review is an opportunity to improve and also to tighten your relationship with customers. Additional values: 1. every type of UGC, good or bad, helps your store to rank for more keywords and appear on more organic searches. 2. Showing that your store is trustworthy will help improve conversion rates. 3. Offering good support and interacting directly with customers will reduce returns too. Important to mention that we delete reviews when they're spammy or completely irrelevant. We use Judge.me by the way.

True, showing only 5 stars reviews looks suspicious. If you remove bad reviews you miss out on the opportunity to interact with customers and build trust. I think that authentic interaction with customers is super important and I wouldn't worry about negative reviews. If there are fake reviews from competitors or trolls you can simply remove them of course. There's a moderation function in some of the apps that you can use.

Most apps (Stamped, Judgeme, etc.) allow you to check and approve reviews instead of letting people publish automatically. So the problem you're worried about can be easily solved.

It looks like I represent a minority because I'm against review apps. I don't want people publicly complaining about shipping, coupon codes, and other things that are not necessarily in my control. If customers need help they are very welcome to reach out to our customer service through email or through the website (we have a contact us section).

We selected Judge.me over Stamped.io due to the price difference as there's no significant difference in features. We haven't had any negative Nancies but we do get customers mentioning design and usability problems every now and again, which we're actually very thankful for...

If you want to build a strong brand then social proof can really help with that and this is what review apps are all about. We used Yotpo and didn't like them. Now we're use Okendo Reviews app and it's very good. It allows customers to leave detailed reviews that help other customers find the info they're looking for.

Review apps allow a certain level of automation that can save quite a lot of time:

1. You can set rules for auto-post good reviews and hold not so good ones until you sort the issue with the customers. It really helps in terms of focusing your attention on customers that have important issues.
2. You can send automated emails with review requests to customers who purchased.
3. Some apps even use chatbots to ask customers about their experience and then solicit a review only if the customer is happy.
4. Some apps (like Stamped) send emails with embedded surveys to customers and extract reviews.

I know there are different opinions about the subject but I can say that in our store we use any type of review to improve our store design, products, fulfillment and anything else customers need.

The Google Rich Snippet feature is also a very important thing to factor in.

My experience is that negative reviews are received from customers who are too lazy to contact customer service and get their problems resolved. That's why we only allow positive reviews and withhold the negative ones (Judge.me lets you do that). We contact customers who sent bad reviews to help solve their problems and they're always happy once we're done with them.

An online store that has only 5 star reviews is just not trustworthy. If you want proof look at Amazon, they take their review system very seriously and that's why you will not find a single store or product that has only 5-star reviews. Here is a screenshot of Amazon best selling products, some of them have more than 100k reviews in total, but none have only 5-sats:



The thing is that you may want to remove reviews that are not helpful to other customers. As reviews are meant to help the buying decision of customers, a 1 star review that has no information isn't worth much, unless all the other reviews are also 1 star and the product is really a disaster :)

Sell good products, provide top-of-the-line customer service and you'll rarely get bad reviews. Then you'll also see how your conversion rate sky rockets.

Loox is the best reviews app if you ask me. We've been using it for a couple of years and are super stoked. Bad reviews should def be shown if you want your online store to look like a genuine business. Just make sure to respond to them properly, that will show your customers that you can be trusted.

We've been using Yotpo, which is the largest and most successful review company I think. My feeling is that they focus now mostly on big ecomm sellers and so we felt undervalued. That's why we moved to Stamped who have very good customer support, the same features, and a much cheaper subscription price.