Why Getting Product Reviews on Shopify Is Important

Here’s one great thing you can do for your Shopify ecommerce site: gather up a whole bunch of product reviews from customers. Product reviews are the fuel of a good e-commerce website.

Why are product reviews important for ecommerce?

If you’ve ever spent time shopping on Amazon, you’ve no doubt noticed the power of product reviews.

They provide social proof to aid in customer purchase decisions, answer questions, and inspire trust. The structured data from reviews is great for search engine optimization (SEO). That means Google will like you better if you get more reviews.

Simply put, you’ll make more sales if you put a product review strategy in place. The best thing you can do for your ecommerce store is to have reviews on each product page and make them display automatically, without the visitor having to click to display them. That’s where most people will find them, not caring to go to a full page of reviews.

Getting product reviews from customers

Having just a handful of reviews on your site is not going to be any better than having no reviews, though. It could be detrimental to show “0 reviews” over and over on many of your products. So if you’re going to add reviews to your site, do it right by starting with a good amount of them, and setting up a system to continue getting new reviews.

We strongly recommend that you take some time right now to gather reviews from your existing customers, if you haven’t already. We suggest to our clients that whenever possible they should launch their new custom Shopify website with reviews!

Find a way to incentivize your best customers to leave a review for you! And make the request to leave a review a natural part of your post-sale follow-up (some of the reviews apps will do this automatically for you – or you could set up a Klaviyo automation).

We often have clients who have successful Etsy shops with lots of reviews, but they are making the switch to Shopify and they want to know how to retain all of those nice things that people have said about their products on Etsy. Make a plan to ask your past customers to leave a review on your new site – you may want to offer them a coupon code or free gift or something… or maybe just ask and see what kind of response you get! Etsy doesn’t allow you to use Etsy reviews without explicit permission from each customer. Do you have a way to get in touch with your Etsy customers to get permission?

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Shopify reviews apps to use

Here are the Shopify reviews apps our clients like to use:

• Product Reviews, by Shopify (free and simple)
• Stamped.io Product Reviews Add-on
• Judge.me
• Yotpo

If the Shopify app doesn’t meet your needs, the Stamped.io add-on may make it work well for you. Your next step, if you want a more robust solution, is Judge.me or Yotpo. You can’t really go wrong with either one; they’re both feature-rich. In the Aeolidia team’s opinion, judge.me is a better option for most small businesses, and Yotpo works well for much larger businesses. Our web analyst Helen Hulskamp explains:

At this point Judge.me has so many really useful features on the free plan and even more on the $15/mo plan that I can’t think of a good reason to pay so much more for Yotpo. I have seen larger corporate accounts that share one Yotpo license among multiple subsidiaries so it may make sense at the enterprise level. The Judge.me features our clients find especially useful are the rich SEO snippets, automatic review requests, product groups, and photo reviews.

When the topic of collecting reviews came up in our Facebook group, The Shipshape Collective, our client Jenny Rushmore of Cashmerette chimed in:

I’m using the Judge.me app and I’ve really liked it so far – you can set how many emails it sends (and reminders) and then they publish to the site (Shopify). For instance, I have it set so they’re only asked to review one item (even if they purchased multiple), and they’re only reminded once. And it doesn’t send them the email for over a month after the buy to allow them time to use the product.

You can see below what the reviews look like in action on her website:

Why you should respond to reviews

Product reviews are important for increasing your ecommerce conversion rate and they help boost your appearance in search engines. But your company may also receive other types of reviews, on sites like Facebook, Yelp, or Google My Business. If you have a brick & mortar retail store or a large following of local customers, these types of reviews are very important for your local SEO rankings. And did you know that you can improve the impact of your negative and positive reviews on other sites by responding to them?

Of course, by listening to feedback and concerns in negative reviews and addressing them appropriately, you can turn negative reviews into new customers. But responding to positive reviews is also important too. It shows existing and potential customers that you are listening to them. You can express gratitude by responding to positive reviews, and your responses can also help boost your visibility in search engines.

Now, go out there and get some reviews!

Do you have any other questions about product reviews I could answer for you? Product reviews are just one way to help increase conversions and improve your SEO for your Shopify website.

If you want to make more sales and get more traffic to your ecommerce store, view our pricing! A brand redesign or custom Shopify website might be just the thing your business needs to take things to the next level!