Product reviews

Reviews are built in — no app required. Everything lives under Reviews in the store sidebar, which has its own sub-navigation: Overview, Reviews, Q&A, Requests, Tools (Imports, Syndication, Groups, Rewards, Products), and Settings. This page is the hub — see Collecting reviews and Review tools for the deep dives.

Turn reviews on

Product reviews and Q&A are on by default under Reviews → Settings: Enable product reviews and Enable product Q&A. The review-request emails that bring reviews in, however, are a separate lifecycle that ships disabled — you must switch it on (see below).

Collecting reviews

There are three ways a review gets created:

• On-page submission — buyers review straight from the product page. Under Reviews → Settings you choose whether Allow guest reviews is on (anyone) or Require verified purchase is on (only customers with a matching order).
• Review-request emails — sent automatically after an order, with a signed one-click link to the form (no login needed). This is the Requests lifecycle, off by default.
• Imports — bring existing reviews in from a CSV or another review app.

Set up review-request emails

1. Go to Reviews → Settings and turn on the request lifecycle (Enabled). It is off by default.
2. Pick the trigger event: order created, order paid, order fulfilled (default), order delivered, or digital access granted.
3. Set the send delay — Send delay days (default 7) and Send delay hours — so the email lands after the buyer has the product.
4. Choose which orders qualify. Toggles exist for online orders (on), POS orders (off), physical / digital / event products (on), gift cards (off), and canceled / refunded / test orders (all off).
5. Tune reminders: Reminder delay days (default 7) and Max reminders (default 1). A separate media reminder can nudge reviewers who left text to add a photo (off by default).
6. Set caps and expiry: Max requests/order (default 20), Max requests/customer/month (default 20), and Expires after days (default 90) after which an un-actioned request is closed.

Requests are line-item aware and combined into one email per order by default. Track every send under Reviews → Requests (scheduled, sent, opened, clicked, submitted, expired, failed). Full detail lives in Collecting reviews.

Photos, videos, and limits

Media is on by default and toggles separately for photos and videos (Allow media, Allow photo uploads, Allow video uploads). The defaults:

Limit	Default
Photos per review	5
Videos per review	1
Max video length	60 seconds
Max file size	10 MB

Media safety lifecycle

Photo and video attachment is deliberately separate from publication. A new object starts Pending and does not set the review’s public has photo or has video meaning. A trusted scanner must inspect the actual bytes and record authoritative type, size, dimensions, duration, scanner name, and audit time.

Status	Meaning	Storefront and reward treatment
Pending	Queued or currently being inspected	Hidden; does not qualify as photo/video content
Clean	A configured trusted scanner accepted an exact private staged copy of the bytes	Still hidden until durable promotion and the edge publication marker both commit
Rejected	The scanner or the store’s size/duration policy rejected it	Hidden; no media reward; its quarantined object is deleted and the merchant may delete the row or ask the buyer to upload a replacement
Scan failed	The scanner is unconfigured, unavailable, returned invalid metadata, or could not create a safe owned copy	Hidden; no media reward; remains failed until a merchant with review-management permission explicitly retries it

The review detail page shows the status, safe reason code, attempt count, and scanner audit fields. A merchant can hide/unhide presentation, retry a Scan failed item, or delete media, but cannot manually mark bytes Clean. Rejected bytes are not retryable because their quarantine source is deleted.

Upload intents write to the non-public review-quarantine/{store}/{review}/ namespace. The scanner may only read that source and write a fresh, attempt-specific review-scanned/{store}/{review}/{media}/{attempt}/ object. It returns the private key and exact ETag—never a public key or URL. A separate promotion worker conditionally copies those attested bytes to the server-derived reviews/{store}/{review}/{media}.{ext} key, records the canonical URL, writes a private review-publications/...ready marker while the review/media rows are locked, and only then records Public ready. The image Worker requires both the canonical object and marker. Clean-but-not-public-ready media is hidden and cannot satisfy a media reward.

Media attached from a delayed “add media” reminder follows this exact same pipeline. Its only special property is financial: the server stamps it permanently non-reward-qualifying because the original reward generation is already frozen. It can be displayed after approval, but cannot retroactively upgrade, restore, or preserve a review incentive or loyalty media bonus.

Caution

No permissive fallback exists. If the scanner boundary is not configured, the worker records Scan failed — scanner_not_configured. It never treats missing infrastructure as a successful scan, and it does not automatically retry that terminal state. This avoids a configuration-failure hot loop and repeated audit events; a permitted merchant retry returns the item to Pending once.

Caution

Production must keep the R2 bucket private, remove every whole-bucket custom or development domain, and use the image Worker as the only public reader. Its allowlist includes exact canonical reviews/ keys and deliberately excludes review-quarantine/, review-scanned/, and review-publications/. Configure R2 lifecycle expiry for both private byte prefixes, with a retention period longer than the merchant retry window, because an upload intent that is never attached has no database row for an app job to clean. Attached clean/rejected/deleted objects are deleted by durable jobs. A trusted malware/content scanner whose credentials cannot write reviews/ is required before launch. The application promotion identity alone owns that namespace.

Moderation & publishing

Setting	Default	What it does
Auto publish reviews	On	Publish without manual approval
Require review body	On	Text required (turn on Allow rating-only reviews for stars without text)
Require review title	Off	Title field mandatory

Pending reviews wait in Reviews → Reviews, where you approve, reply, hide, or report them. Replies appear publicly under the review.

Publication is rating-neutral. There is no configurable minimum-rating publication gate: when auto-publish is on, policy-compliant 1★ and 5★ reviews publish the same way; when it is off, reviews of every rating wait for approval. Low-rating alerts can notify staff without changing visibility.

Caution

Do not use moderation to publish praise while suppressing criticism. A low-star review may trigger a support notification, but every policy-compliant review must follow the same publication rules. If you want private service feedback, ask it in a separate survey that is not presented as a public review.

Notifications, voting, and customer edits

• Notifications — Notify on new review and Notify on low rating are both on; Low rating threshold defaults to 2★ so 1–2★ reviews flag for attention.
• Voting — Enable voting is on (Allow downvotes off). The voting mode controls who can vote: anyone (default), customers, or verified buyers only.
• Customer edits — buyers can edit (Allow customer edit, on; up to 10 uses, token valid 720 hours) and delete their own reviews (Allow customer delete, on) via the signed link.

AI replies

Draft replies with AI under Reviews → Settings → AI reply settings — set the tone (friendly), length, sign-off, brand voice notes, and a support contact. Auto language matching is on, so a Hindi review gets a Hindi draft. You review and approve every draft before it publishes; nothing posts automatically.

Reward reviewers

Configure tiers under Reviews → Tools → Rewards to issue a reward when a qualifying review is published.

1. Choose a reward type: discount, store credit, or loyalty points. Discount rewards mint a single-use buyer code; store credit uses a human-readable amount in the store currency with an optional expiry; points use the active loyalty program.
2. Configure the three reward tiers shown in the UI: Any review, Photo review, and Video review. “Any review” is the base tier and includes a qualifying text-only review; photo and video tiers let you offer a richer reward for approved media.
3. Rewards are rating-neutral: 1★ through 5★ reviews qualify on the same terms. Keep Verified only on (default) to prevent farming.
4. Set whether the rule is active. One-per-customer and one-per-order safeguards currently apply as backend defaults; the seller page does not expose cap or start/end schedule controls.

Store credit issued here uses the same balance as Store credit. Track issued, used, expired, and revoked rewards on the same page.

Caution

An incentivized review is disclosed to the buyer before submission and marked as incentivized on supported feeds. Rewarded reviews are never sent to a destination whose policy prohibits compensation, including Shop.

Import existing reviews

Migrating from another platform? Go to Reviews → Tools → Imports and upload a CSV. Pick the source so the column mapping is applied automatically:

• Generic CSV — csv
• Judge.me — judgeme
• Loox — loox
• Yotpo — yotpo
• Other — best-effort header matching

Rows match to products by product_handle, sku, or product_id, and support rating, title, body, reviewer name/email, date, verified flag, photo URLs, and a seller reply. An imported verified flag is a trusted migration assertion—not a Sellerlane order lookup—so set it only when the source platform verified the purchase. Imports stream in the background; you can cancel mid-run (rows already imported stay, the rest are skipped).

Display options

• Verified buyer badge (Show verified badge, on) — shows verified purchase status. Native verification comes from an eligible order; trusted imports and authenticated admin verification are separate assertions.
• Reviewer name format — defaults to Asha R. style (first name + last initial).
• Reviewer country (Show reviewer country, off) — optionally show where the reviewer is from.
• Star ratings appear on product pages and cards and feed the Product structured data, so ratings can surface in Google results — see SEO.

Review groups

Share reviews across related products under Reviews → Tools → Groups — useful when the same item ships as several variants or SKUs. A group can be manual (pick products) or tag-based (any product carrying chosen tags). Reviews and the aggregate rating are pooled across the group.

Syndicate to Google

Publish your published reviews to Google so star ratings can appear in Google Shopping and the Shopping tab.

1. Go to Reviews → Tools → Syndication and enable Google Product Ratings.
2. Set the publisher name (defaults to your store name) and the product identifier Google should match on — GTIN (recommended), UPC, MPN + brand, SKU, or Custom.
3. Sellerlane generates a Google Product Reviews XML feed (schema 2.4) that Google fetches on a schedule. Submit the feed URL in Google Merchant Center.

You can also publish to custom destinations (your own feed or API endpoint, JSON or XML, with API-key / bearer / basic / HMAC auth). Meta and TikTok are not direct destinations — both accept reviews only through their approved partner apps, so Sellerlane surfaces them as guidance rather than a connect button.

Note

Theme control: review blocks are sections/blocks in the visual editor, and the review_settings Liquid object exposes your configuration to custom themes.

Next steps

Collecting reviews

The request lifecycle, on-page forms, and media in depth — Collecting reviews.

Review tools

Imports, syndication, groups, and rewards walkthroughs — Review tools.

Store credit

Where review rewards land — Store credit.

SEO

Get star ratings into search results — SEO.