Collecting reviews
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Reviews reach IFG Reviews in three ways: from the request email sent after an order is shipped, from the review form on your store, and from an import. This page explains how each one works, and what you do with a review once it arrives.
Review requests
When a request is created and sent
- An order is fulfilled in Shopify. The request is tied to shipping, not to payment. If the order ships in several parts, the request starts when the whole order is fulfilled.
- The app creates one request for each product line of the order. A customer who bought three different products is asked about three products.
- The email goes out after the delay you chose, at the hour you chose, in your store’s time zone. The defaults are 7 days and 10:00. You set both on the Requests page, under When to ask.
- The customer opens the link, writes the review and sends it.
Requests are off until you switch them on: no customer gets an email before that. To switch them on, tick Ask for a review after every shipped order on the Requests page and save, or press Switch requests on in the Activation step of the guided setup. If you switch them off, the requests already scheduled and any reminders still waiting are cancelled, and they don’t restart when you switch back on.
Requests only go out when email sending is active for your store. Settings → Diagnostics → Email sending shows whether it is.
Rules that protect your customers
The app checks these again at the moment of sending, not only when the request is created:
- A fulfilment more than 30 days old gets no email. The request is recorded as expired. This stops a reinstall or a redelivered notification from writing to people about old purchases.
- A customer who unsubscribed is never written to again by your store. Unsubscribing takes one click on the page that the link in every email opens, and the email also carries the standard one-click unsubscribe header that mail providers use.
- One message per person per week. If the same customer has a second request due within 7 days of the last email from your store, it waits and goes out after the window.
- Cancelled orders and refunds. If an order is cancelled, its pending requests are cancelled. If a refund names specific lines, the pending requests for those lines are cancelled. A refund that carries no line information cancels nothing.
- The product must still exist. If it was deleted from your catalogue, the request is cancelled.
- A request stops waiting 45 days after its planned send date.
The reminder
On Grow and Unlimited the app can send one reminder to customers who have not answered. It goes 7 days after the first email, only if the first email was sent, and never later than 10 days after it. It is on by default on those plans, and you switch it off on the Requests page with Send a reminder. A customer who answers, unsubscribes or whose email bounced gets no reminder. On Free the option is shown as unavailable.
What the email looks like
The Requests page has an Email preview: the same email your customers receive, generated by the code that sends it, in each of the six languages, for the first request and the reminder, on phone and computer size.
- It is addressed by first name, comes in your store’s name, and has your store’s contact email as the reply address.
- It shows five stars. Selecting one opens the review form with that rating already chosen. Nothing is saved until the customer sends the form.
- It contains no images and no tracking pixel.
- It is written in the language of the customer’s order when that is one of the six languages, and in English otherwise.
Send me a test email sends one to your store’s contact email on Shopify. See Installation.
Your monthly allowance
Each plan has a number of requests per month: 50 on Free, 500 on Grow, 2,500 on Unlimited. A request counts when the email provider accepts the message. When the allowance is used up, new requests wait instead of going out, and Plans shows your use. They are not charged as extra and they are not lost: they are sent the next month, or at once if you move to a larger plan. The page warns you when you pass four fifths of the allowance.
Following the results
The Requests page shows how many requests are Scheduled, Sent, Reviewed, Cancelled, Expired, Blocked (the customer opted out), Undelivered or Failed, and lists the latest ones with their planned date. If the list shows only the latest requests, the page says so.
Writing a review: the customer’s side
The link in the email opens a page on your store’s own domain. The customer chooses the rating, and may add a title and the text, and confirms the name shown. The email address is not asked for: the app already holds it from the order, so the review cannot be written under someone else’s address. The review page offers a photo field only when photo uploads are active on your store (Settings → Diagnostics → Photos in reviews).
The link works once. A second use shows a page that says it was already used.
Customers can also write a review from the form in the reviews widget on your product page. Reviews written there are not marked as verified. The form carries a bot check that runs in the customer’s browser, with no captcha and no outside service. It needs JavaScript. There is a limit of one review per person and product per day, and a ceiling on the number of submissions per hour for your store.
Moderating reviews
Every new review is Waiting until you decide. Nothing is shown on your store before that.
Open Reviews. You can filter by status, rating, source (store form, request email, imported), verification, product and period. For each review you can:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Publish | The review appears on your store, and the product’s rating is updated. |
| Hide | The review leaves your store. It stays in the app. |
| Mark as spam | As Hide. A review marked as spam does not come back to the waiting list. |
| Archive | A place for reviews you no longer need, without deleting them. |
| Send back to waiting | Returns the review to the list to decide. |
You can select several reviews and apply one action to them (up to 50 at a time). When you have many waiting reviews, for example after an import, Publish all waiting publishes the ones that were there when you opened the page.
One rule worth knowing: bulk actions are switched off while the rating filter is on. Choosing which reviews to publish or hide by their star count is selective curation, and IFG Reviews does not offer it. Every move is recorded.
After you publish or hide, product pages update on their own. If some pages are behind, the Reviews page shows a notice with Update the product pages, which brings them up to date.
Replying
Each review has a Public reply of up to 4,000 characters. It is shown next to the review on your store, once the review is published. The widget labels it with your store’s name.
Verified purchase
A review is a Verified purchase only when it was written from the link of a request tied to a real order line for that same product. It is decided by the app when the review arrives, it is never changed later, and there is no control, for you or for anyone else, to grant it. Moderation, replying and publishing do not change it. Reviews from the store form and imported reviews are Not verified.
Deleting reviews
The app does not offer a delete button. Hide and Archive take a review off your store and keep it in the app. A review, and a customer’s requests, are erased for good when Shopify forwards a privacy erasure request for that customer, or when your store’s data is erased after you uninstall. See Privacy and data.
A link or QR code to ask for a review
In Products, each product has Link and QR code: a link to its page that opens the review form straight away (?ifg_write=1). Put it in a message, on a card in the parcel or print the QR. It needs the reviews block with its form switched on. A review that comes in this way is a storefront review and is never marked verified: that badge comes only from the request sent after the purchase.
Reviews of your store
The IFG Reviews — store reviews block collects reviews of your shop itself, such as service and shipping. They are kept apart from the product ratings: they never change a product’s stars, count or structured data. They go through the same moderation. See Widgets.
Photos
When photo uploads are active on your store, a customer can add up to 5 photos (JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 10 MB each) to a review. Each photo is re-encoded and stripped of its metadata, and a photo waits in private storage until you publish the review. Hiding the review takes its photos off your store. Photo storage counts towards your plan: 100 MB, 1 GB or 10 GB. If the review form does not show a photo field, photo uploads are not active on your store yet.