Moderate reviews and reply to customers
At a glance
- What you get
- The right reviews published on your store, with your reply when it helps.
- Time
- 5 minutes each time
- Plan
- All plans
Before you start
Reviews come from three places: the request email, the form on your store and an import. They all arrive as Waiting: nothing shows on your store until you publish them.
When there are reviews to read, Overview tells you: “There are reviews waiting for you” and the Go to the waiting reviews button.
Publish a review
Warning: a published review is visible to every visitor of your store, with the name the customer chose.
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Open Shopify Admin › Apps › IFG Reviews › Reviews.
What you’ll see: the Reviews page with the status tabs at the top (Waiting, Published, Hidden, Spam, Archived, each with its count) and the list of waiting reviews.
- Read the review. Next to the rating you see two labels: the verification (Verified purchase, Known customer or Not verified) and the status.
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Press Publish.
What you’ll see: the review leaves the Waiting list and moves to Published. The product page updates straight away: reload it to see the review.
The other actions
Under each review there’s one main button. The other moves are under More actions.
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Publish | The review appears on your store and the product’s average updates |
| Hide | It disappears from your store but stays in the app. You can publish it again whenever you like |
| Mark as spam | It disappears from your store and never comes back to the moderation queue |
| Archive | You put it aside without deleting it |
| Send back to waiting | It goes back to the ones to decide (from Spam or Archived) |
The app has no button to delete a review. A review is only really deleted when the customer asks Shopify to erase their data, or after the app is uninstalled.
Reply in public
Warning: the reply is public. Don’t write any of the customer’s personal details, such as their address or order number.
- Under the review, write in the Public reply field. 4,000 characters at most.
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Press Save reply.
What you’ll see: the reply stays in the field. On your store it appears next to the review, once the review is published.
To remove a reply, empty the field and press Save reply again.
Work on several reviews at once
Useful after an import, when you have lots of reviews waiting.
Publish them all:
- On the Waiting tab, find the box that says how many reviews are waiting.
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Press Publish all pending (…).
What you’ll see: the message “… reviews published.”. If there are more left, the message tells you to press again.
Only the ones that were already there when you opened the page are published. A review that arrived in the meantime stays waiting.
Pick some of them:
- Tick Select on the reviews you want, or Select all … on this page. 50 at most at a time.
- In the Action menu, choose what to do (for example Hide).
- Press Apply to ….
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Read the confirmation question and press Confirm. If you’ve changed your mind, press Cancel.
What you’ll see: a message with the action and the number of reviews moved.
Note: when you filter by rating, the actions on several reviews are switched off. Choosing what to publish based on the stars is forbidden by Shopify’s rules. You can still moderate one review at a time.
Find a review
- Open Filters above the list.
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Choose one or more filters: Rating, Source (Store form, Request email, Imported), Verification, Product, Period.
What you’ll see: the list narrows down and a line says how many reviews match the filters.
- To go back to the full list, press Clear filters.
The Product filter also has Store review: reviews of the store itself, not of a product.
What “verified” means
- Verified purchase: the review comes from the link in a request tied to a real order for that product.
- Known customer: when writing, the person was logged in to their customer account on your store. The review, however, isn’t tied to a purchase.
- Not verified: all the others, including the ones from the store form and imported ones.
The app decides this when the review arrives and it never changes. Nobody can change it by hand, not even you.
Tip: if you use Shopify Flow, the app offers two events for your workflows: Review submitted (a review arrives) and Review published (you publish one).
If something goes wrong
I published but the review doesn’t show on my store. Reload the product page. If Reviews shows the yellow notice “The product pages are not up to date yet”, press Update the product pages. Also check that the reviews block is in your theme: see Showing reviews on your store.
“This review changed after you opened the page” appears. Someone else, or you in another tab, changed it. Reload the page, check and make the move again.
There’s no “Apply” button. You have a rating filter on. Remove it, or moderate one review at a time.