Letting customers do the selling
Collecting reviews, deciding what goes live, and reading the wishlist.
Overview
Two features, both about what customers think. Reviews are what people say after they've bought; favorites are what they've saved but haven't bought yet. One sells the next order, the other tells you what to stock.
Neither needs setting up from scratch. Reviews are on unless you turn them off, and the heart on a product page writes to your favorites list on its own.
Both live in the side navigation under People, alongside Customers.
The three settings
Everything about how reviews behave sits on one settings card.
- In the side navigation go to Sites, click your site's action button (the ⋯), and choose Settings.
- Under Selling, open the Store card.
- Reviews on or off — off hides them from your site entirely and stops the request emails going out.
- Whether new reviews wait for you or publish themselves. Waiting is the default, and it's the right default.
- How long after an order is finished the review request should go out. Five days is the starting point; anything from none to two months is allowed.
Turning reviews off after a request has already been scheduled is safe — the email is skipped rather than sent to someone who'll land on a page that no longer exists.
How the ask goes out
You don't chase reviews by hand. When you mark an order fulfilled, we schedule a review request for that customer and send it once the delay you set has passed.
The timing is on purpose: asking on the day of dispatch asks someone to review a parcel they haven't opened. Waiting until it's arrived and been used is what produces a review worth reading.
One order, one ask. Marking an order fulfilled again — adding a second shipment, correcting a status — never schedules a second email, and orders with no email address are skipped.
Approving what appears
Reviews, under People, is the gate between what someone submitted and what your visitors see. Every review is in one of three states:
- Pending — submitted and waiting on you. Nobody else can see it.
- Published — live on the site.
- Hidden — pulled from the site but kept here. The way to retire a review without destroying the record.
Approving is a judgment about whether a review is genuine, not whether it's flattering. Deleting honest criticism is how a review section stops being believed — and readers are much better at spotting a wall of five stars than most people expect.
Collected and manual reviews
A review either came through your site or you typed it in.
Collected reviews arrive from customers and start out pending. Manual reviews — a press quote, something a customer said by email — skip the queue, because you're the one vouching for them.
Where a review is linked to a real order it's marked as a verified purchase, which is worth considerably more to a reader than an anonymous five stars.
The star rating is optional. Leaving it off gives you a plain quote, which is usually what a press mention wants to be.
Where reviews appear
Once a review is published it shows on the product it's attached to and in the review listings your template provides — the shop and the product pages both pick them up automatically.
A review doesn't have to belong to a product. One left about you generally still counts as proof; it just isn't tied to a single thing you sell.
Reading the wishlist
Favorites is a read-only list of what shoppers have saved by tapping the heart on a product. A save only sticks once the shopper has confirmed their email address, so every row is a real, reachable person rather than an anonymous click.
It's most useful read as a question. Something saved often but rarely bought is usually telling you about its price, its photos, or its delivery cost. Saves against something out of stock are a restock list with names attached.
Saving a product isn't permission to email someone. Check their marketing consent under Customers before you contact anyone about their wishlist.
Frequently asked questions
No. Marking an order fulfilled schedules the request, and it sends once your chosen delay has passed. You set the delay once and then leave it alone.
Counting from when the order was marked fulfilled, not from when it was paid — so the clock starts when the thing is actually on its way. The default is five days.
No. Each order can only schedule one request, so re-saving a fulfillment or adding a second shipment doesn't produce another email.
Not by default — new reviews wait for your approval. There's a setting to publish them automatically instead, but holding them is the safer choice for most shops.
You can hide one, which pulls it from the site and keeps the record. Worth pausing first: a review section with no criticism in it is the one shoppers stop trusting.
The review is linked to a real order on your site. It's the difference between a stranger's opinion and a customer's, and readers notice.
Yes — a press quote or something a customer emailed you can be entered by hand. Those skip the approval queue, since you're the one standing behind them.
In your site's Settings, under Selling, open the Store card and switch reviews off. They disappear from your site and the request emails stop.
No. The heart on the storefront is the only thing that writes to that list, which is what keeps it an honest record of what people actually want.
The row keeps the details as they were when it was saved, so the history stays readable. It's a record of what someone wanted, not a live link to a product.