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, open Home, click the gear button below View site on the Home panel, and choose Settings.
- Under Selling, open the Store card and find the Reviews section.
- Reviews on or off — off hides them from your site entirely and stops the request emails from 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 it ships asks someone to review a package 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 added it yourself — typed in, or imported from a spreadsheet, which is handy when you're moving from another platform.
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.
Replying to a review
Each review takes one reply from you, in plain text. It shows under the review wherever your site shows it — on the product's page and in your theme's review sections — signed with your site's name, for as long as the review is published. So you can answer one that's still pending, and the reply appears when you publish it. The scrolling review strip in one theme and the small reviews beside a booking form show no replies.
When the review came from an order, the customer is emailed your reply too, once: the first time it goes out. Edit the reply or remove it afterwards and nothing more is sent. The email comes from your site's own address, so it needs a verified email domain; without one the reply still posts, and once the domain is verified the review offers to email it.
If your site's owner has turned on reply drafts, Write with AI above the reply box writes a draft from the review for you to read and change. Nothing posts until you post it.
- In the side navigation, open Reviews under People and click the review.
- Write in Your reply, then click Post reply.
- To change it later, edit the text and click Save changes. Remove takes it off your site.
On Home, a new review under four stars has a Reply button that opens it with the reply box ready, and replying clears that row. Owners, admins and editors can reply, and visitors see a new or changed reply within a few minutes.
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. Orders with nothing to fulfill, like downloads and license keys, are never asked automatically.
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, but setting it to Hidden is usually better: it pulls the review from the site and keeps the record. Worth pausing first: a review section with no criticism in it is the one shoppers stop trusting.
Yes. Open it under People, then Reviews, and write in Your reply. The reply shows under the review wherever your site shows it — on the product's page and in your theme's review sections, though not in a scrolling review strip or beside a booking form — and if the review came from an order, the customer gets it by email too.
No. They're emailed once, the first time the reply goes out. Editing it or removing it sends nothing, and neither does posting a reply again after removing one.
Replies go from your site's own email address, so they wait for your email domain to be verified, and the review then offers to send it. A review you entered or imported has no address to send to, and an address that bounced, reported your mail as spam, or was erased at the customer's request is skipped.
Yes, once your site's owner turns on reply drafts: in your site's Settings, under Access & legal, open AI features. Your privacy policy has to say that replies may be drafted with AI first, and that page can add the section for you. Write with AI then puts a draft in the reply box for you to edit, and nothing posts until you do. It sends Anthropic, our AI provider, the review's stars and words, the product's name, your business's name and kind, and any note you add, with the customer's name and the email addresses, phone numbers and web addresses it recognizes taken out. A review that mentions someone's health, religion or another sensitive subject isn't sent at all, so you write that one yourself. That check reads English and Spanish only and may miss things, so read every draft before you post it. Each draft uses some of your AI credits. Reply drafts aren't offered to health care practices for people, religious organizations, law firms, schools or childcare providers, or tutoring services.
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.