Reviews
Litestore asks buyers to review products they bought, and the ratings appear on the product page after you approve each review.
Litestore lets shoppers review the products they've bought. You read each review in a queue and choose whether it appears in the store.
Review sources
A shopper can only review a product they've bought.
Before the storefront accepts a review, it checks for a matching order item and rejects the submission if there isn't one. This means every review comes from a purchase, rather than having a verification badge added afterwards.
New reviews arrive unmoderated, and Litestore stores them in the store's own database. Once you approve one, it appears on the product page and in the page's Product schema.
The queue is here:
Reviews
/admin/reviewsYou need the reviews:view permission to open it. Each review gets a sequential number, which keeps admin URLs short and readable.
Verified buyers
Litestore checks the purchase with the same test when it shows the review form and when it accepts a review.
The storefront only shows the review form when the customer has an order item for that product, and it only accepts the submission if the same test passes. Hiding the form is a convenience for the customer, while the check on submit is what actually enforces the rule.
Because a review requires an order item, the verified-buyer flag on a storefront review is always true. There are no unverified reviews to filter out, and you don't need a separate verification step.
The database allows one review per customer per product, so a customer can't post five reviews on the same item. Since the database enforces this rule rather than the form, it applies no matter how the data is written.
Review states
A review is pending, published, rejected or flagged.
Litestore doesn't store the state in a status column. Instead, it determines the state from which decision timestamp is set.
If the status were stored separately, it could get out of sync with the decisions. The list filter might show one thing while the product page shows another, or the moderation menu might offer an action that no longer applies. Because Litestore derives the state from the moderation decisions, the list filter, the product page and the moderation menu always show the same status.
A new review has no decision timestamp at all, so it's treated as pending automatically.
Reviews are not published until you approve them
A submitted review has no decision timestamp, and Litestore treats it as pending. It stays off the product page and out of the structured data until you approve it.
Moderation actions
Each decision takes an optional moderation note.
pending → approve → published
flagged → approve → published
pending → flag → flagged
published → flag → flagged
anything not already rejected → reject → rejectedA review that's already published can be flagged. Flagging removes a live review from the store for a second look. This is useful when a review seemed fine when you approved it but later turns out to come from a competitor, to have been posted by mistake, or to be about the wrong product.
Rating markup
When you publish a review, it appears in the product's structured data as well as on its page.
Litestore adds the product's average rating and review count to the Product schema as AggregateRating. It also adds up to ten individual Review nodes, each including the rating, body, author and date.
Litestore only includes published reviews. Pending reviews aren't shown to search engines or to shoppers, because both use the same state.
Imported reviews
When you migrate a catalog, its review history goes into the same queue and the same table as new reviews.
An imported review keeps its source, its external id and URL, the id of the import batch it came in, and its external image URLs.
There's no separate inbox or import table to manage. You moderate an imported review with the same actions as a new one.
Settings
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews on or off | Turns reviews on for the store or off entirely. | On |
| Request delay | Sets how many days after delivery Litestore asks the customer for a review. | 3 days |
| Reminder | Sends one reminder if no review has arrived. A longer sequence isn't available. | 11 days later |
These are fixed defaults in the store's code, not admin settings, so whoever runs the store changes them.
Review ownership
Reviews are stored as rows in the store's own database.
You don't need to embed a widget, and no third-party code loads on the product pages. There's also no per-review fee, so keeping a growing review history doesn't cost more.
Review queue
New review
If they have a matching order, the review enters the queue as pending.
Moderation
Approve, flag or reject it, and add a moderation note to record the reason.
Publishing
The approved review and the updated average rating appear on the product page and in its structured data at the same time.
If you're unsure about a review, consider what each action does. Rejecting removes the review from every page, while flagging keeps it in the queue for a second look. A live review can also be flagged later.
Litestore has already verified the purchase before a review reaches the queue, so you only need to choose whether to publish it.
Related
Customers
The customer list shows who buys from the store, how much each customer has spent, and which lifecycle stage their orders put them in.
Storefront questions
The assistant sets search-result titles and descriptions; Litestore builds structured data, sitemaps and redirects for renamed URLs on its own.
Products
A product holds its options, variants, prices and links, and has to pass a set of checks before it's published.