Starting a Shopify store is easy enough. You've completed the admin and uploaded your products, but now comes the part where you need to build your brand and get customers to buy what you're selling.

There are so many marketing strategies and tools that can be used (some of which we've covered in our other tutorials), but online reviews are right at the top, alongside email marketing.

Why online reviews? Let's take a look below to find out.

  • The Benefits Of Customer Reviews 💸
  • How To Get Customer Reviews For Your Shopify Store 🎁
  • How To Add Product Reviews To Your Shopify Website 👩‍🏫
  • Conclusion 🙌
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra). For more information, read our affiliate disclosure.

    The Benefits Of Customer Reviews 💸

    Customer reviews, product reviews, or user reviews, whatever you call them, have been proven to work. This is because, where other marketing content comes from your business to convince shoppers to buy your products, reviews are personal recommendations that come from somebody with first-hand experience with your product.

    Of all your eCommerce marketing efforts, the most consequential might just be your customers lavishing your brand with praise in the form of positive reviews.

    This social proof shows that people are buying your products, using them, and loving them! This, in turn, builds trust in your brand.

    Think about it this way; your potential customers can't experience your products in an online store as they can in a brick-and-mortar store. All they have are some pictures and a product description to go on.

    Having happy customer feedback about a product they have physically interacted with acts as validation that the products shown in your online store are indeed as good as they look. This goes hand in hand with validating that you offer a smooth shopping experience and a safe checkout process.

    Reviews also garner interest in your products. They get people talking about what you offer, which increases conversion rates, boosts average order value, and improves your ranking on search engines.

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    Did you know that around 70% of people will read reviews before making a purchase? According to research, reviews can increase click-through rates (CTR) by up to 35% and increase the average order value by 11%.

    How To Get Customer Reviews For Your Shopify Store 🎁

    It's good that you want to showcase reviews on your Shopify store, but you might ask, "How exactly do I get customers to leave reviews?" especially if you're still just starting out.

    There are many beautiful ways to engage your audience and get them to leave positive reviews, some of which include the following:

    • Ask your customers for reviews using email marketing (set up automated emails and reminder emails and target satisfied customers)
    • Incentivize your customers to leave reviews by offering discount codes on their next purchase (hello, returning customers!)
    • Create a loyalty program (a great way to build a loyal customer base)
    • Offer different review formats (text-based reviews, photo, and video reviews, star ratings)
    • Engage with your existing customer reviews (people love to see a business respond to their feedback)
    • Provide a review template and/or make the review process as simple as possible

    So, what are you waiting for - let's add reviews to your Shopify store!

    How To Add Product Reviews To Your Shopify Website 👩‍🏫

    The easiest way to add reviews to your Shopify store is to grab a product reviews app off Shopify's app store. You can also add reviews using code, but to be newbie-friendly, we're going to focus on some of the top apps.

    To start with, we also want to mention Shopify's product review app. While it doesn't have the same 4+ star reviews as the apps below, it is a good option for those just starting out.

    Product Reviews By Shopify

    This app by Shopify is free and easy to use, which is a big draw card. However, it is an entry-level app and doesn't have the broadest range of features.

    You can add a customer review feature to your products using a theme-friendly design with easy customization (no coding required).

    It also allows you to perform bulk actions such as publishing, hiding, filtering, and managing your reviews.

    Another cool feature is that it supports Googe microdata, automatically adding an average review score that appears in your search results on Google. This is an excellent way of increasing traffic from organic searches.

    Now that we've covered Shopify's product review app let's look at the top 5 review apps based on users and ratings. In no particular order:

    1. Judge.me Product Reviews
    2. Loox Product Reviews & Photos
    3. Yotpo Product & Photo Reviews
    4. Stamped Product Reviews & UGC
    5. Ali Reviews - Product Reviews

    1. Judge.me Product Reviews

    Pricing: pretty decent free plan (Forever free) and paid plan (Awesome @ $15 p/m)

    Judge.me helps you collect and display genuine reviews and star ratings. It offers not only text-based reviews but also reviews with photos and videos, absolutely free!

    Social proof from reviews and other user-generated content, like photos and videos, increases your conversion rate, organic traffic, and buyer engagement. - Judge.me

    Other features include a review carousel, Q&A, custom review forms and questions, social posts, cross-shop synchronization, instantly loaded reviews to increase page speed, and SEO Rich Snippets.

    They have a highly-rated 24/7 customer support team available to help with setup and basic customization to ensure their review widget aligns perfectly with your Shopify theme. In addition, their widgets and emails accommodate 34 languages.

    2. Loox Product Reviews & Photos

    Pricing: 14-day free trial. Beginner plan $9.99 p/m, Growth plan $34.99 p/m, Unlimited plan $299.99 p/m. Additional charges may apply.

    Available in 19 languages, Loox helps you gather product reviews using review request emails which you can schedule according to delivery time or order status.

    Other features include site-wide referral widgets, brand discovery on social media and Google Shopping, the ability to offer a discount code for photo and/or video reviews, send review request reminders, create lookalike audiences based on your happy customers, and moderation of bad reviews.

    They have a helpful, 24/7 support team, and no technical knowledge is needed to install and use the app.

    3. Yotpo Product & Photo Reviews

    Pricing: Free plan available with 200 extra review credits in your first month. Growth 50 plan $15 p/m, Growth 100 plan $24 p/m, Growth 250 plan $49 p/m. External charges may apply. These charges are billed by the external provider and won't appear on your Shopify invoice.

    Yotpo assists you in collecting reviews from customers through automated email and SMS requests. They offer different types of reviews, including text, star ratings on product pages, photos, and customer Q&A.

    Leverage our official partnership with Google to boost brand discovery through search. Publish reviews, share them on Facebook & Instagram, and comment to engage with customers. - Yotpo

    You can easily import reviews with the help of their 24/7 support team, and they have a pretty cool feature that flags negative reviews for your attention.

    Other features include discount codes to incentivize customers to leave reviews, Google Seller Ratings and Google Shopping ads, Walmart syndication, and the capability to collect site and product reviews in one email flow.

    4. Stamped Product Reviews & UGC

    Pricing: Free plan available (Lite Plan). Basic plan $23 p/m, Premium plan $59 p/m, Business plan $149 p/m. 7-day free trial.

    Stamped boasts some big names, such as HBO, Colgate, Purple, and Linjer, that use their app to increase sales with custom content and reviews, and it's not hard to see why. It's much more than a product reviews app and offers a variety of user-generated content in addition to product recommendations (upselling), retargeting ads, and incentivized photo and video reviews.

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    You can collect seven types of user-generated content using Stamped, including product reviews, photo, and video reviews, Instagram shoppable gallery, community Q&A, Checkout reviews, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and imported reviews from Facebook, FB Messenger, AliExpress, and Kaviyo.

    Last but not least, it adds SEO-friendly review scores for Products and Collections pages to your Google search results.

    5. Ali Reviews - Product Reviews

    Pricing: Free plan available. Starter plan $9.90 p/m, Essential plan $19.90 p/m, Premium plan $49.90 p/. 7-day free trial. Additional charges may apply.

    Ali Reviews lets you easily collect reviews through automated follow-up emails and SMS requests, QR codes on product containers, discount codes, manual requests for older customers, importing photo reviews directly from dropshipping businesses, and by migrating existing reviews using CSV files.

    It also helps you improve your user experience by utilizing one or more of its many eye-catching review widgets with templates that are compatible with any page and don't reduce your site speed.

    In addition to the most common online customer review features (reminder emails, adding reviews to Google, social sharing, etc.), Ali Reviews also helps you increase sales by displaying the most relevant reviews to the right target audience on any store page.

    Conclusion 🙌

    Now you know the importance of consumer reviews, how to get them, and how to add reviews to your Shopify store!

    If there is one important point we'd like to make before signing off, it's that for all the greatness of displaying reviews, never create fake reviews. It may take some time to build up your honest customer ratings, but rather the time than starting on the wrong foot and losing trust points!

    Once your potential customers turn into happy, loyal, or returning customers, you're sure to gather all the hype and trust points you need to continue building a successful brand!