How to Add WooCommerce Reviews to Your Store

You want to have reviews for your product. Even negative reviews can be good for your credibility. In a study by Reevoo, 95% of consumers think your reviews are fake if they are all positive. So you shouldn’t be too quick to delete or block those negative reviews!

As a new store owner you need to reach out to customers and reviewers to get real reviews of your products. We’re are going to take a look at product reviews and how you can display them in WooCommerce.

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How to Enable WooCommerce Reviews

The first step is to make sure reviews are enabled in WooCommerce. They should be on by default, but sometimes plugins can disable this functionality by accident.

• In the admin of your store, click on “WooCommerce,” “Settings,” “Products,” then “General”.
• If you scroll down, you’ll see the “Reviews” settings.
• You can see that product reviews are enabled, so we’re good there.

There are two settings here about ‘verified owners’ but there isn’t a definition. What is a verified owner?

A verified owner is someone who purchased the reviewed product from your store. In other words, your store knows they bought that product.

You could discourage reviews by only allowing verified owners to leave reviews, but I don’t recommend this. If someone wants to review your product on both Amazon and your store, you want them to be able to do so on both, even though only one store will have that verified owner tag.

How to Work With WooCommerce Reviewers

If you have a brand new store, it’s a good idea to get a few friends, family, and industry experts to review your products. Now I don’t recommend sending out products to every possible person. That’s an easy way to lose inventory and not get anything from it.

Instead I recommend asking if someone is interested in reviewing. If so, give them a 100% off coupon, plus free shipping for that specific product. That way they can order the product if they’re interested, and if they don’t order the product, they’re clearly not interested enough. And as a bonus they’ll be a verified owner on your store.

WooCommerce Reviews on the Front End

Let’s make sure reviews work on the front end. They should work fine, but occasionally a theme will not include the right code and reviews aren’t possible. Let’s check.

• Go to the frontend of your site.
• Navigate to a product.

On most themes, reviews will be tucked away at the bottom of the product page in a tab. But sometimes they may be located somewhere else. If you don’t see them on the product page, it’s likely your theme doesn’t support reviews and I’d reach out to your theme developer.

Let’s see what a complete review looks like.

• If your theme displays the reviews in a tab, click the tab.
• Write a review.
• Click “Submit”.

• Now you should see a published review.

The reviews use the WordPress comments system, so all of the things that you already know about comments apply here. I was able to simply give a review without moderation because I’m logged in. If I were not logged in, the review would need to be moderated. Let’s take a look at what that look likes.

Here you can see that when you submit a review, it says that your review is awaiting moderation. Nobody else would be able to see this review until it has been approved.

When you go back to the admin, you’ll see that you have one comment awaiting approval.

From here you can choose to “Approve,” “Reply,” “Edit,” “Trash,” or mark as “Spam”.

If we approve this review, we will be able to see it on our site. You might remember based on WordPress comments, that once an address for a user has been approved, that user is able to post in the future without needing approval.

Going Further With WooCommerce Reviews

There are a few extra things you can do if you really want to have gorgeous reviews. You could look into WooCommerce Product Reviews Pro which lets users submit additional types of reviews like photos and video reviews as well as submit questions and answers to other users’ questions. If you have an active user base, an extension like this will make your Reviews section quite vibrant.

We also recommend the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin, which is available for free on WordPress.org.

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce has a range of useful features.

• Go to “WooCommerce,” then “Settings,” then “Reviews”:
• Here you can set up automatic reminders to ask people for reviews after purchasing a product:

• The email reminder can be customized to maximize your chances of getting a good review:

The plugin has a variety of other useful features too. Click the “Review Extensions” tab and you can enable the ability to upload images alongside a review:

If you want, you can even give customers a discount for leaving a review. In this example, we created a coupon called “purplevillelaunch”. Click the “Review for Discount” tab, and you can automatically send this coupon to all your reviewers: