Product Reviews Updates: Stars Everywhere

We expect the next couple of weeks to be quite exciting around CM Commerce HQ, as there should be a flurry of new releases coming your way. Some of these will be bigger (and brand-new) features, others will be smaller releases geared towards improving and maturing our existing tools.

One of our primary focus areas for the next couple of weeks will be Product Reviews.

Since the first release of Product Reviews last year, we have not been able to dedicate a bunch of time to new features for it. Regardless of this though, CM Commerce-powered stores have seen open rates of 80% on their review (request) email and 18%-odd submission rates (which firmly puts this on par with industry standards). We also saw an increase of about 250% in reviews submitted and review widget views.

It is on that backdrop, that we’re excited to announce the first batch of new features that is available for Product Reviews this week:

New Review Summary Widget

Some of you might say “Finally!” and you’d probably be right. 🙂 We have added a new Review Widget (called a “Summary Widget”) which only displays a product’s star rating. This is perfect for Product Collection / Category pages where you are displaying multiple products or in the meta data section of individual Product pages. Our existing “Recent Widget” can then still be used in conjunction with the “Summary Widget” on individual Product pages to display the actual, recent ratings for the product.

This is what the  new “Summary Widget” looks like:

Learn how to set up your Product Review widgets.

Including Product Ratings on Recommendation Widgets

Product reviews and ratings are all about adding credibility or social proof to your sales and marketing techniques. Many times a well-rated or -reviewed product will be the tipping point for a prospective customer to make that purchase.

If you are already using our Product Recommendation widgets, you now have the option to also display the product’s rating in those widgets. This means that the widget will display some personalised recommendations to your customers /  visitors and add a touch of social proof by showcasing the rating for that product. Just look at how enticing this looks… 🙂

Requesting reviews based on fulfilment status

Shipping and logistics are never an exact science and sometimes your shipping process and timelines differs for different kinds of products or for customers in different areas or countries. Until now you could only send a review request email (via our Follow-Up Emails) based on a delay from the date of the order. But sometimes this meant that the review request email arrived before the actual package.

To increase the relevancy and conversion rates for all your review request emails, you can now use our “After Order Fulfilled” sending rule which will only send the review request email after the order has been shipped / fulfilled. Learn more about this sending rule.

Excluding certain products from reviews

We know you don’t always want to request a review for all of your products. Sometimes you have “Free + Shipping” products or custom options, which don’t require a review. You can now exclude these products from ever getting a review, which means we can shine the spotlight on the products for which you want reviews. Learn how you can exclude certain products from being included in your review request emails.

What do you think of the updates? And what else would you like us to release for Product Reviews? Let us know in the comments and we’ll be sure to consider that alongside our existing roadmap. 🙂

Photo by Sidharth Bhatia on Unsplash