#Collecting reviews

For the person setting up review requests. A survey flow watches for an order, waits, and emails the customer asking them to review what they bought. Almost every review you collect will come from one.

#The quickest way in

Set up reviews in the sidebar, or /reviews/setup, asks four questions and writes the flow for you. It is the fastest way to a store that is actually collecting reviews, and it writes exactly what you would have written by hand:

The two waits and the star threshold are picked for you rather than asked for, and the buttons say what they will be. They are ordinary settings afterward: change the waits on the flow under Reviews → Email flow, and the threshold under Settings → Reviews.

The two email shapes are lead with one product, which shows one item from the order with a star rating prompt and links the rest underneath, and list every product equally, which gives each item in the order its own row and its own button. The first suits orders with one or two things in them; the second suits baskets that routinely carry several products.

Nothing it writes is special. The flow shows up under Reviews → Email flow and the templates under Settings → Email templates, and you edit both like any other. Read on for what each decision means and how to change it.

#What a flow is

Three decisions:

1. A trigger. Which order event starts the clock: created, shipped, or delivered.
2. A condition, optional. Which orders qualify.
3. Steps. What happens and how long after, usually one email.

Flows live under Reviews → Survey flows. A flow that is not active ignores its trigger entirely.

#Choosing the trigger

Shipped and delivered depend on your store sending those dates to Cascade. On Shopify they arrive with the order sync; on a custom integration they are the shippedAt and deliveredAt fields on the order import.

#Choosing the wait

The wait is set on the step, not the flow. Give the customer long enough to have formed an opinion and no longer: a week after delivery is a common starting point, two weeks for something that takes a while to judge.

Waiting too long is the more common mistake. A request that arrives a month later reads as a store that lost track of the order.

#Conditions

Leave the condition empty and the flow runs for every order that hits its trigger. Set one and only matching orders qualify. Conditions can match on the order, the customer, the site, and the products and variants in it, using the same filter syntax as everywhere else in Cascade. See Filtering.

Useful things to condition on:

• One site, when you run more than one storefront and want different timing or wording for each.
• A product tag, to ask about the products you actually want reviews on.
• An order total, to skip the very small orders.

Flows are checked in order and the first matching flow wins, so put the specific ones above the general one. An order never generates two requests.

#Steps

A step is an email or a webhook, and a flow runs its steps in order, waiting the time set on each before it runs.

• Send email picks one of your email templates. This is the review request itself.
• Send webhook posts to a URL of yours, for anything you want to do alongside the email.

A second email a week after the first is the usual reason to add a step. Be careful: a customer who ignored the first request is not always a customer who wants a second one, and reminders are the fastest way to train people to unsubscribe.

#The request email

The email comes from one of your templates, so you control the wording, the branding and the layout. Edit it under Settings → Email templates, where you can preview it against sample data before it goes anywhere. See Email templates.

Two things the template gives you that matter here:

• {{order.reviewUrl}} is the link to the review form for that order. Without it, the email has nothing to click.
• Star links append the rating to that URL, so a customer who clicks 4 stars in the email lands on the form with 4 stars already selected. This lifts completion noticeably, because the first decision is already made.

The email is marketing mail, so it is not sent to a customer who has opted out of marketing email, and it carries an unsubscribe link.

#What the customer sees

The link opens a review page on your organization's own address, showing the order and the products in it. The customer picks a rating, writes a headline and a body, and can attach photos or videos. Their review arrives back in Cascade marked as a verified buyer, because Cascade knows which order it sent that link for.

Nothing about that page needs installing. It is served by Cascade and branded with the site's logo and colors from Settings → Sites.

#The extra questions

If you have set up review questions on the Reviews settings page, the form asks them too, under the review box and above the attachments. Only the questions that apply to the product being reviewed are asked, so an order of three items can put a different set on each of its three forms.

A scale is a row of numbered steps with your own words under the ends, and under the middle when the scale has one. A multiple choice is a set of radio buttons, or checkboxes when you allow more than one answer. A question you marked as required carries a "Required" note, and the form says which question is still missing rather than sending an incomplete review.

The storefront form asks exactly the same questions, so it does not matter which way a customer reviews you. See Storefront widgets for what shoppers then see of the answers.

#Watching requests go out

Reviews → Review requests lists every request, with the customer, the order, the flow it came from and where it has got to:

You can cancel a request that has not gone out, which is what to do when an order is refunded or you notice a flow pointing at the wrong template.

The list can be filtered and exported like any other in Cascade. See Filtering.

#Collecting without a request

From your storefront. The reviews widget carries a "Write a review" button that opens a form on the product page, so a shopper can review a product without waiting for an email. They give a rating, a title, their review, their name and their email, answer any review questions that apply to the product, and can attach up to five photos or videos.

These reviews land in Reviews exactly like any other: unpublished and waiting for you, unless you have auto-publishing on and the rating clears your threshold. Content screening runs on them the same way. They are never marked as verified buyers, because nothing proves the person bought the product, and the email address is only used to identify the reviewer and to stop the same person reviewing one product twice. It is never shown on your storefront, where reviewers appear as a first name and a last initial.

If you only want reviews from the requests you send, turn the form off: on Shopify, clear "Let shoppers write a review here" on the Product reviews block, and elsewhere put data-cascade-review-form="false" on the widget. See Storefront widgets.

By importing. Bring history from another platform, or a spreadsheet of your own. See Importing reviews.

Over the API. POST /reviews takes a review from anywhere you collect one: a kiosk in a physical store, a support tool, your own form. See the API reference.

#If requests are not going out

Work down this list:

1. Is the flow active?
2. Are orders reaching Cascade at all? Check Orders.
3. Are they reaching the trigger state? A flow triggered on delivery does nothing if your store never sends a delivery date.
4. Does the condition match? An over-specific condition is the usual culprit. Clear it temporarily and see if requests start.
5. Has the customer opted out of marketing email? Their record says so.
6. Check Reviews → Review requests for failed rows, which name the reason.