#Questions and answers

Shoppers ask questions on your product pages. Cascade answers twice: once immediately, from what your reviewers have already said, and once properly, when someone on your team writes the answer that gets published.

The published questions and answers appear on the product page under the reviews, and are marked up for search engines so they can show up under your listing.

#How one question works

1. A shopper types a question in the reviews widget and, if they like, their name and an email address.
2. They get an instant answer generated from that product's published reviews, clearly labeled as generated. If the reviews do not cover it, they are told so.
3. The question lands under Reviews → Questions in your dashboard.
4. You write the answer. Publishing it puts the question and your answer on the product page, and emails the shopper if they left an address.

Step 2 is optional. If instant answers are not switched on for your store, or the product has too few reviews, the shopper simply sees no generated answer and the question still reaches you.

#The Questions page

Three tabs, because they are three different jobs.

• Needs an answer. Everything waiting on you, oldest first. Open a row to read the question in full, see whether the shopper asked to be emailed, and write your answer. Answer and publish does both at once, which is almost always what you want: a question with no answer is not worth putting on a product page.
• Published. What shoppers can see. You can add another answer, hide one, or unpublish the question.
• Rejected. Questions you decided against. They stay here so you can find them again, and they never appear on your storefront. The shopper is not told.

Questions flagged by content screening (links, profanity, your blocked words) are marked Flagged. Flagging only holds a question for you to read; nothing is ever rejected automatically.

You cannot edit a shopper's question. The words are theirs. If a question cannot be published as written, reject it.

#Answering

Answers you write are published as soon as you save them and are shown as coming from your store. You can add more than one answer to a question, and hide any of them later.

Your store's answer always appears first, however late you added it, and it is the one search engines are told is the accepted answer.

#Letting shoppers answer each other

Off by default. Turn on Let shoppers answer each other under Settings → Reviews and a shopper reading a published question can write their own answer. Those answers arrive unpublished and wait in your queue exactly as questions do, and they always sit below yours.

#Emailing the shopper

A shopper who left an email address gets one message, when the first answer to their question is published. Never a second one, however many answers you add afterwards.

Edit the wording under Settings → Email templates, template Question Answered. It can use the question, your answer, who answered, and the product's name and link.

Turn it off with Email the shopper when you answer under Settings → Reviews. Email addresses shoppers leave are never shown on your storefront, and deleting a question deletes the address with it.

#On your storefront

The reviews widget grows two things: the ask box above the review list, and a Questions and answers section below it. Both appear as soon as questions are switched on; nothing to install. If you have deep-linked to the Q&A from somewhere, the section's anchor is #cascade-questions.

Published questions and answers are added to the page's structured data as a QAPage, so search engines can show them. Only published questions with at least one published answer are included.

#Settings

All under Settings → Reviews, in the Questions and answers block.

#Through the API

Questions are a resource like any other: GET /product-questions lists them (with answered=false for the queue), POST /product-questions/:id/answers answers one, and PATCH /product-questions/:id publishes or rejects it. The storefront endpoints are GET /widgets/questions and POST /widgets/questions. See the API reference for the full shape.