#Reviews

For anyone running reviews on a store. This page is the shape of the whole feature: where reviews come from, what happens to one after it arrives, and which setting decides what. The two pages after it go deeper on collecting and moderating.

#What a review is

A star rating from 1 to 5, usually with a headline and some body text, about one product on one site. It can carry photos and videos, and it is attached to the customer who wrote it.

A review is either published, meaning it shows on your storefront, or it is not. Only published reviews reach the widgets, the ratings, the aggregate score and the structured data that produces star snippets in search results.

#Review questions

Beside the star rating, you can ask reviewers a few extra questions. There are two kinds:

• A scale of 3 to 7 steps with its ends labeled, such as "Runs small" to "Runs large". The steps in between are unlabeled, and you can label the middle one. Answers average out to a marker on a slider in the reviews widget.
• A list of options, picked one at a time or several at once. Answers come back as the percentage of reviewers who picked each option. Each option can be hidden from the storefront on its own, so a yes/no question can show only its "Yes" share.

Every question can be marked required, hidden from the storefront while still being asked, and limited to part of your catalog with the same filter the products list takes. Both review forms, the emailed one and the storefront one, ask whichever questions apply to the product being reviewed.

A question is archived rather than deleted once anyone has answered it: it stops being asked, and the answers already given keep showing. For the same reason, a question with answers keeps its type and its number of steps, and its options can be added to, relabeled or archived but never removed.

#Managing your questions

Questions live under Settings → Reviews → Review questions, listed in the order reviewers are asked them. Each row shows the question, what it asks for, which products it applies to, and how many reviews have answered it.

Add question opens the form. Fill in the question itself, pick Scale or List of options, then:

• A scale takes the number of steps and what the first, middle and last steps mean. Only an odd number of steps has a middle.
• A list of options takes the options themselves. Reorder them with the arrows, and use each option's switch to keep it off the storefront while still offering it. Let reviewers pick more than one turns the list from a single choice into a multiple one.

Below that, Require an answer blocks the form until the reviewer answers, Show the answers on your storefront decides whether the results reach your widgets, and Ask it about limits the question to products matching a filter. A preview at the bottom of the form shows how the question will read.

The row's ... menu edits, reorders, archives and, while nothing has answered it, deletes a question. Once a question has answers the type, the number of steps and the options it already offers are fixed, and the form says so; archive it and add a replacement if you need to change those.

Answers show on each review in the moderation pane. See Moderating reviews.

Over the API the questions are /review-questions, answers ride along as answers on a review submission, and each review's answers come back from GET /reviews with include=answers. See Review questions.

#Where reviews come from

Requests are where most reviews come from once you are set up. See Collecting reviews.

#Verified buyers

A review that came in through a review request is marked as a verified buyer, because Cascade sent that request to the person who placed that order. The reviews widget shows it as a badge, and it is the main reason to collect through requests rather than a bare form.

An imported review can be marked verified too, by naming the order it belongs to in the orderReference column. See Importing reviews.

#What happens to a review after it arrives

1. It is created, unpublished by default, and lands in the moderation queue.
2. Screening runs, if you have turned any of it on: blocked words, profanity, links, or the AI classifier. Anything flagged is held for a person and never auto-published.
3. It is published or rejected, either by you or automatically if you allowed that.
4. It is visible, counted in the product's rating, and included in the structured data on your product page.

A review can be edited, replied to, redacted or deleted at any point after that. See Moderating reviews.

#Showing reviews on your storefront

Two widgets do the work: a compact star rating for collection grids and product cards, and the full reviews list with the rating breakdown, sorting, filtering, helpful votes and the review form.

Both can emit schema.org JSON-LD, which is what puts star snippets in search results. The reviews widget emits it by default; the rating widget does not, because it repeats across a collection grid and a second product node per card is noise.

See Storefront widgets for the embeds and their attributes, and Widgets in your theme for adding them on Shopify.

#Settings

Everything below is under Settings → Reviews.

#Automatically publish new reviews

Off by default, so every review waits for a person to publish it by hand. Turn it on and new reviews go live the moment they arrive; choose a rating threshold and "4 stars & up" publishes the good ones immediately and holds the rest for you.

Screening still applies. A review that trips a blocked word or is flagged by the classifier is held even when it clears the threshold.

#Review questions

The extra questions asked beside the star rating, with an Add question button and per-row edit, reorder, archive and delete actions. What the two kinds ask is covered at the top of this page; the form itself is Managing your questions.

#Content screening

Three checks you can turn on independently:

• Blocked words, words or phrases of your own, matched as whole words. Put one on each line.
• Flag profanity, which matches a built-in wordlist.
• Flag reviews that contain links. Links are the strongest spam signal in a review.

A flagged review waits in the moderation queue instead of publishing automatically, and shows why it was flagged. Screening only holds a review for you, never rejects it, so a false match costs nothing.

#Screen reviews with AI

An optional classifier that reads each arriving review and flags anything worth a second look that the word lists cannot catch: spam, advertising, abuse, off-topic text, a review of the wrong product. Longer reviews are also checked for AI-written text. When it is on, the publish decision waits for it, usually a few seconds, so a flagged review never goes live and then comes back down. Nothing is rejected automatically. The switch is disabled on plans that do not include AI screening. See AI features.

#Questions and answers

Three switches covering the public Q&A on your product pages: whether shoppers can ask at all, whether they can answer each other, and whether the asker is emailed when you answer. See Questions and answers.

#Show an instant answer while they wait

An add-on. A shopper who asks a question gets a short answer generated from that product's published reviews straight away, labeled as generated and shown only to them, while your team writes the real one. See AI features.

#Summarize what reviewers say

Generates a short summary of what reviewers say, shown above the review list once a product has enough published reviews and labeled as generated. Turning it off hides every summary at once; a single product's summary can be hidden from its own page. See AI features.

#Notifications

Notify us as reviews arrive emails everyone in the organization the moment a matching review comes in, with a link straight to the moderation queue. Choose which reviews count: every review, or only those at or below a rating you pick. Most stores want to hear about the 1 and 2 star reviews immediately and read the rest in the daily summary.

Send a daily summary sends one email each morning covering every review from the last 24 hours, whatever its rating. Quiet days send nothing. It is usually the better default once you are getting more than a handful a day.

Slack webhook takes an incoming webhook URL from your Slack workspace. The alerts you have switched on are posted there as well as emailed. Leave it empty to post nothing.

#Delete reviews with their product or customer

Off by default. Normally, deleting a product or a customer keeps their reviews and unlinks them: they stay in Cascade, are unpublished, and show as "Deleted product" or "Deleted customer" rather than losing the row, so your rating history survives a catalog change. Turn this on if you would rather reviews were deleted with the record they describe.

#Related pages