Reviews & Q&A: moderation that builds trust

Reviews are the cheapest trust you will ever earn, and unmoderated reviews are the fastest way to lose it. The Reviews area at /dashboard/reviews is a moderation queue: nothing appears on your storefront until you approve it, spam and rants stay hidden, and genuine buyers get a Verified marker. Product questions (Q&A) are handled through the Product Questions plugin, covered below. ## How to moderate reviews 1. Open **Reviews**. The stat tiles show total reviews, your **average rating** across approved reviews, and counts by state; tabs filter the queue to **All**, **Pending**, **Approved**, or **Rejected**. 2. Read each pending review with its product, rating, and author. Reviews are submitted by shoppers from the product page on your storefront. 3. Click **Approve** to publish. The review immediately renders on that product's page — star rating, text, author, and, where applicable, a **Verified** marker that signals a real purchase. 4. Click **Reject** to hide a review from the store without deleting the record — right answer for spam, wrong-product mistakes, or abuse, and better than deletion when you may need to revisit. 5. **Delete** is reserved for data you never want back. It is permanent; prefer reject for anything ambiguous. 6. Watch your average rating tile as you approve — it recalculates from approved reviews only, so rejected one-star spam does not drag it down. ## Handling product questions 1. Enable the **Product Questions** plugin from **Plugins** and configure it to your taste. 2. Shoppers ask questions on product pages; the questions queue for you under the plugin's area in the dashboard (or via **Plugins**), where you answer before anything publishes. 3. Answer precisely and publicly — a good answer sells to everyone who reads it later, not just the asker. Repeated questions are strong candidates for your FAQ page or product description. ## Reviews and loyalty If gamification is enabled for your store — toggle it from **Gamification** in the dashboard at /dashboard/gamification — customers earn **15 points** for writing a review (the customer_review_written action), credited once per review with the engine's idempotency guarantee. Points accumulate into levels on the customer's profile and redeem in your loyalty setup — turning review collection into a repeatable loop instead of a plea. The awards log keeps a record of every grant, so point disputes are answerable rather than argued. ## What happens next Approved reviews do quiet conversion work: product pages display ratings and review text inside your theme's product layout, and the aggregate rating strengthens how your products look in search listings. A pattern of low ratings on one product is a merchandising signal — fix the product page, the photos, or the product itself before you fix the marketing. ## Tips 1. Moderate daily while volume is low; approval queues that sit for a week train shoppers to stop writing. 2. Approve critical-but-fair reviews. A wall of five-star blurbs reads as fake; a 4.6 average with honest complaints reads as real. 3. Reject anything that breaks the law in your market (defamation, privacy leaks) rather than arguing it in public. 4. Keep the queue empty before a big launch — new traffic reads recent reviews first, and a moderation gap at launch is the worst possible first impression. ## FAQ **Can I reply to a review publicly?** The platform keeps review moderation to approve, reject, and delete — there is no public merchant-reply thread on reviews today. Treat a critical review as input: fix the issue, and future reviews will say it for you. **Why is there a Verified marker on some reviews?** The storefront marks reviews it can tie to a genuine purchase on that product, so shoppers can weigh verified feedback more heavily. **Do rejected reviews notify the customer?** No notification is sent when you reject. The review simply never appears publicly, and the record stays in your dashboard if you change your mind.