Online shopping is more and more popular. According to Invesp, 90% of customers tend to read product reviews before making purchases. And 88% of customers trust product reviews than personal recommendations. Therefore, WooCommerce product reviews are one of the most crucial parts of any WooCommerce online store if the business wants to boost traffics and convert more sales. In this article, we are presenting the importance of product reviews, the way to enable and customize WooCommerce product reviews, and giving the top best WooCommerce review plugins.
Benefits of product reviews in WooCommerce stores?
Customer reviews, playing an important role in a WooCommerce store, helps store owners highlight various aspects of their business, such as credibility, SEO, transparency, and more. Below are some of the best benefits of product reviews in the WooCommerce store.
Product reviews are considered a form of free advertising
Customer reviews can provide more exposure at little and bring you more value customers than other forms of marketing. Nowadays, people shopping online have lots of knowledge and know how to search for information about the products they consider buying. They now don’t trust marketing and advertising anymore and tend to read and believe in online product reviews before making purchases.
There are many ways for store owners to take advantage of product reviews to drive more sales such as including reviews on search results by using snippets, highlighting customer testimonials on your shop (home page, category page, and shop page), marketing them on social channels, and so on.
Improve credibility and transparency
Store owners can use product reviews to build trust in customers and improve transparency by displaying both positive and negative reviews. Product reviews help consumers to trust and authenticity in both the company and the products, which not only encourages a customer’s initial purchase but keeps them coming back to your website.
Enhance SEO
Another benefit of product reviews is that they can help with SEO improvement. Search engines take priority to display product reviews and ratings. Online buyers definitely prefer to visit the eCommerce site with product reviews. When visitors click into product reviews and ratings displayed on search results, they will be redirected to the retail website, which results in traffic increase and ranking improvement in search engines.
Build a Closer Relationship with Customers
Asking for customers to leave reviews on a product or brand and replying to their feedback is an ideal way to build a relationship with customers.
You can use this exposure to develop a closer relationship with your customer base and should respond to all reviews, especially the negative ones. This shows that you are concerning your clients and are responsible for your work. And surely, customers will be more satisfied, come back to you, and even refer your products to their friends, which will potentially bring you more sales.
How to enable and customize WooCommerce reviews?
Enable WooCommerce reviews
By default, reviews are available in WooCommerce, but you may need a WooCommerce theme that shapes their performance. The core WooCommerce review allows sellers to include a review tab on the single product page. The setting up process is pretty simple and straightforward. In the dashboard, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Product:
Then scroll down to the Reviews section and choose the features you want to show on product reviews. Remember to save everything you’ve done by hitting the “save changes” button.
- Enable product reviews: quickly toggle reviews on/off
- Show “verified owner” label on customer reviews: this feature ensures reviews left by genuine customers are labeled correctly, which can enhance the credibility of your customer reviews.
- Reviews can only be left by “verified owners”: This feature helps the store owners restrict the fake/spam reviews on their store.
- Enable star rating on reviews: I can’t think of any store that wouldn’t want star ratings
- Star ratings should be required, not optional: By turning on this option, you can enrich your WooCommerce reviews with a star rating and review content.
Once you’ve saved changes, head back to one of your product pages and you’ll see the WooCommerce Reviews tab now appears along with any published reviews for that product.
Customize WooCommerce reviews
In core WooCommerce, reviews are created basing on the core WordPress commenting system, so these reviews are considered “comments”.
WordPress allows its users to manage, customize product reviews in their WooCommerce store. Go to Dashboard → Comments, and then shop owners are able to approve/ un-approve, remove, reply, and edit any review there with a single click.
By default, the oldest reviews are shown in the first position in the comment section. However, users can customize, change their places, prioritize the most recent and positive reviews first by navigating to Settings -> Discussion.
Then you are driven to a list of setting for comment and discussion as follows.
Dropdown to select Newer, instead of the default “older” to show newer comments first.
You can also set up to receive an email notification once a customer leaves a review on your eCommerce site by choosing both options in the Email me whenever section.
Is it enough to use the default WooCommerce reviews only?
That is some basic functionalities of the core default WooCommerce reviews. Some small-sized businesses may find it ok with such features, but the basic functionalities seem to be not enough in the bigger. Below are some key reasons why you should upgrade WooCommerce reviews if you want to expand your online store.
No including images/videos in product reviews
I am sure that all customers believe more and prefer reading the product reviews with images or videos than the only text ones. As technology advances, considering the integration of a text to video feature for customer testimonials could be a game-changer, offering a visually engaging way for customers to express their opinions and fostering a deeper connection with potential buyers. Shop owners should customize WooCommerce reviews and allow customers to include images or videos to their feedback on the store, which will increase conversion rate and drive far more sales to their shop.
No review workflow automation
If you are running a big business and handle so many customers. You don’t have enough time to remind and stimulate them to leave reviews on your store. In such a case, you should create an automated email campaign to ask for customers’ reviews at a suitable time after they’ve got their product. Basically, there is no review workflow automation in WooCommerce. So if you would like to improve the review submission rate, while you are too busy to ask the customers to give product reviews, you need to install a plugin supporting review automation workflows.
No integration with email marketing and loyalty plugins
One of the most ideal ways to attract online shoppers to leave product reviews for your WooCommerce eCommerce site is to give them points in loyalty club or contact them via email. However, the core WooCommerce reviews currently don’t integrate with any of the popular loyalty platforms, or email software. As a result, in order to set up email marketing or loyalty campaigns, you need to upgrade the review system with the third-party WooCommerce review plugins.
The best WooCommerce review plugins
Below are some of the best WooCommerce review plugins that can help shop owners get more reviews and extend their online business.
Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Rating: 4.9/5 (638 reviews)
The first WooCommerce review plugin in the list is the Customer reviews for WooCommerce. This WooCommerce review plugin supports you to encourage your customers to leave reviews by automatically sending reminder emails to customers who recently purchased a product from your WooCommerce store.
The plugin helps you collect more authentic reviews from real customers by sending automated invitations to give a review, answer survey questions. It is a useful tool that allows your customers to leave reviews for all the products they bought on a single page. With this review plugin, customers can attach images, ratings, and many other interesting factors to their product reviews.
Besides, shop owners can keep customers engaged by offering discount codes, and placing a “trust badge” on the home, checkout, or any other page which will make customers feel more confident when shopping on your site. That results in an increase in repeated sales for your store.
The plugin offers both free and pro versions starting at $4.17 + VAT per month.
WooDiscuz – WooCommerce Comments
Rating: 4.8/5 (48 reviews)
WooDiscuz lies in the second position. It allows buyers to give feedback and discuss products they are considering directly on the website product page, as well as ask for pre-sale questions. Clients are also able to vote for comments and share products on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and more.
In WooDiscuz, the discussion boards and comment threads will generate interest among your potential customers by engaging them in fruitful conversion.
In WooDiscuz, your shop visitors can observe customer activity. WooDiscuz comes with a wide variety of highly customizable features such as set discussion tabs, hiding/removing WooCommerce Product reviews and sharing features, turning on/off comment voting, creating threads, deleting threads, hiding them, and much more. Furthermore, it offers users an interactive and clean interface.
Rating-Widget: Star Review System
Rating: 4.6/5 (860 reviews)
The Rating-Widget Star Ratings WordPress plugin allows you to create and manage ratings, set up custom rules when to open a modal review box, and capture a textual review from your customers without any complex configuration. In detail, you can embed thumb & star ratings into your product reviews to make them look stunning on your shop.
With Rating-Widget, your eCommerce site’s review is supported with fully customizable, cross-browser, support multi-language, CSS3 compliant. As a result, you can create unlimited thumb & star ratings and grab unlimited feedback. Besides, you have full customization of your WooComerce product reviews and place the “Top rated” widget on the website’s sidebar that automatically shows your highest rated products. That will significantly increase your sales.
This WooCommerce product review plugin comes with various plans including free and paid versions. For a small WooCommerce site, shop owners can start with the Starter level at the price of $3.99 per month (pay annually). The larger business can go for the Professional plan ($7.99/month) or a Business plan ($29.99/month).
Photo Reviews for WooCommerce
Rating: 4.8/5 (36 reviews)
Another choice for you to grow WooCommerce reviews for your store to the next level is WooCommerce Photo Reviews. This is an ultimate review plugin for WooCommerce which helps you stimulate customers to give reviews on your WooCommerce store by sending reminder emails.
The plugin allows customers to include images in their reviews and then automatically send emails to thank and offer them valued WooCommerce coupons for the next purchases. That will help you to attract more WooCommerce product reviews and drive more repeated sales to your business.
Similar to other plugins in this collection, Photo review for WooCommerce provides users both free and pro versions. To unlock advanced features, you need to upgrade to the paid level starting at $30 for a license.
SIP Reviews Shortcode for WooCommerce
Rating: 4.5/5 (21 reviews)
The next solution for your WooCommerce reviews is SIP. This is a WooCommerce Reviews Shortcode plugin that allows you to show the product reviews anywhere you like such as post or page with by using a shortcode.
Such an extension gives users a fully customizable style and advanced features. It comes with a color picker suitable for all elements, easily matching your theme in a few minutes. Plus, shop owners can be able to insert and customize product schema including name, price, and rating anywhere with a shortcode.
This WooCommerce reviews shortcode plugin comes with a free version and a paid plan at the price of $17 per one license.
Ryviu
Rating: 3.8/5 (21 reviews)
If you are running a WooCommerce dropship store, Ryviu may be the most suitable option for you to showcase product reviews on your store.
This plugin can help you export reviews from other marketplaces such as Aliexpress or Amazon and then import them to your store in just a few steps. Moreover, you can easy to manage and customize all reviews with Ryviu and display the best ones on your store. Also, the plugin helps you show product reviews and ratings on Google search results, which can attract more customers to your site.
The plugin is offered for free but the features are limited. You can extend the functionalities by getting the advanced Ryviu packages starting at $4.99 per month.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced reviews
Rating: 3.5/5 (14 reviews)
YITH Woocommerce Advanced Reviews is an awesome plugin for product reviews. It not only helps you display customer reviews and ratings but also allows customers to a title and some attachments such as product images to their reviews.
Furthermore, this WooCommerce review plugin offers the built-in functionality of Advanced Review reminder that shows you who purchased what on your online store and how many reviews have been written for each different rating.
You can get the core features of this WooCommerce review plugin for free. But if you need more advanced functionalities, you may have to install the premium plugin with the price starting at $69.99 per site per year.
Schema Pro
Schema Pro helps make your reviews more visible through search engines. It can help you add the correct review schema to review pages to help search engines correctly identify and understand the page, increasing the chances of higher ranking.
Schema Pro also increases the chances of your reviews being used within rich snippets in search engine results. Both features can drastically improve search engine visibility and clickthrough rates.
Schema Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that costs $79 annually and $249 for a lifetime. It automates a lot of the process of adding schema to your website. Schema Pro supports all current schema types and is regularly updated to include any newly released schema.
WP Product review Lite
Rating: 4.5/5 (154 reviews)
WP product review lite plugin helps you enhance interaction between you and your users with more comments. You can get many layouts to display product reviews as you desire.
Besides, with this WooCommerce review plugin, you are allowed to place a buy now button in your post to generate more purchases.
WP product review lite comes in both a free version and a paid one. You can easily download the free version in the WordPress plugin library. The starting price of the Pro version is $59.
Taqyeem
Rating: 4.4/5 (160 reviews)
Taqyeem is a premium WordPress plugin for reviewing and rating products. With this plugin, you can add product ratings and reviews to your posts, pages, and custom post types.
Taqyeem offers various options to create and customize the reviews and ratings on your eCommerce website such as changing the fonts, image, colors, and style.
Regarding pricing, you can start to use Taqyeem at the cost of $29.
Site Reviews
Rating: 4.9/5 (166 reviews)
Site Reviews is a simple but powerful WooCommerce plugin that helps you collect ratings and reviews for your website. With this WooCommerce review plugin, you are given several options to showcase your reviews including shortcodes, widgets, and blocks.
The plugin is a great tool to attract more customers by selecting the best reviews and put them at the top of the list reviews.
Besides, You can also enable or disable any reviews before they are published on your online store, require visitors to be logged-in in order to write a review, send custom notifications on a new submission, and much more. That offers you full control over all reviews on your site.
The plugin comes in both a free version and paid plans. You can access to premium features at the price of $89 per year for a single site.
Conclusion on WooCommerce review plugins
Those are some basic knowledge about WooCommerce reviews and the best WooCommerce review plugins. Besides the names mentioned above, there are many other options like WooCommerce product reviews pro, StarCat Reviews, and Ultimate Reviews Plugin.
Hopefully, with such useful information, you can get an overall understanding of how to enable, customize, and upgrade WooCommerce reviews to empower your eCommerce store and help you earn more sales as well.