Customer reviews and review photos

Customers can rate your products out of five stars, write a few words, and attach photos of the item they received. The star average and the number of reviews show on your product pages, and they are what puts star ratings next to your product in Google search results.

Everything on this page lives in two places. The switches are in Settings, Reviews. The reviews themselves are handled per product, from your product list.

Turn on customer reviews and photos

Go to Settings, then Reviews. There are three switches:

• Allow customer reviews. Off means no one can write one. Turning it off later hides existing reviews from your storefront but keeps them, so nothing is deleted and you can turn it back on.
• Allow photos on reviews. Lets customers attach pictures to the review they write.
• Review photos before they appear. Off by default. See the section on approving photos below before you turn it on.

Photos ride on the review, so Allow customer reviews has to be on for photos to appear at all.

One more thing has to be true, and it is not on this page: your storefront has to show a file picker on its review form. A store created with npx create-brainerce-store has one built in. A storefront someone built by hand needs the review form wired up to accept photos, otherwise the switch is on and shoppers still see no way to attach anything.

Who can leave a review or a photo

Only a customer who actually bought the product, and who is signed in. Guests cannot review, and neither can a signed-in customer who never ordered the item.

For a physical product the order has to have reached Shipped, Completed or Delivered. For a downloadable product, Paid and Processing count too, since there is nothing to ship.

Each customer gets one review per product. They can edit it or delete it afterwards, and editing it lets them swap the photos.

What the limits on a photo are

• Up to 5 photos per review.
• Up to 5MB per photo.
• JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF only.
• Location data is stripped from every photo before it is published, so a customer cannot accidentally publish where they live.
• Photos count towards your plan's storage, the same as your own product images.

Photos taken on a phone in portrait come out the right way up. You do not have to ask customers to rotate anything.

Where reviews and photos show up

On your storefront they appear on the product page, and reviews that carry photos are shown first, because a picture from a real buyer is the strongest thing on the page.

In your dashboard they live in your product list. Each product row has a Reviews column with a star chip showing the average and how many reviews there are. Click that chip to open the reviews screen for that product.

That screen opens on the product's rating and how it is spread across the five star ratings. Click a bar to see only those reviews, which is the fastest way to read your one-star reviews without scrolling past the happy ones. You can also filter to Visible, Hidden, Awaiting approval or With photos, sort newest or lowest rated first, and page through them.

Approve photos before shoppers see them

Turn on Review photos before they appear in Settings, Reviews, and every new photo waits for you instead of going live.

There is no store-wide queue of waiting photos. This is the part that surprises people. A photo waiting for approval sits inside its own product's reviews, and nowhere else. If you sell a lot of products and you turn this on, plan to go looking, because nothing will come and find you.

Within one product it is easy: open its reviews from the star chip and use the Awaiting approval filter, which counts the photos still waiting and shows only those reviews. What does not exist is a single screen listing everything waiting across every product.

That is also why the switch is off by default. Reviews themselves publish immediately and always have, and photos match that: they go live straight away and you take down anything you do not want.

Photos that were already approved stay up if you later turn the switch off, and photos already published stay published if you turn it on. The setting only decides what happens to photos uploaded from that moment.

To approve a waiting photo, open the product's reviews and press Show on it. There is no separate approve button. Show is the approve action.

Hide a single photo without losing the review

Open the product's reviews from the star chip in the Reviews column, find the review, and press Hide on the individual photo.

Hiding a photo is not the same as hiding the review. If you hide the whole review, its star rating leaves your product average with it. A genuinely happy five-star customer who attached one blurry or unusable picture should lose the picture, not the rating. Hide the single photo and the review text, the stars and the average all stay exactly as they were.

Hiding is reversible. Press Show to put the photo back.

Hide a whole review

Same place, on the review itself rather than on a photo. Hiding a review removes it from your storefront and takes its rating out of the product average at the same time. The review is not deleted and you can show it again later.

You cannot edit what a customer wrote, and you cannot delete their review outright. Hiding is the tool.

Reward customers for writing a review

If you run a loyalty program, you can give points for it. The switch is Bonus for writing a review in your loyalty settings, not on the reviews screen.

It pays out once per customer, not once per review. A customer who reviews ten products earns the bonus on the first one only, so nobody can farm points by reviewing your whole catalogue. The points land when the review is written, and they do not wait on a photo or on your approval.

What Brainerce does not do here

Worth knowing before you go looking for these:

• No store-wide moderation queue. Reviews and photos are handled one product at a time, from the product list. There is no single screen listing everything waiting or everything reported.
• No email about reviews, in either direction. Nothing notifies you when a review or a photo arrives, and nothing notifies the customer when theirs goes live. If you turn on approval, check in on your own schedule.
• No replying to a review. You cannot post a public response under a customer's review.
• No way to invite reviews. Brainerce does not send a "how did you like it" email after an order.
• No uploading a photo for a customer from the dashboard. Developers can attach photos when creating a review through the API, but there is no button for it on the reviews screen.
• No editing or deleting a customer's review. Hiding is the only tool. Only the customer who wrote it can change or delete it.