Product Reviews

ProductCart includes a system that allows customer to rate and review products on your store, and allows you to manage, check, approve, and reject those reviews. You can turn off and on this feature on a storewide basis, or for individual products. You can allow reviews to be immediately posted on your Web store, or set up the system so that each review has to be approved before it is shown in the storefront. Here is an example of how product reviews can look on your store.

Product reviews are shown at the bottom of the page, below cross selling items and the detailed product description. You can set the system to show N reviews on the product details page, while the rest of the reviews are shown on a separate page that customers can get to by clicking on Read all product reviews.

A summary of the ratings given to the product is shown at the top, and customer reviews are shown underneath it. Depending on how you configure this feature, customers will be required or not required to post a textual review of the product. They will also be prompted to rate products on any number of things that you define for them. In the example above, customers were ask to say whether they liked the product or not, and to rate its comfort, performance, and value, etc.

It's entirely up to you how to set the system. You can assign different rating criteria to different products (e.g. “performance” could be a good rating criteria for a pair of skis, but not “comfort”, which instead could be used for rating ski boots sold on your store).

These and a number of other settings can be configured when setting up the Product Reviews feature.

From the Products menu, select Manage Product Reviews > Product Reviews Settings. At the top of the page you will find an option to turn the feature “on” and “off” on a store-wide basis. If you would like customers to be able to post reviews on at least one of your products, turn the feature on. You will be able to turn it off for individual products using the Product Exclusion feature, which is discussed later in this chapter. Customers will be able to give a general opinion on a product by either saying whether they liked it or not (Rate by Feeling) or by saying now much they liked it (Rate by Marks). Let’s look at these two options in more details.

When you enable this feature, customers will be asked to say whether they liked the product or not. It’s a yes/no type of question. The answers given by all of the customers that rate the product will then be taken into account and the product details page will say something like 35% of customers liked this product (46 votes). The language used can be changed using the following fields:

• Display Rating Text
  This is the “liked this product” portion of the “35% of customers liked this product” statement mentioned above. This is shown on the product details page, in the summary section of the product reviews area.
• Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down
  This is the text that is shown next to the two radio buttons that allow customers to rate the product. This text is used only for the general rating question, which is the one shown on the product details page. This is the first question that the customer is asked to answer to rate the product (and the only question unless you set up other fields in the Manage Fields area).
• Sub-Rating “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down”
  This is the text that is shown next to the radio buttons shown for any other yes/no question that you ask your customers to answer when they post a review. This text is used when you create a Rate by Feeling field in the Manage Fields page. If you don’t have any Rate by Feeling custom fields, this text is never shown.
• Rating images
  Use the default images or upload your own images (e.g. you could upload thumbs up & thumbs down images, or alike).

When you enable this feature, customers will be asked not only to say whether they liked a product, but also how much they liked it. You can have them rate a product on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale. You can have the overall score (Overall Product Rating) be determined:

• By automatically averaging sub-ratings. If you choose this option, make sure you have one or more Rate by Marks custom fields. These fields are configured in the Manage Fields area, which is discussed later in this chapter.
• Or independently of any sub-ratings. You must choose this option unless you have custom fields whose type is Rate by Marks.

Images are used in the storefront to show customers a graphical version of the numeric average of all the product ratings that have been submitted. You can use the default graphics or upload your own.

Note that changing the main rating option described above from Rate by Feeling to Rate by Marks (or vice versa) after customers have submitted product reviews could result in reviews no longer showing meaningful information in the storefront. We recommend that this option is not changed, or that you remove or hide existing reviews if you decide to change it.

The lower part of the Product Review Settings page allows you to set the following other options:

• Show Rating Summary on the view product pages.
  Check this option if you want to show a rating summary on the product details page.
• N Reviews will be displayed on view product pages.
  Here you can enter the number of reviews that you would like to show on the product details page. All reviews will be displayed in a sub-page. For example, if 12 reviews have been submitted and approved for a product, and you enter “3” here, then only the 3 reviews are shown on the product details page, whereas all of the reviews are shown when the customer clicks on the View All Reviews link.
• All reviews should be reviewed by admin before they are published on the site.
  Check this option if you want to check and approve every review that is posted on your Web site before it is shown in the storefront. Otherwise, product reviews are shown immediately after they have been submitted. Use the Bad Words filter (see below) to automatically take care of common “bad language”.
• Lock Posting Options
  Use this feature to limit the amount of reviews that the same customer can post. You can specify how many reviews each customer can post for each product. You can determine who the customer is by registering the customer’s IP address, using a cookie saved to the customer’s computer, or both. Note that in many cases Internet users are assigned a dynamic IP address by their Internet Service Provider and therefore only using the IP address may not work in limiting the amount of times the same customer can post a review for the same product.

ProductCart can help you prevent “bad” language from being used in product reviews through the Bad Words Filter feature. From the Products menu, select Manage Product Reviews > Bad Words Filter. Enter one word per row in the Bad Words List area, and then click on the Update List button to save the list to the database.

Whenever a review is posted, all “bad” words are automatically hidden and replaced with ****. If you decide to allow product reviews to be posted to your Web site without requiring your approval, you should definitely use this feature. But even if you configure the system so that your approval is required, this feature can help you speed up the task.

The Manage Fields area allows you to add additional questions/fields to the product review submission form. You can ask you customers to answer any number of questions and/or fill out any number of fields. Each question or field can be required or not. You can set the order in which they are shown on the product review submission form, and edit, remove, or add new fields at any time.

Note that the fields that you specify on the Manage Fields page are used for submitting reviews for all products except those that either listed in the Product Exclusion List or for which you have defined specific requirements using the Product-specific Settings feature, which is discussed later in this chapter.

Let’s look at the different kinds of fields that can be added to the product review form. There are 5 field types:

• One-line text field
  A one-line input field. Use it for short, open questions (e.g. on a computer store “Where do you typically use a computer?”)
• Text area field
  A multi-line input field. Use it for longer, open questions (e.g. “Do you have suggestions on how to improve our Web store?”).
• Drop-down field
  A special field that allows you to pre-define which answers will be available for the customer to choose from. After you create a drop-down field, you will have to specify which values will be shown in the drop-down. You can do so by clicking on View/Edit Values on the Manage Fields page. A new window will be displayed (see image below). Enter one value per row, and then click on the Update Values button to save the list. If you don’t specify any values, the drop-down field will not be displayed on the product review submission form.
• 'Feeling' rating
  A yes/no question that uses the Sub-Rating “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” settings mentioned earlier in this chapter. For example, if you entered “Positive” and “Negative” in those fields, you could have a ‘Feeling’ Rating field entitled “What was your experience with customer service on this product?”. Customers will be able to answer by choosing either “Negative” or “Positive”.
• 'Mark' rating
  A question that is answered by choosing from a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale. If in the Product Review Settings page you have chosen to calculate the overall product rating By automatically averaging sub-ratings., make sure to create one or more 'Mark' rating custom fields here. Otherwise the overall product rating cannot be calculated.

All the product review fields that you have defined in your store are shown on the product review submission form whenever a customer decides to post a review for any of the products in your catalog. However, there could be products for which some of those fields don’t apply. For these product you can define a smaller set of fields using the Product-specific Settings feature.

From the Products menu, select Manage Product Reviews > Product-specific Settings. Click on the Add New Product button to choose the products for which you want to define a special set of fields. On the following page, uncheck the Active check box for the fields that you don’t want to show when customers post a review. Click on the Customize button to save these settings. ProductCart will display a list of products for which you have customized the fields selection. Click on View/Edit to further specify which fields should be shown or hidden.

To remove products from the list, check the corresponding check boxes on the right side of the window, and then press the Remove Selected from List button. When you do so, all fields listed in the Manage Fields area will again be shown for those products.

This feature allows you to limit the number of questions/fields shown on the product review submission form for selected products. However, there might be products for which customers should not be allowed to post reviews. If that is the case, use the Product Exclusions feature to list these products.

From the Products menu, select Manage Product Reviews > Product Exclusions. Choose the products for which product reviews are not available, and click on the Add to Exclusion List button. You can add/remove products from the list at any time.

As customers begin posting reviews in the storefront, you can use the Control Panel to keep track of them. At any time, you can see a snapshot of how many pending and live reviews have been submitted for any product in your store, and you can view details, edit, make active or inactive, and remove each product review.

• Pending Reviews
  To view a list of reviews that have been posted, but are currently not shown to customers, select Product Reviews > Pending Reviews. If you have set up ProductCart so that reviews always need to be approved before being shown in your storefront, all reviews will always be pending until you manually render them active. You will be automatically notified via e-mail whenever a new review is posted. Click on the link included in the e-mail to check, edit and approve the new review.
• Live Reviews
  To view a list of reviews that are live in your storefront, select Product Reviews > Live Reviews. If you have set up ProductCart so that reviews are immediately shown to customers when they are submitted, there will be no pending reviews in your store unless you manually render any of the live reviews inactive.