What is Review Management?
Review management is the end-to-end process of soliciting, collecting, moderating, responding to, analyzing, and strategically displaying customer reviews across all channels where a business has a presence.
Understanding Review Management
Review management encompasses the entire lifecycle of a customer review, from the initial request to its long-term impact on business decisions. It is not a single task but a discipline that spans marketing, customer service, product development, and operations. A comprehensive review management strategy addresses five phases: collection, moderation, response, display, and analysis.
Collection involves actively soliciting reviews from customers through post-purchase email and SMS sequences, on-site prompts, and in-package inserts. The timing, channel, and messaging of review requests directly impact both the quantity and quality of reviews received. Best practices include requesting reviews 7-14 days after delivery, making the submission process as frictionless as possible, asking specific questions that guide helpful content, and offering incentives (like loyalty points) while clearly disclosing the incentive per FTC guidelines.
Moderation and response are the operational backbone of review management. Moderation involves screening incoming reviews for spam, profanity, competitor mentions, or content that violates your policies, while being careful not to cross into review gating (selectively suppressing negative reviews, which violates FTC guidelines and most platform policies). Responding to reviews, both positive and negative, signals that the brand values customer feedback. Thoughtful responses to negative reviews can actually increase purchase confidence among prospective buyers who see that the brand takes accountability and resolves issues.
Display and analysis close the loop. How and where reviews are displayed on your store directly impacts their conversion influence. Star ratings above the fold, review summaries, photo and video reviews, and keyword-filtered displays each serve different purposes. Analysis involves mining review content for product insights (recurring complaints, feature requests, quality issues), tracking review velocity and sentiment over time, and using review data to inform product development, inventory decisions, and marketing messaging.
Why Review Management Matters for E-Commerce
Unmanaged reviews are a missed opportunity at best and a reputation risk at worst. Stores that actively manage reviews collect more of them, maintain higher average ratings through service recovery, generate more useful UGC, and extract product insights that competitors who ignore reviews never access. In a landscape where 93% of consumers read reviews before buying, the quality of your review management directly correlates with your ability to convert browsers into buyers and address product issues before they become systemic.
How Eevy AI Helps with Review Management
Eevy AI provides a complete review management platform for Shopify stores. It handles automated review collection via email and SMS, content moderation, and display optimization. The platform's genetic algorithm continuously tests different review display layouts to maximize conversion, while the review collection pipeline ensures a steady flow of fresh social proof. Review analytics provide insights into sentiment trends, product feedback, and review velocity.
Related Terms
Review Velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which a product or store accumulates new customer reviews over a given period. It measures not just the total number of reviews, but how quickly new ones are added.
Review Syndication
Review syndication is the practice of distributing product reviews collected on one platform or channel to other retail websites, marketplaces, or brand sites where the same product is sold. It allows reviews written on one storefront to appear on another.
Review Widget
A review widget is an embeddable component that displays customer reviews on an e-commerce store. It typically renders star ratings, review text, customer names, photos, and filtering options within a defined section of a product page or homepage.
Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people look to the actions and opinions of others to guide their own behavior, especially in situations of uncertainty. In e-commerce, it manifests as reviews, ratings, testimonials, purchase counts, and user-generated content that signal product quality and trustworthiness.
Review Gating
Review gating is the practice of screening customers based on their satisfaction level before asking them to leave a public review. Typically, happy customers are directed to leave a review while unhappy customers are redirected to a private support channel instead.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the use of natural language processing (NLP) to identify and categorize the emotional tone expressed in text, classifying it as positive, negative, or neutral. In e-commerce, it is most commonly applied to customer reviews, support tickets, and social media mentions.
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