Google Customer Reviews is a free solution allowing merchants (physical or online) to collect customer reviews. From a pop-up window present on the thank you page, your customers are asked if they wish to complete a satisfaction questionnaire within a few days, sent by email. This program, launched in 2011, aims to strengthen customers’ trust in sellers, through their buying experience and the possibility of sharing their opinion.
The email sent is relatively simple. The customer is invited to rate the seller’s service on a scale ranging from 1 to 5 stars. By clicking, he is invited to share a brief comment on his shopping experience.
The program is available for all stores. However, until very recently, installation was only easy for Shopify Plus stores. But in July 2017, Shopify stated that all payment URLs would be migrated from checkout.shopify.com to the store domain. This means that there is no longer any need for an app or other hacks for standard Shopify stores (not running on Shopify Plus) to be able to set up Google Customer Reviews. So, if you want to install this program, all you have to do is follow the steps in our tutorial.
To learn more about Google customer reviews, go directly to the guides offered by Google.
Why set up Google customer reviews?
Google AdWords advertisers should consider this integration as it enables review extension in search campaigns. Google Customer Reviews can indeed create trust and attract the attention of Internet users who are undecided about the products they are going to buy. Under these conditions, the presence of yellow stars can easily help increase click-through rates.
Second, the program triggers the display of stars in Google Shopping results.
Finally, all sellers using this program have the option of displaying a Google Customer Reviews badge on their Shopify store. You do not need to use AdWords for this badge and its use is not mandatory, but it allows web merchants to report on the degree of customer satisfaction in the following areas:
- customer support,
- delivery times,
- quality product,
- overall shopping experience.
Google customer reviews don’t have to be used by all merchants registered with AdWords. The most common reason is that it would be strange if the online store asked users to leave a review, through another app like Yotpo or Judge.me, and then asked Google customers to ask for a review. However, in some cases, like Yotpo, the reviews program automatically integrates with Google Customer Reviews, so you don’t need to follow this guide if you have Yotpo. Contact support for your Google Avis app if you have any questions about this.
How to Set Up Google Customer Reviews in Shopify
1. Sign up for the program in the Google Merchant Center. Click on the three vertical ellipses at the top right, then select “Merchant Center Programs”.
2. Activate “Customer reviews “. Read the agreement and continue. You should then see the “Customer reviews” box on the left side of the Merchant Center menu. Sometimes it appears immediately. In other cases, you have to wait several hours:
3. In the customer reviews configuration, the default code provided will look like this, but with your merchant_id value :
How to check if it works?
There are several ways to check if Google Customer Reviews is working properly. The “questionnaire completed”, “questionnaire offered” options and other dashboard reports may take 2 weeks to appear in your merchant area. It is therefore not necessarily the ideal solution.
The fastest way to bring up the thank you page after an order and then search for the source code of the snippet to be sure that the values entered correspond to what you are looking for. Ex: the estimated_delivery_date line. If you use the {% if first_time_accessed %} tag on the snippet, we recommend that you remove it temporarily so that you can see the status of an order made.
If you are running an AdWords campaign and have a Merchant Center connected to Google AdWords, you may see the automated ” Seller Ratings ” extension in your reporting:
Another way to test the app’s effectiveness is to check out the following URL for your Shopify store:
https://www.google.com/shopping/seller?q=yourstore.com
The Ad Preview module also allows you to test the Seller Ratings extension.
Send notices at different time slots depending on delivery countries
If you know your shipping and delivery times to other countries, setting time slots for your most popular countries in your customer base can maximize the number of reviews you get. Add the following liquid code above the snippet and adjust the country code variable and times (written as integers) as needed:
{% case shipping_address.country_code %} {% when ‘AU’ %} {% assign delivery_time = order.created_at | date:’%s’ | more:691200 | date:’%F’ %} {% else %} {% assign delivery_time = order.created_at | date:’%s’ | more:1209600 | date:’%F’ %} {% endcase %}
Second, modify the estimated_delivery_date line in the snippet according to the following template:
“estimated_delivery_date”: “{{ delivery_time }}”
Change the language according to the country of destination
In order to change the language in which customer reviews are set, you can change the different delivery times:
{% case shipping_address.country_code %} {% when ‘AU’ %} {% assign delivery_time = order.created_at | date:’%s’ | more:864000 | date:’%F’ %} {% assign google_language = ‘en_AU’ %} {% else %} {% assign delivery_time = order.created_at | date:’%s’ | more:1209600 | date:’%F’ %} {% assign google_language = ‘en_US’ %} {% endcase %}
window.___gcfg = { lang: ‘[{ google_language }}[ };
Limit the frequency of reviews to be shared per customer
There is a fairly simple way to ensure that the number of reviews written by a customer corresponds to the number of orders made by the latter. The customer.orders_count variable allows you to count the number of times the customer has placed an order on your online store. Filter the entire Google Customer Reviews snippet, and this will allow accepting a written customer review only if the customer has ordered once:
{% if customer
.orders_count == 1 %} … {% endif %}
If you want this to appear the first two times, enter the tag <= 2.
Change the position of your dialog box
If the opt-in form/questionnaire takes up too much space on your browser page or conflicts with a pop-up linked to a referral program, you can move this form altogether.
opt_in_style is an optional field that allows you to change the position of the opt-in dialog box. To do this, you can enter the following values:
- “CENTER_DIALOG”: to display the questionnaire through a dialog box in the center of the screen. This is the default value.
- “BOTTOM_RIGHT_DIALOG”: to display the dialog box at the bottom right of the screen.
- “BOTTOM_LEFT_DIALOG”: to display the dialog box at the bottom left of the screen.
- “TOP_RIGHT_DIALOG”: to display the dialog box at the top right of the screen.
- “TOP_LEFT_DIALOG”: to display the dialog box at the bottom left of the screen.
- “BOTTOM_TRAY”: to display the dialog box at the bottom of the screen.
Below is a finished example of what a field filled with all the required values would look like:
{ “merchant_id”: XXXXXXXXX, “order_id”: “{{ order.name }}”, “email”: “{{ order.email }}”, “delivery_country”: “{{ shipping_address.country_code }}”, ” estimated_delivery_date”: “{{ order.created_at | date:’%s’ | plus:604800 | date:’%F’ }}”, “opt_in_style”: “TOP_LEFT_DIALOG” }
Google Product Reviews
Google offers an optional product review program. You can get reviews for the products you sell and have permission to display their reviews on Shopping ads.
“Product ratings appear as a 1-5 star rating system and the total number of reviews. These star ratings represent aggregated rating and rating data for the product, compiled from from multiple sources, including merchants, third-party review aggregators, editorial sites and consumers.” Google
GTIN value can be included to collect product reviews:
“products”: [{“gtin”:”GTIN1″}, {“gtin”:”GTIN2″}]
To do this in Shopify, use the following code. Note the comma after the “estimate_delivery_date” line to validate the JSON :
“estimated_delivery_date”: “{{ order.created_at | date:’%s’ | plus:604800 | date:’%F’ }}”, “products”: [{% for item in order.line_items %}{“gtin “:”{{ item.variant.barcode }}”}
{% unless forloop.last %}, {% endunless %}{% endfor %}]
 to collect customer reviews.){kind=link}