This is a yet-to-be-published article written for Mantle on the importance of Shopify app reviews, and how Mantle can help you improve your rating numbers.
We see the request all the time: “Leave us a review! Let us know what you think!” Products, companies, podcasts, apps; it feels like everyone and everything is asking for a review from their customers.
And with good reason, especially on the Shopify App Store.
Positive reviews play a key role in converting potential customers to paying ones. Seeing other people’s positive experience with your app creates a sense of trust amongst new leads, making them more comfortable with investing in your business. But most importantly for the Shopify App Store, a higher quantity of reviews is more likely to put your app in front of your target audience. That’s why collecting reviews as efficiently and and quickly as possible is the best way to grow your app.
With Mantle, gaining and tracking reviews is easy. We help you get the reviews you need to race to the top of the App Store.
Why Are Reviews Important?
Reviews are the foundation of growth for any Shopify app. The Shopify App Store is the primary place Shopify merchants look for and review apps for their store.
There are two ways merchants discover apps in the App Store: browsing and actively searching. Both methods are driven by a ranking algorithm that weighs heavily towards the number of reviews, the average rating, and their recency. That’s why collecting reviews is one of the most important things you can do for growth.
While a good ranking is hugely important, it’s not the only benefit that comes from encouraging customer feedback. Good reviews give social proof that your app is accomplishing what customers need from it. This social proof boosts trust and loyalty, which ultimately brings in more customers that feel comfortable in trusting that your app will work for them. Reviews help build your brand, your customer base, and your customers’ trust. They’re a source of free marketing that can generate sales and improve brand recognition through SEO.
Once your app hits 25 reviews, Shopify generates an AI summary of them, so it’s the first thing to catch a potential customer’s eye in the review section of your listing.
How Can I Get More Reviews?
Let’s say you build a great app, launch it in the App Store, and then do nothing else. You might get a handful of reviews, but that’s about it. The truth is most people, unprompted, won’t go out of their way to leave a review. Lots of merchants (even if they love you and want you to succeed!) don’t understand the colossal positive impact reviews have on your business.
There’s really only two ways to get reviews at the scale needed to grow your business, and they both involve asking for them.
The first way is product-led. Think of it like this: what’s the earliest point in your customer journey that someone might have a positive impression of your app, and how can you prompt them in that moment to leave a review?
This is the “a-ha” moment, and that moment comes at a different point for every app. For a reviews app, it might be after the merchant has customized the design of the reviews widget and placed it on their site. For a live chat app, it could be right after the merchant has resolved their first customer issue through a chat.
It’s going to be different for every app, and it’s worth experimenting with different points in the journey to see where you get the highest conversion rate. But no matter where it is, the process is easy—use a modal, throw up a notification window, or however you want to present the request to customers, and make a genuine, heartfelt request for a review if they’re enjoying their experience.
The other way that works (without fail!) is to embed review requests into your customer service workflow. This is a lot more straightforward—as a rule, every positive customer support interaction should end with that same genuine, heartfelt, obviously-not-copy-and-pasted request to leave a review. If you run your entire customer support operation via macros and automations, this is the point where you need to have a real human step in. Customers can tell when it’s not a genuine request, and they don’t respond the same.
If you have a customer service team, find ways to get them excited about each review they get. You could reward them for each review they earn. You can also measure their success by how many reviews they get. Celebrate every review in Slack as a team! (Mantle makes this easy with review notifications in Slack.)
When you see apps with hundreds or thousands of reviews, know that every one of them is using one or both of these techniques. Or they’re buying reviews, which is bad business:
What Can’t I Do To Get Reviews?
While it may be tempting to do whatever you can to encourage merchants to leave reviews, there are some methods that are against Shopify’s rules. It’s important to stay within the boundaries of the terms of service, otherwise you risk demotion or removal from the App Store.
Shopify is very strict about not allowing incentivized reviews. At no point can you offer anything of value, whether tangible (like money), or intangible (“it pays in exposure!”), in exchange for a review. There’s no distinction between incentivizing positive reviews versus incentivizing any reviews—Shopify doesn’t discriminate, and they’ll all be subject to the terms of service.
Shopify also prohibits the suppression of bad reviews that are left in good faith. We get it. Nobody wants a bad review, even if it’s constructive criticism. But trying to prevent other potential customers from seeing it is absolutely not allowed.
According to Part C Section 2.1 of the Shopify Terms of Service: “Reviews on the Shopify App Store and Shopify Theme Store are meant to be unbiased, useful and trustworthy. Shopify reserves the right to take any action it deems necessary in respect of a Partner engaged in any of this behaviour, including the right (but not the obligation) to remove or edit reviews.”
So what’s the best thing to do when someone leaves a negative review?
What To Do About Negative Reviews
There’s no denying that negative reviews hurt your ranking. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much, but the general consensus is that it takes 40 positive reviews to counter the effect of a single negative review, and a ratio like that is close to what partners see anecdotally in the ranking algorithm. That’s why it’s important to take steps to turn a negative review into a positive interaction as quickly as possible.
When a negative review comes through, the very first thing to do is look at it from the customer’s point of view. Is there actionable feedback? Are they trying to suggest improvements? Looking at the issue from their point of view helps, even if they expressed it in an angry or frustrated way.
Try to identify at what point things took a turn for the customer. Was it during the setup process?? Did they have customer service issues? Finding where things went wrong will help you resolve issues for this customer, and possibly future customers as well.
Sometimes they’re just an asshole. Assholes happen. This is where you need to get creative. It’s up to each company how they want to handle these folks. Some fall into the “never negotiate with terrorists” camp and some fall into the “whatever it takes to flip the review” camp. There’s no right answer here, and great companies make different decisions about how they want to deal with these people.
Finally, (and some might find this to be the hardest part,) you have to respond. Coming to the customer with a solution is ideal, but acknowledging their frustration and searching for ways to help is also important. One survey suggests that consumers are 41% more likely to use a business that responds to its reviews.
Keep in mind, that’s all reviews, so make sure you’re thanking the positive reviewers too!
How Mantle Helps You Get Reviews
Mantle makes it super simple to see which customers have left reviews, and to reach out to customers who have yet to do so. The easiest method of doing this is filtering your customer list by those who have not left a review. You can create an email campaign targeting these customers and request a review from them.
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If you’re looking at individual customers, Mantle will tell you if they’ve left a review or not. If they have left a review, we show it here:
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If the customer hasn’t left a review, you can copy a link to share with them that will direct them to the review screen in the App Store.
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Mantle allows you to see all your reviews in one place, as well as filter them across vectors. You can see how long a customer was using the app, when the review was written, or whether it was edited after publishing (see all those 1 stars you turned into 5 stars!).
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You can also track counts of reviews and how they impact your rankings within categories and search terms in the Shopify App Store Index (SASI) report.
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Reviews are an essential part of growing your business and establishing customer trust. While it may feel daunting to reach out for reviews or handle difficult ones, Mantle is here to help. We make it easy to find reviews, request new ones, and track all your review information. Let Mantle help you grow your customer base with social proof of your company’s success.