Reviews
Marutto Search handles product reviews alongside search. You can keep your current review app: its stars appear in search results, and shoppers can filter and sort by rating. You can also collect reviews with Marutto Search itself.
| What you can do | Plan |
|---|---|
| Show another review app's stars in search results | Basic and up |
| Filter by rating (4★ & up, 3★ & up) and sort | Basic and up |
| Collect and display reviews with Marutto Search | Basic and up |
| Find products by what reviews say (review search) | Pro |
Using another review app
Review apps such as Judge.me and Loox write each product's rating to Shopify's standard metafields reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count. Marutto Search reads them when it syncs products and:
- shows stars and counts on search results, the header search and collections
- filters by "4★ & up" and "3★ & up", decided the same way as the stars a card draws
- sorts storefront search results by rating, weighted by the number of reviews so a product with one review does not jump to the top; unrated products come last
Review apps don't notify anyone when a rating changes, so the products whose ratings changed are re-read every hour, and every product once a day. Where a product has reviews collected by Marutto Search, those take precedence.
Finding products by Judge.me reviews (Pro)
On Pro, review search also finds products by what their Judge.me reviews say. Marutto Search reads, with the ratings, the title and text of the newest reviews Judge.me keeps on each product (five, by Judge.me's default).
- It follows the title and text switches in Reviews → Settings → "Use in product search". With both off, nothing is read
- Stars, the rating sort, the rating filter and review keywords don't change: they come from the rating Judge.me writes (
reviews.rating) - Words from 1★ and 2★ reviews don't find products (as with Marutto Search's own reviews)
- A search result card shows an excerpt of the review its words came from, without the reviewer's name
- Where a product has reviews collected by Marutto Search, only those are used
- These searches count toward "Searches answered by reviews" on the analytics page
- Up to 5,000 reviews per store (products are read oldest first; past the limit, the rest are left out)
- Moving to Basic takes the Judge.me text out of search
About Judge.me's format
Judge.me doesn't publish the format of the data this reads, so a change on Judge.me's side can make it unreadable. Products would then no longer be found by Judge.me reviews' words; stars and sorting are not affected. Review text from Loox, Junip and other apps isn't read yet.
About Search API v1
The Search API v1 contract includes neither rating fields nor the rating sort. Use the storefront blocks for them.
Placing reviews in the theme
Reviews are shown with theme blocks. In the admin, Reviews → Settings → "Where reviews appear" shows where the published theme has them and how to add the rest.
| Block | Where | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Product Reviews | Product template | Rating breakdown, search, sort, photos only, photo viewer, "helpful" |
| Review badge | Product template | Stars and count near the title |
| Customer reviews (carousel) | Home page or anywhere | The store's newest reviews, optionally photo reviews only |
| Customer reviews (reviews page) | Page template | Every review in the store, searchable by words, stars and photos |
| Reviews tab (screen edge) | App embed (every page) | A tab to the reviews page |
For the reviews page, create a page first (for example "Customer reviews"), add the block to the page template, then choose that page under the block's "Page to show it on". Even in the default page template, the block shows only on the chosen page.
Moving reviews from another app (CSV)
Import the CSV your review app exported, as it is.
- Formats: Judge.me, Loox, Junip, Yotpo, Okendo, Stamped, Shopify Product Reviews and Marutto Search's own export. Japanese headings are read too
- Columns are matched by their headings, in any order and any case
- Encoding: UTF-8, or Shift_JIS as Excel saves it in Japan
- Status: reviews published in the other app can stay published (your choice). Reviews marked as spam, and reviews of the store rather than a product, are skipped
- Photos: moved into the store's files. This needs file uploads allowed (Enable photo uploads, beside the import)
- No duplicates: importing the same file, or an overlapping export, adds only new reviews
- Limits: 50,000 rows and 20 MB per file. The import runs in the background; the admin shows its progress and why rows were not imported, by row number
- Email addresses, IP addresses and other personal details are not read
CSV files opened in Excel
A product ID turned into an exponent such as 7.01E+12 cannot be recovered, so the row is not imported. Use the file as your review app exported it, without re-saving it in Excel.
Review requests
Marutto Search does not send request emails. For each order, once the chosen number of days (3, 7, 14 or 30; 7 by default) has passed since it shipped, it starts its Shopify Flow trigger for review requests. Send the email or LINE message with your app's Flow action.
| Flow variable | Value |
|---|---|
order | The order (reference) |
customer | The order's customer (reference) |
reviewUrl | The review link |
productTitles | Products not yet reviewed, separated by 「、」 |
productCount | How many |
eventId | For de-duplicating deliveries |
- The link stands in for signing in. Customers who open it can write verified reviews of that order's products without signing in. Links stay valid for 180 days after shipping
- After a review, the customer is offered the rest of the order
- Orders already fully reviewed are not sent
- The admin has email and LINE message templates
There is also a packing-slip QR code. It is the same for every parcel (/apps/marutto-search/r); customers who scan it and sign in go straight to reviewing what they have not reviewed yet.
Fair display
Built for stealth-marketing and endorsement rules (Japan's Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, and the FTC's rule in the US):
- There is no setting to show only favorable reviews. Bulk publish and hide are not available while the list is filtered by rating
- Reviews written while you reward reviewers (with a coupon, say) show "Incentivized". Give everyone the same reward whatever their rating or words
- Optionally, storefront reviews still pending after a number of days are published, whatever their rating
- The product page explains what "Verified purchase", "imported" and "Incentivized" mean
In the admin
- Filters: status, rating, verified purchase, replied, product
- Publish or hide everything a filter found (500 at a time)
- Hiding asks for a reason, kept in the review's history
- Delete a reply (the original text stays in the history)
- A block on Shopify's customer details page with that customer's reviews
- On the analytics page (Pro), "Searches answered by reviews": searches where a product was found only through words in its reviews, with the clicks and orders that followed (reference figures)