The Best Time to Request a Product Review for an Ecommerce Store

Remember the last time a brand delivered a good experience, and you gave it a 5-star rating? Trust me when I say this; it’s vital for a brand. It separates them from the competition and ensures that you go back to them every single time. 

Here’s the thing: The ones who had a bad experience won’t hesitate to leave a bad review everywhere, but the customers who had a decent experience won’t leave a review unless you ask them to. In fact,  77% of shoppers are willing to leave a review if asked.

So, in conclusion, you need to ask for a review. Okay, great. But when? Before I tell you that, let’s read when you should not ask for a review if you’re running an ecommerce store. 

When NOT to ask for a review

To date, I have worked with hundreds of Shopify stores, and only 1% know when to ask for a review from a customer. 

Most brands do one of the following:

• Asks to review on the product page two seconds after the customer purchased a product
• Sends a review request through email the moment it gets delivered (example: Amazon)

At the risk of contradicting myself, the above two ways aren’t wrong. 

I mean, you can still ask for a review once the purchase has been completed but ask yourself this: Would you want to add 5-stars even before trying out the product for some time?

When to ask customers for reviews

I’d love to have a direct answer, but it depends from business to business. Either way, it’s NOT right after they purchase a product or when it gets delivered to their doorstep. If you want to maximize the “review conversion rate,” you need to find the delay that works for you. 

And, there’s a simple formula for that. So, all you have to do is answer this question: How much time does it take for your customers to find real value from your product?

Let’s go through some examples.

1) You’re an alternative water brand selling healthy sparkle water. In this case, once the product is delivered, your customer can instantly tell whether they like it or not. So a 2-day delay before asking for a review seems fair. 

2) You sell ergonomic work-from-home chairs. Since there’s no predicting when the customer will start liking the chair, you can take your best guess and ask for a review after 14-days. The chances are that they bought it for their back pain, and your chair is helping them cope with that pain better. 

How to ask for a review in the most efficient way

It’s super easy (and efficient) to ask for a review if you’re running your ecom store on Shopify and are using one of the top review apps.

Yet, there’s an issue that’s beyond your control. Review apps trigger based on Shopify’s fulfillment events. Now, there are only a handful of shipping carriers that Shopify supports, meaning if it’s an unknown carrier, the “shipment delivered” event won’t get triggered.

Hence, the review app you’re using won’t be able to fire a review request automatically. 

Fret not, for you can solve this simple issue in minutes. You just need to pair up your review app with Wonderment.

What is Wonderment, and why should you care?

Wonderment as a platform helps DTC brands connect with their customers better and deliver the best experience possible. We’ve partnered with companies like JudgeMe, Okendo, Junip, and other apps to help you dole out the experience your customers deserve.

Since we connect with 80+ carriers across the globe, we can tell you when an order is delivered when Shopify can’t. This gives you the accurate data you need to launch a review request at the right moment and increase your chances of landing a glorious review. 

The perfect way to send a customer review request on Shopify

Let’s cut right to the chase. You should install Wonderment and integrate it with your Shopify reviews app to enable automatic review collection from customers. 

We integrate with the top review apps:

• Okendo
• JudgeMe
• Junip
• Stamped.io 
• Loox

Once you have integrated Wonderment with your preferred review app, you can automatically trigger review requests after a certain number of days from the date of delivery. The delivery trigger will be furnished by Wonderment.

For example, once you activate the integration with Okendo, Wonderment will mark packages as Delivered in Shopify, even if it's not a carrier commonly supported by Shopify. Okendo reads this Event to determine eligibility for reviews. 

Alternatively, you can take it one step further and create a flow in Klaviyo where you trigger a review request from the reviews app based on Wonderment’s fulfillment event triggers, like “order delivered.”

For example, Jason from Doe Lashes has already done this with a three-way integration between Junip, Wonderment & Klaviyo. 

Time to get that review from your favorite customer

There you have it, one implementable and straightforward guide on how to ask for a review for your ecommerce store the right way. 

Of course, there are other, more manual ways of asking for a review but based on my experience and interaction with our customers; we found that the above method has the highest “ask-to-convert” percentage. 

Try Wonderment for free to start sending smarter product review requests.