Using Reviews in Your Online Store: Getting Them, Showing Them, Staying Legal

Reviews are one of the few things on a product page that you do not write, do not control, and that customers actually believe. That is precisely why they work, and it is why the temptation to interfere with them has now been made illegal.

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Getting reviews right is worth real money on a small shop, and most of the work is in asking properly and then displaying what you get honestly.

What reviews actually do for you

They answer the questions your product description does not. Does it come up small. Is it heavier than it looks. Did it survive a dishwasher. This is the information a hesitant buyer is looking for, and it is more persuasive coming from a customer than from you.

They reduce returns. A product with honest reviews sets accurate expectations. Buyers who know what they are getting complain less and return less.

They are unique content on every product page. If you sell products other shops also sell, you are probably using the same manufacturer description as everyone else. Reviews are the one thing on that page that is yours alone.

They can put stars in search results. With correct structured data, review ratings can appear under your listing on a search results page. That does not improve your ranking, but it makes the listing considerably more clickable.

Asking, without being a nuisance

Most customers will leave a review if asked once, politely, at the right moment. Very few will do it unprompted.

Time it for after they have used the product, not after it was delivered. For most goods that is somewhere between one and three weeks. Asking on the day of delivery gets you reviews of your packaging.

Ask once, and maybe once more. A single reminder is reasonable. Beyond that you are generating unsubscribes.

Link straight to the review form for the specific product they bought. Every extra step loses people, and asking someone to log in, find their order and locate the product will lose almost all of them.

Ask a specific question. “How did you get on with it?” produces more useful text than “Leave a review”, which produces “Good product, fast delivery”.

Incentives are legal but need care. You may offer a reward for leaving a review, but it must not be conditional on the review being positive, and if you offer one you need to be transparent about it. Offering a discount for five stars is exactly the kind of practice the law now prohibits.

The legal position in the UK

This changed materially and recently, and a lot of long standing advice is now out of date.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought its consumer protection provisions into force on 6 April 2025. Reviews that do not reflect a genuine experience, and concealing the fact that reviews have been incentivised, are now banned practices. The CMA can investigate and enforce directly, with penalties of up to 10% of global turnover, and it allowed a grace period until July 2025 for businesses to get their processes in order.

In practice, what this means for a normal shop:

• Do not write reviews of your own products, or have staff, friends or family do it.
• Do not buy reviews, and do not use a service that supplies them.
• Do not publish only your positive reviews while suppressing the negative ones.
• If a review was incentivised in any way, say so.
• Take reasonable steps to check the reviews you publish are genuine.

That last point is an active obligation, not a passive one. Requiring a verified purchase before a review can be left is the simplest way to meet it and is worth doing regardless.

Handling negative reviews

The instinct is to delete them. Do not. Beyond being a banned practice if done systematically, it is counterproductive: a product with nothing but perfect scores reads as fake, and shoppers routinely go looking for the critical reviews first specifically because they are more informative.

Reply publicly, once, and keep it short. Acknowledge the problem, say what you are doing about it, and offer to sort it out directly. That reply is not really aimed at the unhappy customer. It is aimed at every future buyer reading the page, and a calm, practical response to a complaint does more for your credibility than another five star review would.

What you can legitimately remove is abuse, obvious spam, content about the wrong product, and anything defamatory or containing personal data. Have a stated moderation policy so those decisions are consistent and defensible.

Displaying them properly

Show the average rating and the number of reviews near the top of the product page, where it is visible without scrolling. Show the distribution across star ratings rather than only the average, since twenty reviews split between five and one star is a very different product from twenty consistent four star reviews.

Let people sort and filter, mark reviews as helpful, and see whether the reviewer’s purchase was verified. Include the date, because a shopper needs to know whether the complaints are historic or current.

Then mark it up with structured data so search engines can use it. aggregateRating needs a ratingValue plus either a ratingCount or a reviewCount, and those figures must match what is actually visible on the page. Google’s rules here are strict, and self-serving markup where a business rates itself is explicitly disallowed.

If you run CubeCart

CubeCart has a review system built in. It is off by default and enabled under Settings, where you also choose whether to show Gravatar images alongside reviews.

Reviews are moderated by default: the storefront only ever displays reviews marked approved, and everything else waits for you in the back office under the products section. The rating average shown to customers is calculated from approved reviews only, and customers can vote reviews up or down for helpfulness.

One thing worth checking if you are on an older release: CubeCart’s JSON-LD markup used to hardcode the rating value to 5 regardless of the actual score, which meant every product claimed a perfect rating to search engines. That was fixed in 6.7.6. If you are running anything earlier and have reviews enabled, your structured data is misreporting, and given the rule that markup must match the visible page, that is worth resolving promptly.

Reviews are also exposed through CubeCart’s REST API, so pulling them into another system or syndicating them elsewhere is straightforward.

Where to start

Turn reviews on, require a verified purchase, and add a single follow up email a fortnight after delivery linking directly to the review form. Then leave it alone for a couple of months and see what arrives.

The shops that do well out of reviews are not the ones with the cleverest tactics. They are the ones that asked consistently and published what they got.

If you host with us and want a hand setting up the follow up email or checking what your product pages are reporting to search engines, get in touch.