How To Get Product Reviews To Boost Brand Trust (2026) – Shopify

Knowing how to get product reviews helps your business establish credibility in a crowded market. Reviews are a form of social proof, as customers look to one another for reassurance that a product does what it’s supposed to and is of a high quality.

McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2025 report found family and friends (50%) and reviews (22%) were the most trusted sources behind eventual purchasing decisions; social media influenced consumers the least in their search for product recommendations. 

Learn how product reviews contribute to brand trust, customer loyalty, and conversions. Get techniques for collecting quality reviews from your customers and using the results in your overall brand strategy.

Why product reviews matter

Here’s what reviews contribute to shoppers, brands, and the online shopping experience:

• Trust among shoppers. According to Brightlocal, 97% of consumers read product reviews, seeking reassurance on product quality and value before making a purchasing decision. A large number of reviews validate a shopper’s instinct, making them more likely to trust where they’ve landed. That same study by Brightlocal found that 47% of customers won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

• Increased conversions. More reviews lead to more purchases. Bazaarvoice found that even one review led to a 10% increase in purchases; 50 reviews drove a 30% increase. 

• Improved SEO results. Strong reviews on an online store are more than trust-boosting testimonials; they’re a form of content in their own right, with the power to boost your search engine optimization efforts by highlighting relevant keywords used by potential customers. Additionally, positive reviews on your store’s Google Business Profile increase your chances of appearing higher in local search rankings. 

Ways to get product reviews

• Send automated post-purchase review emails
• Follow up and engage
• Use SMS review requests
• Offer incentives
• Make it easy to leave reviews
• Leverage social media and UGC
• Highlight existing reviews to trigger more submissions

To gather product reviews that move the needle, encourage your customers to write reviews through your online store, social media, email marketing, and more:

Send automated post-purchase review emails

To get more product reviews from your customers, capitalize on their attention while you have it. Adding an automatic prompt to review into your post-purchase email marketing flow keeps you top of mind in the early days after they’ve received their order. This also offers an opportunity to welcome them further into your community with small incentives or engagement.

The timing of your review request matters. Sending your post-purchase email too soon may mean that your customer will forget about your ask by the time their order actually arrives. Send it too late, and the urgency of the interaction has passed, and the most salient details of their experience will have faded. If your product offers a more immediate experience (makeup or skin care products, for example), request a review a few days after the delivery date. 

If your product benefits from a longer window to highlight results (say a 28-day wellness box like the one from The Turmeric Co., or cookware that customers acquire a feel for over time), hold off for a few weeks to give your new customers time to develop an opinion. 

Shop Product Reviews allows Shopify merchants to configure the notification timing best for their unique products, with post-purchase push notifications sent automatically after delivery. Customers can leave anywhere from one to five stars and add text up to 1,000 characters.

Follow up and engage

Once you’ve sent your initial request, plan to follow up with a reminder. Avoid dry, transactional language (“Leave a review” or “Tell us how we did”) and aim instead to keep your reminder consistent with your brand voice and personality. 

If you can, attach the prompt to an experience customers would likely be having with your product. If you sell outdoor apparel, ask about recent adventures. If you sell cookware, frame your request around cooking or recent get-togethers.

Once reviews start coming in, engage with them as soon as possible. Shopify merchants can manage their Shop Product Reviews directly from their Shopify admin, with the ability to reply to reviews, customize request intervals or reminders, or build custom review notification flows with Shopify Flow automations.

Use SMS review requests

Some customers may respond more readily to text message requests or in-app push notifications—42% versus email’s 9%, as reported by LaunchSMS. Send mobile-friendly reminders that follow the same timeline you identified in previous steps (allowing time for customers to use your product, but not so long that they forget the highlights) that are short and easy to read at a glance. 

Offer incentives

Incentives can be a good way to break through the noise and weave in a little surprise and delight to an otherwise transactional task.

Claudia Snow, cofounder of coffee brand Kloo, approached requests for reviews with an awareness of the survey fatigue that most consumers experience. “If I get an email asking to leave a review, or do a survey, I will probably ignore it unless there is something in it for me,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We offered our customers free products in exchange for their time, whether they took the survey or spoke with me on the phone. Every time, I would offer them something in return.” 

Incentives might look like free samples, early access to new releases or events, discounts on future orders, or loyalty points. The Federal Trade Commission requires that customers disclose when reviews are given in exchange for the product in question; it also prohibits incentivizing the sentiment of a given review (whether positive or negative). 

Make it easy to leave reviews

To encourage customers to leave reviews, eliminate as much friction from the process as possible. That means linking directly to product pages from review request emails and texts, for example.

For The Turmeric Co., incorporating a review app into their website not only smoothed the process of capturing reviews, but surfaced more opportunities to connect further with satisfied customers. Using positive reviews as a jumping-off point meant the brand could reach other shoppers with more detailed messaging around the impact of their wellness shots; the first step was making it as easy as possible to leave a review on every page.

“We very quickly incorporated the ability to track the reviews coming in, and would then reach back out to that customer and see if they’d be willing to do a video piece, or share more about what they experienced when using the product,” founder Thomas “Hal” Robson-Kanu says on an episode of Shopify Masters. 

To keep feedback top of mind for both first-time and loyal customers, feature reviews prominently on product pages and throughout the homepage. Highlight the number of starred reviews alongside product descriptions, and include a more comprehensive review section at the bottom of the page paired with a call to action for readers to write their own.

Leverage social media and UGC

A great way to surface reviews with pictures or video featuring your product is to engage directly with your customers when they tag your brand on social media. Respond in the comments of their post talking about your product, and get approval to repost their content or feature the review on your own channels or website. 

Doing this can help potential customers visualize your product in their own lives, encourage other fans to tag you in their content, and boost visibility for your brand’s page for potential customers who have yet to discover you.

Highlight existing reviews to trigger more submissions

Using reviews as testimonials and incorporating them into product videos communicates to would-be reviewers that you value customer feedback as an important piece of your brand identity. 

For the founders of snack brand Elavi, early customer reviews helped generate interest and attention for their nut butters and protein brownies. “For our first six months of launch, what moved the needle the most was sharing screenshots of reviews on our Instagram stories,” cofounder Michelle Razavi says on Shopify Masters. “As soon as you start to get testimonials, whether it’s a review or a text message or someone kind enough to make a video, share them. People want to see that buy-in.”

How to approach negative reviews

• Keep the big picture in mind
• Look for patterns
• Take the opportunity to respond gracefully

The Brightlocal study found that customers are far more likely to use a business that replies to both positive and negative reviews than a business that replies to only one or the other. Showing that you’re listening to negative feedback signals your commitment to your customers and to filling the gaps in your products and processes.

Here’s how to keep criticism in perspective and put negative feedback to good use:

Keep the big picture in mind

Some negative opinions can be a sign your brand is engaging authentically. For example, the creative team at Liquid Death thrives on strong reactions. “A lot of brands act like, ’Oh, no, five people said something mean about us. We can’t do that again,’” vice president of Creative Andy Pearson says on Shopify Masters. “You have to understand that it’s a proportions game. If you’re making great stuff, not everyone’s gonna like it.”

For the founders of Taza Chocolate, negative reactions to their stone-ground chocolate are proof of their commitment to creating something worth having an opinion about.

“We’re in a very, very competitive and crowded category dominated by just a handful of large multinational corporations. As a small business in the chocolate candy category, you have to find a niche that is defensible,” Taza cofounder Kathleen Fulton says on Shopify Masters. 

“We knew very early on that we were making a very polarizing product: our focus is making really weird, dramatically flavored and textured chocolate products that celebrate a specific ideal around food and flavor and ingredients. We’ve had some amazing customer service emails that are like, ‘Why is this so disgusting?’ And then we have fans for life.”

Look for patterns

One bad review shouldn’t be the reason you make a major change, but if you’re consistently receiving negative feedback about a certain aspect of your product, your fulfillment process, or your packaging, it can be a sign that there’s room for improvement. 

When Dossier’s customers began complaining about the longevity of the brand’s perfumes, founder Sergio Tache’s initial reaction was surprise. “We put a lot of effort into the quality of our perfume,” he says. “It turns out that people think of longevity in terms of the number of spritzes, not how much perfume they put on the skin.” They made a simple hardware change to update the pump, and perception improved.

Divy Oja, the founder of produce brand Odd Bunch, took a different approach to negative reviews. His brand specializes in “rescuing” produce that doesn’t meet conventional grocery standards and would otherwise be thrown out.

To preempt customer complaints of odd-shaped or unconventional produce, the team decided to address the issue head-on with conversations around produce diversity on their social media channels, where they had strong community engagement. “There’s so much education to do, but I think we’ve been able to set expectations that it may not be pretty looking, but it’ll always be fresh,” Divy says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

Take the opportunity to respond gracefully

How a brand handles a bad review is yet another opportunity to build trust with customers. Some brands lean on humor to bat away trolls; however, being courteous to customers with real grievances helps repair the issue and signals to other customers that you value the relationship enough to go the extra mile. 

An early opportunity for apron company Headley & Bennett involved an unhappy chef with errant apron straps. This feedback led to rapid design changes that improved the product. “As an entrepreneur, you’re going to [mess] up along the way. Are you willing to own it and fix it rapidly? If you are, most of the time, people are totally down to be a part of that with you,” founder Ellen Bennett says on Shopify Masters.