How to Add Reviews to Shopify and Choose the Right App

Does Shopify Have Built-In Product Reviews?

Search for Shopify product reviews and you will still find guides to an app called Product Reviews, made by Shopify. It is gone: Shopify retired the Product Reviews app on May 6, 2024, and since that date it can't be installed or used. Shopify warned owners beforehand that after that date they would lose access to their existing reviews, and that reviews from the app would no longer display on their store. Its App Store listing now reads “This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store.”

So in 2026 three different things get called “Shopify reviews”, and only one of them puts stars on your product pages.

Shop product reviews live in the Shop app

After a customer buys a product through the Shop app or your online store, they can leave a Shop product review in the Shop app. Only Shop customers who purchased from you can, with a rating from 1 to 5 stars and an optional comment of up to 1,000 characters. Reviews and average star ratings are public, on the product's page in Shop.

That collection is not something you switch on, and it is not something you can switch off.

The route Shopify documents for getting those reviews onto your storefront is a supported partner app. When one is installed, reviews published in the Shop app are shared with it automatically, and you manage whether they publish to your online store from the app's admin. Shopify names five such apps: Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped.io and Yotpo.

Reviews collected in Shop arrive with a Verified by Shop badge you can't remove. No Shopify page we checked describes a native theme block that shows Shop reviews on your storefront without an app (see “What we looked for and did not find” at the end of the legal section).

The flow also runs the other way: reviews your partner app collects can display in Shop. Two limits apply. Reviews migrated between apps by CSV, or uploaded from a CSV, aren't eligible for Shop, and Shopify notes that Shop's requirements can show fewer reviews in Shop than on your storefront.

How the Shop channel lists your store and products is its own subject, covered in our guide to the Shop app for merchants.

Where storefront star ratings come from

Shopify defines two standard metafields for product ratings: reviews.rating for the aggregated average and reviews.rating_count for the total number of ratings on a product or variant. The instruction to apps is explicit.

The other half is addressed to themes: those that display product ratings should reference the same metafield for the average. Horizon follows it. Its review block, in Shopify's own Horizon code, reads product.metafields.reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count. Read together, the two rules mean a theme and a reviews app that both follow them meet at those fields.

Apps in Shopify's standard product review syndication program must also show the Verified by Shop badge on reviews eligible for Shop. None of this is a setting you configure; it is the plumbing your app uses. If metafields are new to you, our Shopify metafields guide explains what they are and where they surface.

Which Reviews App Should You Pick?

We read seven reviews-app listings on the Shopify App Store on October 7, 2026: Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped, Yotpo, REVIEWS.io and Klaviyo Reviews. The App Store holds many more, so treat this as a dated shortlist rather than the whole market. The first five are the apps Shopify lists as Shop-sync partners; REVIEWS.io and Klaviyo Reviews are here because they price differently, by review invites and inside an email platform.

Free plans and where each one stops

Two things in that table change the decision more than any feature list. Judge.me is the only free plan without a ceiling, and the ceilings elsewhere are counted in different units: orders a month for Okendo, Yotpo and Klaviyo Reviews, orders in total for Loox, and review invites a month for REVIEWS.io. A free plan that looks generous on one listing is not comparable to another until you translate both into your own monthly orders, which is what the calculator below does.

Photo and video reviews sit on different plans too. On their App Store listings, Judge.me's Forever Free and REVIEWS.io's FREE plans list them, Stamped lists photo and video collection on all three Reviews plans, Yotpo lists it from Starter, and Loox lists video reviews on Convert.

Billing terms differ as well. Yotpo, REVIEWS.io and Klaviyo each state on their listings that some charges may be billed separately from your Shopify invoice. And one integration is worth a line: Shopify's Sidekick help page names Judge.me as an example of an app that has added Sidekick support, so the admin assistant can work with it once you approve that for a conversation.

Shop sync and Google stars: check the two official lists

Two listings claim more than the official lists show. REVIEWS.io's listing includes “Shop App Review Syndication” on its free plan, while Shopify's list of partner apps supported to sync with Shop product reviews names five apps and REVIEWS.io is not one of them. Klaviyo Reviews' listing says it can “sync to Google Shopping”, while Klaviyo does not appear, on the page we read, among Google's eligible Product Ratings aggregators. All four pages were read on October 7, 2026.

While they disagree, let the official list decide. For reviews in the Shop app, Shopify's list is what Shop supports. For Google Shopping, use an app on Google's list or submit your own product review feed, which Google accepts as the second route.

Plan names are the other trap. Google asks for Loox “Scale or Unlimited”, Stamped “Business or higher” and Reviews.io “Premium”, while those listings sell plans named Beginner, Convert and Unlimited; Reviews, Reviews (1k) and Reviews (5k); and FREE, LAUNCH and LAUNCH PLUS. Ask the vendor which current plan Google's condition maps to before you pay for an upgrade to get it.

Judge.me and Loox carry the Built for Shopify badge on their listings; the other five showed no badge of their own when we read them on October 7, 2026 (see the box at the end of the legal section). What the badge does and does not certify is a separate question, answered in our guide to the Built for Shopify badge.

What Does a Reviews App Cost at Your Order Volume?

Take a store doing 1,200 orders a month, priced on the listings' own terms read October 7, 2026. Two of the results need the arithmetic spelled out:

• Stamped: Reviews (5k) at $199 a month, because Reviews (1k) stops at 1,000 orders. Stamped's own pricing page starts plans at $199 a month — confirm the price at install.
• Loox: Convert comes to $199.99: $49.99 with 300 orders included, plus three more blocks of 300 at $50 each.

Put your own monthly orders into the calculator below.

The prices move in steps rather than lines, and on three different axes: Judge.me's are flat, most of the others step up with monthly orders, and REVIEWS.io steps up with review invites. Loox has one crossover worth knowing: Convert's blocks add up to the Unlimited price at 1,800 orders a month, and above that Unlimited is the cheaper Loox plan.

The cheapest line is not automatically the right app. The plans differ in what they include, such as video reviews and Google syndication on Loox's Convert (Google's list names Loox's Scale or Unlimited plans — confirm with Loox), which is why the verdict at the top and the two tables above matter more than the bottom figure.

How to Add Reviews to Your Shopify Store

The steps live in different places: the App Store, your theme editor, the app's own settings and, later, Google Merchant Center.

Install the app and show reviews on product pages

Start from the app's page on the Shopify App Store (the names in the tables above link straight to them) and install from there. The app's own onboarding takes over next, and what it asks you to set up first differs from app to app.

Getting the reviews onto your pages happens in the theme editor, and Shopify's help page on app blocks and app embeds documents two mechanisms:

1. App block. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store, find the theme you want to edit and click Edit theme. Open the page and section you want, click Add block, and in the Apps section select the app block, or search your installed apps. Click Save.
2. App embed. These are app-provided elements that float or display as an overlay in your theme, or add code to your store without being visible to customers. In the theme editor, click the App embeds icon, select the app embed, click the toggle beside it to activate it, and Save.

Two conditions on the same Shopify page decide whether this works on your store. App blocks can only be used with compatible themes, and Shopify notes that you can read the app listing and documentation to understand whether the app is compatible with your theme. And if you later change your published theme, the app's blocks and embeds won't be active in the new one: you re-activate them there. That second point is the one to remember on a move to Horizon.

If you have never set up a reviews app, the walkthrough below shows one end to end: installing Judge.me, configuring it, collecting and managing reviews, and placing its widgets. It is one creator's video from 2025, not Shopify's, and his theme-editor screens may not match Horizon, so use it for the sequence and the steps above for the panel names.

Ask for reviews after delivery

Reviews apps send their own request emails, set up inside the app. Whatever the app, the safe shape is the one the rules describe.

Under the FTC rule, reviews that come from a business making generalized solicitations to purchasers are carved out of its prohibitions in §465.2(b) and (c), and §465.5(b) and (c) carve out such solicitations too. Asking only customers you expect to be satisfied is a different matter: the FTC says the rule contains no specific prohibition against it, “But this practice could violate the FTC Act.”

Shop's merchant guidelines put it in one sentence: if you encourage customers to leave a review, you need to do so in a neutral manner. For the Shop app itself, the controls sit in the Shop channel:

• Request timing: in Settings → Shop reviews, send the review request any time between 1 and 180 days after the order is delivered.
• Purchases outside Shop: customers can review online-store purchases by default; the Reviews on purchases outside of Shop checkbox controls it.
• Automation: Shopify Flow's Shop Review Published trigger runs whenever a Shop review is collected and published.
• Who sees them: staff with the Customers permission can see Shop reviews in the channel.
• What you can measure: the channel's Reviews page shows four metrics: collected reviews, conversion rate, average rating and partner app reviews.

The checklist below puts the whole route in order. Step five applies only if you have reviews to bring over, and step seven only once you sell through Google Shopping and have the reviews Google asks for; the other steps apply to every store.

Can You Import Reviews From AliExpress or Another App?

Switching apps comes first for most stores. Shopify's rule is that reviews collected through a partner app are managed within that same app, so a move runs through export and import rather than a switch you flip. Judge.me's listing says it imports from Yotpo, Loox, Amazon, Etsy and other platforms; Klaviyo Reviews lists importing existing reviews on its free plan; Loox's listing promises easy migration and import from other apps without naming the formats.

The verified label is where AliExpress imports differ from your own reviews, and Judge.me's import documentation is plain about why.

The legal side has no single line to quote. In the US, the FTC declined to finalize a proposed section on reusing or repurposing reviews (§465.3), because it could not resolve concerns about what counts as a substantially different product. The final rule does bar a business from writing or creating a review that misrepresents that the reviewer used the product (§465.2(a)). The final rule has no review-hijacking provision, though the FTC's Federal Register notice named the practice among those it considered: “review hijacking, where a seller steals or repurposes reviews of another product” (see the box at the end of the legal section).

In the UK, the CMA's fake reviews guidance says consumers are most likely to be misled where reviews of two or more products with material differences are merged to boost one product's rating and review count. That is guidance on the law rather than the statute, and none of these texts gives a yes-or-no answer for supplier reviews. Moving reviews when you change platforms rather than apps is a different job; our BigCommerce migration guide covers what happens to reviews and their Google stars on a replatform.

How Do You Get Review Stars in Google?

Merchants say “Google stars” about three different things. They are not sources disagreeing with each other; they are separate programs, each with its own entry condition.

Store ratings are the one most often confused with the rest: they rate the shop, and Google's Store ratings page points you to Product Ratings if what you want is reviews of specific products. And if you don't collect product reviews yet, Google's Product Ratings basics page points to Google Customer Reviews, which you can sign up for free.

Product Ratings in Google Shopping

Getting in starts with these conditions on Google's Product Ratings requirements page:

• At least 50 reviews across all of your products, not per product. Check the total in your reviews app.
• A standalone Merchant Center account or a sub-account, not a Multi-Client Account, with administrative access. Check it in Merchant Center.
• Product URLs on your registered domain: the domains in the review data must match the one registered in Merchant Center.
• Unique product identifiers, such as GTIN, or Brand plus MPN. Check your product data.

Staying visible is a second gate. Google says it can take 2–4 weeks for reviews to go live after the review process, and the review data source must be uploaded at least once a month with updated reviews to keep eligibility.

You can send it yourself or have a supported aggregator submit it, and aggregators may charge fees. Aggregate product reviews can appear on free listings whether or not you join the program.

What goes into the feed is stricter than most merchants expect. You must collect and own the reviews you share, reviews syndicated from other sources aren't accepted, old reviews may not be deleted from the feed, and an incentivised review must carry the is_incentivized_review attribute, with no incentive dependent on the review's sentiment. The rule that catches selective feeds is this one.

Product Ratings run through your Merchant Center account. If your catalog is not in Merchant Center yet, start with our Shopify Google Shopping guide.

Stars in organic search: the review snippet rules

Organic search stars are a different system again: Google's review snippet guidelines govern that structured data, which several apps in this guide list as a feature, such as Judge.me's rich snippets and Okendo's Google SEO Snippets. The rules that matter for a product page:

• Provide review information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items.
• The review content you mark up must be readily available to users from the marked-up page.
• Don't aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites.
• Don't include fake or undisclosed incentivised reviews on the page or in the markup.
• If a site violates the guidelines, Google may take manual action against it.

Whether your theme already outputs product structured data, and how to check it, is covered in our technical SEO audit.

What the Law Says About Collecting and Showing Reviews

United States: the FTC rule on reviews

The Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) went into effect on October 21, 2024. Five of its provisions map directly onto settings in a reviews app.

The rule authorizes courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations. The maximum civil penalty under Section 5(m)(1)(A) of the FTC Act is $53,088 per violation, an amount that applies to penalties assessed after January 17, 2025; the FTC is keeping the 2025 levels for 2026. What the rule does not ask of you matters as much as what it bans.

For a business that hires a third party to generate reviews, for example through free samples, the same guidance says it would likely be on notice that the reviews are fake if they appear so quickly after purchase that it's doubtful they reflect real experience, an unusually large number arrive in a very short period, or they refer to the wrong product. Three more clarifications from the FTC's Q&A shape how you run the widget:

• Hosting reviews stays “mere consumer review hosting” even if you prompt submissions or aggregate star ratings.
• Organizing reviews isn't suppression under the rule, but organizing them so that negative reviews are hard to find could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act.
• A policy of not publishing reviews that mention other products is fine as long as it treats positive and negative reviews equally. Reviews you feature in advertising become testimonials, and the hosting exemption no longer applies to them.

European Union

The rules sit in the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, as amended by the Omnibus Directive, whose national measures apply from May 28, 2022. They reach your store through each member state's own law, and three points bear on a reviews widget:

• Disclosure. Where you provide access to reviews, information about whether and how you ensure they come from consumers who actually used or purchased the product is material. The Omnibus recitals give requesting information that verifies a purchase as an example of the technical means.
• Two blacklisted practices. Stating that reviews come from real users or buyers without reasonable and proportionate steps to check, and submitting or commissioning false reviews or misrepresenting reviews to promote products, are unfair in all circumstances.
• Selective publication. The recitals name publishing only positive reviews and deleting the negative ones as manipulation.

On penalties, the directive requires member states, when fines are imposed in coordinated cross-border enforcement under Article 21 of Regulation (EU) 2017/2394, to allow a maximum of at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the member states concerned.

United Kingdom

Under Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force for reviews from April 6, 2025, publishing consumer reviews in a misleading way is always an unfair practice. The Act defines a fake review as one that purports to be, but is not, based on a person's genuine experience, and commissioning one includes incentivising it by any means. Failing to publish, or removing, negative reviews while publishing positive ones is one of its examples of misleading publication.

Location doesn't exempt you. The CMA's guidance is that an invitation to purchase directed at UK consumers must comply even if the trader is outside the UK.

Its short guide for businesses publishing reviews explains the duty: take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and false or misleading review information. It adds that you should have a published policy that clearly prohibits fake reviews, and it is direct about apps.

The CMA's fake reviews guidance adds that while suppressing fake negative reviews matters, suppressing genuine negative reviews is problematic. Under the new regime, the CMA can fine a company up to 10% of its global turnover for infringing consumer protection law; that ceiling is the regime's general one, not a figure specific to reviews.

Incentives for reviews: four rulebooks, four answers

Note what the FTC row does and does not say: the incentive itself is allowed, a requirement of a good review is not. Shop's guidelines go further for Shop reviews and add a conflict-of-interest rule: you, your employees, family members or friends shouldn't review your products or incentivize someone else to do so.

The Bottom Line

Most of the work here is one decision and a few settings. The decision is the app, and it turns on the job the reviews do and your monthly orders. The settings are a theme block, a request email and a moderation rule you apply to every star rating the same way.

Frequently Asked Questions