Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

[wcw]

A ratings and reviews feature has been included in the Emporium Plus Tool Kit. As you can see from the summary below this feature has many bells and whistles. The feature list was adopted from suggestions by Miva Merchant forum participants. Login and try out the new feature at http://www.emporiumplus.com/SFNT.html Please pick products you have purchased in the past at Emporium Plus. This will give you the opportunity to test the "verified purchase" feature. After rating a product you'll get an email with a discount coupon. I set the discount at 15% for a limited time. Please don't give bad scores just to see what happens to the average score. If you do, please go back and correct the score with a valid review.

• Require login or allow anonymous or both
• Import from the "Rate This" module's database if you had that old system
• 5 example pages with store morph code
• Computes average rating for each product
• Displays number of raters with the average rating to show strength of rating
• Show the rating with images (hearts, stars, etc)
• Display reviews on any page, including a popup to reduce clutter on the product page
• Product reviews include
  - Name (or other customer data) if customer is logged in and they give permission to show it
  - Link to logged in customer's other reviews so viewers can evaluate their objectivity
  - Narrative review
  - Each rater's rating
  - Show verified purchase if logged in customer gives permission and module verifies they really bought the item in the past
  - Display if reviewer said they would recommend to a friend
  - Sorted with most recent on top
• List of logged in customer's individual reviews of all products he/she reviewed
  - Name (with link) of each product the customer rated/reviewed
  - Narrative review
  - Rating the customer gave to each product
  - Show verified purchase if logged in customer gives permission and module verifies they really bought the item in the past
  - Display if reviewer said they would recommend to a friend
  - Sorted by date, product name, rating
• Rating and reviews can be automatically approved or require admin approval
  - This feature can be applied differently, e.g. depending on whether they are logged in or anonymous
• If the same reviewer posts a new review for the same product, the original is erased (one review per customer per product)
• New ratings and reviews are copied to the Power Search (if installed) mirror database when they have been approved and become searchable
• If a rating/review is posted that requires approval, an email goes to the store admin
• A "thank you for the review" message can be displayed on the screen after the customer submits it
• A "thank you" email can be sent to logged in customers
  - If you have our coupon redemption module you can embed a unique, on-the-fly generated coupon as a reward

If you have other suggestions for product reviews, please let me know.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

One or two Comments:

A lot of how things are displayed can be changed with Store Morph Technology (SMT), so if you have some familiarity with editing your page templates, then it will be easy to customize the appearance of the ratings and reviews.

I bring this up because in the past, some review modules did not allow as much customization of the display. The ToolKit feature does give you lots of flexibility.

One other note:

This module associates reviews in a different way than most other review modules. Instead of keeping ALL your reviews in a single Admin screen, the reviews are instead kept in new custom product fields on a per product basis.

So if you wanted to edit / approve the review for product XYZ, you would go to yor store admin, Store Name -> Products -> Product XYZ Edit Screen -> ToolKit Custom Fields and look at the ratings and reviews field.

For many stores, this might be an easier, more intuitive way to administrate reviews. However, if you get LOTS of reviews for LOTS of different products on a daily basis, it may be less practical; you would have to go into the product edit screen of EACH product and administrate them there.

Hope this helps.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

One More Nice Feature I Forgot To Mention:

There is a little "snippet" feature as well, so you can show just the first sentence of a review, quite easily as well. You could show that first-sentence snippet from the most recent review, or from multiple recent reviews. This just helps to add more flexibility in the display of the reviews.

[kitdang]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

How about the ability to include the ratings associate with the products in your template data feed? Google products would love that.

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

So if you wanted to edit / approve the review for product XYZ, you would go to yor store admin, Store Name -> Products -> Product XYZ Edit Screen -> ToolKit Custom Fields and look at the ratings and reviews field.

That's not correct. The approval is a snap in admin. You simply click the awaiting approval button and it lists all unapproved ratings/reviews. You put checks in the approve boxes you want to approve and checks in the delete boxes for those you want to delete. Then with one button click, it runs all those actions. Quite fast.

If you want to edit, a certain one, e.g. to add a tag line, you simply click the product name you want to edit and it takes you to that screen. Oh, did you notice the new Tool Kit Custom Fields tab in the product edit screen. For those custom fields over 254 characters, you see a textarea field. For those less than 254 you see a regular text input. Is that slick or what!

Here is a screen shot of the list reviews by product code in admin.
http://www.emporiumplus.com/i5/tkreview.jpg You also list by those pending approval, by customer login, or by cookie ID. The latter two are useful if you have an abusive rater.

Here is another screen shot, not specifically related to tool kit or anything else. I customized my /site/h_main.mv using the an old one I had laying around. Compiled and replaced the original. See http://www.emporiumplus.com/i5/tkreview2.jpg There is code in some of the modules that tell you how many are pending, e.g. number of reviews or contact manager entries. Clicking the link takes you directly to the action screen.

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

How about the ability to include the ratings associate with the products in your template data feed? Google products would love that.

Is rating one of the optional columns they will take?

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

That's not correct.

Oppsss... sorry about the misinformation.

I am embarrassed to ask this, but where in the admin is the Ratings and Reviews admin page???

I swear I looked up and down for it before making the comment that they could only be approved in the product edit pages, and couldn't find it.

(It is probably very easy to find and I just overlooked it. But I didn't see any mention of it in the ToolKit docs.)

Thanks in advance.

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

Those darn docs. Go to admin. Click the + to the left of the word Utilities. Click Emporium Plus Tool Kit. There are several report/action forms on that page. One of them is Product Reviews. There is a drop down on which way you want to search the data. With the "approval" option, you don't need to put anything in the text input. For the other 3 you do need to put in the product code or customer login or cookie id. Then just click the button and the info displays. There are links that let you view the data differently. Try em all.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

Go to admin. Click the + to the left of the word Utilities. Click Emporium Plus Tool Kit.

Thanks!

I never knew that was under the Utilities section. How long has it been there for? (You can lie and make me feel better and say that you just recently made that part of the ToolKit so I don't feel so bad for never knowing it was there before).

what is the condition "unknown ID" for in the drop down menu? Is that where you would enter the cookie from one rating to see if that same user had posted other ratings?

One last thing: am I correct in assuming that the review function looks for the first period . and then creates a snippet from the text that came before it?

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

Those forms have been there for a couple years. Course the product reviews form was just added to the page.

The snippet is being created using the brief function which was put in the toolkit a couple months ago. It looks for period followed by a space to mark the end of a sentence.

[kitdang]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

Bill,

Yes, there are two fields that Google accept. See below.

product review average [product_review_average]
This is the average rating for one of your products based on a one to five scale, with 5 being the highest rating. The average should be based on the reviews and ratings that are displayed on your landing page and must be in between 1.0 and 5.0.
TypeFloating-point numberText/Tab delimited4.4XML <g:product_review_average>3.75</g:product_review_average>Recommended forAny items you show reviews for on your landing page

product review count [product_review_count]
This is the total number of reviews for one of your products. Please only count reviews and ratings that are displayed on your landing page.
TypeIntegerText/Tab delimited13XML <g:product_review_count>9</g:product_review_count>Recommended forAny items you show reviews for on your landing page

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

The first one would be easy. I'll get on that one.

The second would be a bit more difficult. When you go to my landing page I show the first sentence of two reviews. Clicking the link to "read all" could show 20 more. But they talk about the landing page, not clicking a link to see all. I can't just automatically hard the number 2 in there because that product may not have any or only have one. So the token would have to count available and then cap it at the number you show, e.g. 2. It would be a meaningless entry in my case and in most stores' cases. I don't think I've seen anybody show all the reviews on first display of the product page.

[wcw]

Re: Ratings and Reviews Feature Added to Emporium Plus Tool Kit

How about the ability to include the ratings associate with the products in your template data feed? Google products would love that.

This has been done. I added two tokens; %product:rating% and %product:raters% which can be used in the product section of Template Data Feed. The rating shows the numeric rating between 1-5, rounded to two decimal places. The raters shows the number of people who rated the product between 1-5. If you setup the Tool Kit to require both rating and text review with each submission then raters would also be the number of people who wrote a text review. However, their review may not be on the landing page until you click a link to show all (your choice how you setup that page). On the other hand you can easily show the graphic hearts/stars/whatever and the number used to compute it. So that should satisfy the need to show on the landing page. The update is at http://www.emporiumplus.com/1AA00220U.html If you don't have the module you can get the full version at http://www.emporiumplus.com/1AA00220.html