Miva Ratings & Reviews App

[SidFeyDesigns]

Bruce - PhosphorMedia I just sent you an email from your website in regards to the easy reviews module. Look forward to the response.

[jpatrickm]

Joe, can you share your thoughts on TurnTo?

TurnTo has worked very well. I don't have any data on how competitive their pricing is, but they worked with us to integrate all the customizations we wanted. It's not a simple module install, so the integration involves adding in custom CSS & JS resources to specific pages in Miva. It's been up and running for a few years now so the integration process might be different now. The reason we chose them was to accommodate several custom fields in the reviews for really drilling down to a series of product attributes relevant to the customer. We also liked their question and answers which can be associated with individual products to help staff address customer questions, similar to the way Amazon has questions that both staff & other customers can answer, as well as the regular review submissions. Things like "why did you just buy this?" at checkout, plus emails where customers can submit a review directly from the email. They provide many avenues to grab customer feedback along the purchase funnel.

Overall, it's worked great after stumbling around for a few years trying to find the right solution between really pricey review services and building it ourselves.

If you want to see it in action, you can checkout https://www.wetsuitwearhouse.com.

[SidFeyDesigns]

Thanks for that info Bruce - PhosphorMedia and jpatrickm .

We will be weighing cheaper ongoing cost & manual feed creation/submission & updating

VS.

more expensive ongoing cost & ease of syndication by using a google trusted review service like eKomi.

[jpatrickm]

jpatrickm How are you generating your xml feed?

Considering using Bruce - PhosphorMedia 's Easy Review Module but we want an easy way to generate the xml feed. Or at least easy once the feed is set up.

Thanks,

Nick

Since this original post, our client switched over to using TurnTo service for their reviews platform. But to answer your question, when we were using our own internal reviews we were building the XML file with a custom PHP script set on a scheduled CRON job. But, as Bruce mentioned, to keep everything inside Miva you could replicate that logic in a custom Miva feed template rather than using PHP.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

jpatrickm How are you generating your xml feed?

Considering using Bruce - PhosphorMedia 's Easy Review Module but we want an easy way to generate the xml feed. Or at least easy once the feed is set up.

Thanks,

Nick

You could use a Miva Feed template to create an XML document from Easy Review's "Review Export" file. The feed could be set to upload automatically, but you'd have to click the "Export Reviews" button in Easy Review to update the file.

[SidFeyDesigns]

The only other option I am seeing is using eKomi which is a trusted Google review aggregator

[SidFeyDesigns]

jpatrickm How are you generating your xml feed?

Considering using Bruce - PhosphorMedia 's Easy Review Module but we want an easy way to generate the xml feed. Or at least easy once the feed is set up.

Thanks,

Nick

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

AFAIK, Shopper Approved doesn't allow for 'Ad Hoc' reviews. The reviews are requested either after checkout, or as a followup email.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I don't think you need any 'module' for Shopper Approved as its display is pulled in via JS. The module, if i recall correctly, is just a 'sign up' vehicle.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Interesting. The site I need this for doesn't use product pages. How would someone write a review for the actual category?

By assigning the Easy Review Group custom field to the name of a 'pseudo' product. You can also do this dynamically. For example, on RR, we have a inactive product for each category. In the example page, its 68lb_satin_pro_review. So, on the category page which has a code of "68lb_satin_pro" we use the category page + _review to create the g.product_code variable, then call Easy Review. Easy Review is setup to look first for g.Product_code. Would be happy to help you set it up.

[William Davis]

How about store reviews?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Easy Review has a built in "product grouping" that can be used for this. Its based on a custom field that you just assign the "review product" code to. Here's a prime example. Each of the 'Items' in this 'Category' are separate product listing who's 'review grouping' is set to a pseudo product.

https://www.redrivercatalog.com/brow...pro-satin.html

[jpatrickm]

We are using self-hosted reviews in our Adwords shopping campaign and have been for over a year.

[JFancett]

In my experience, Google will use customer hosted product reviews (given proper Schema.org markup) in SERPs but they do not flow to the Google Shopping and Adwords platforms. I also do not believe there is a way to self-host store reviews.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Google takes the customer review that we upload to them and matches it with a product GTIN...[snip]....

I see. So, this would be for the 'followup' email requesting a review (since its being tied to a specific purchased product). Since Easy Review (and I think Sebenza too) has a "Group" function, you should be able to make some template changes to load the GTIN (variant code) as the 'product-code' while saving the product-code as the reviews product-code-group.

This may also require some htaccess rules as well, but seems doable.