Reviewing the Reviewers: Top Product Review Plugins for Your Webshop Compared
Rivio, Yotpo, PowerReviews and more — Find out who’s worth their salt
There are a lot, I mean a lot of review tools out there. Once you realize all of the perspectives you have to consider, diving into the review world can be intimidating.
To make your job easier, we’ve created a handy comparison of the top Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce review plugins and matched them up respectively according to: Pricing, SEO, Content Management, Review Generation Features.
Look out for *’s for info on additional features in a given service.
This comparison was created on the basis of feature information on each service’s website.
The Numbers
Review plugins run the gamut from 100% free plugins to enterprise-grade packages and pricing.
Some tools that collect reviews aren’t necessarily created as review aggregators in the first place — Disqus can be an option to collect reviews, but as they don’t include features like sending post-purchase emails you’re much less likely to quickly collect a critical mass of reviews.
If you’re an SMB looking to build long-term credibility for your store, we recommend investigating the additional features offered by paid services.
Often even a small package upgrade can increase your effectiveness by a long shot with added SEO friendliness, post-purchase email features, and neat incentives.
The Nitty Gritty
And now for the meat of each plugin.
Seeing as the number one most important thing you want your product review plugin to do is to get product reviews, let’s compare the review generation features of each tool.
Give yourself a boost and add existing reviews from the net about your product! Rivio’s FusionFilter technology allows you to capture the ratings and reviews floating around the net about your specific product and display them in your webshop.
When it comes to collecting reviews from scratch, it all boils down to the post-purchase email. First, if your goal is to pro-actively build a sizable store of reviews, you need a system where you can customize, automate, and optimize an email requesting feedback.
p.s. save yourself some time, and skip straight to the caption below :).
Next, optimizing the content will take you very far. Allowing customers the option to fill out a review by clicking immediately in the body of the email greatly increases the likelihood of someone completing your questionnaire.
At Rivio, we’ve experienced even more success with adding one in-line question into the body of the email, and immediately redirecting to a longer questionnaire once the customer has ‘opted-in’ to completing the review.
Here are 5 more tips on how to get awesome customer-generated product reviews.
*Finally, advanced tools like Power Reviews power a community-based Q&A forum that enables customers to ask and answer each other’s questions before they make a purchase.
Next up is your backend.
Both the ‘Reviews Dashboard’ and ‘Public Replies’ features are incredibly handy for setting the tone of your reviews and allowing as much of your human side as possible to shine through your webshop.
Here you can weed through the spammy reviews and also reply in kind to individual comments. Check out our previous article for tips on how to keep your cool and love your haters.
If you already have tons of existing reviews and want to migrate them over to a new platform, make sure to install a service that lets you aggregate reviews into a CSV file and import them to your new plugin.
*Rivio’s trademarked FusionFilter technology jumpstarts your review generation process to a whole new level by finding and integrating all existing reviews within the Rivio network about a given product.
In other words, you could immediately list tons of reviews about your product in an instant! This can provide webshops that are just starting out with a healthy level of credibility that otherwise takes lengthy months to build from scratch.
Last but not least, the mythical beast that is SEO.
New reviews can seriously boost your SEO efforts by providing organic, fresh content. Some review tools take the extra step of structuring your reviews in HTML as well, making sure that Google indexes your content word-by-word.
This feature will definitely strengthen your SEO if that’s your absolute main goal, but these days Google is getting better and better at crawling Javascript as well.
Google also supplies so many awesome tools in it’s toolbox to help you make your reviews stand out, including: images, star ratings, and product listings. Implementing and earning these on your own can be a time-consuming doozy (more on this in an upcoming article), but a good product review service can take the load off your shoulders.
The Takeaway
Every SMB will benefit from investing in an optimized product review tool — choosing the right one for your business ultimately depends on your goals and budget.
If you’d like people to be able to find your website through reviews, with some technical knowledge, you can utilize the inline SEO feature of Yotpo, or PowerReviews.
For those businesses where SEO, branding, engagement and affordability are key, we’d love for you to give Rivio a try. It’s our mission to create a highly affordable, feature-packed review plugin optimized for small to medium-sized webshops.
This is why, if you don’t have the time to wait months to get reviews from your customers, we’ll give you access to reviews from Rivio’s certified product review database, Rivio FusionFilter, for a flat $19/mo rate.
As always, Mike at marketing@getrivio.com is at your beck and call for more info and questions, give him a shout if you’ve installed our one-click plugin or want to find out more.
Psss…..Pass the #feels. Click a 💚 to keep the product review tips coming!
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