What happens after your customer submits
Last updated: April 17, 2026
When a customer hits submit, the review is saved and the conversation is marked complete. From there, one of two things happens: the review either goes live on your widget right away, or it lands in your pending queue for you to approve or reject.
Auto-approve rules
Auto-approve is off by default. Every new review lands in your pending queue until you opt into one or more of these rules in Collect. This is deliberate — we don’t want to surprise you by publishing reviews you haven’t seen.
Auto-approve verified buyer reviews
If the customer came from a review request email (a confirmed purchase), their review publishes immediately. The safest auto-approve to enable — you know the person actually bought the product.
Auto-approve email-verified reviews
For reviews collected through the widget (customers who click “Write a Review” on a product page), we can auto-approve once they verify their email via a one-time link. Slightly less strict than verified buyer, but still tied to a real person.
Auto-approve high-quality reviews
Every review gets a quality score based on length, specificity, and detail. You can set a threshold (default 7 / 10) — reviews at or above that score publish automatically, others stay pending.
Screenshot of the Collect page auto-approve settings — manual capture, drop in here.
These rules combine. A review that passes any enabled rule auto-approves.
The pending queue
Reviews that don’t auto-approve land in your Reviews tab in the BetterReviews admin. The tab bar has four filters:
- Pending — awaiting your decision
- Approved — live on the widget
- Rejected — submitted but never shown
- All — everything
Clicking a row opens a detail modal with the star rating, title, body, reviewer name (with email redacted), attached photos, platform, and submit date.
Screenshot of the Reviews tab with pending filter — manual capture, drop in here.
From there you can Approve, Reject, or Delete. The modal shows the right buttons for the review’s current status: a pending review gets all three, an approved review offers Reject or Delete, and a rejected review offers Approve or Delete. Delete is permanent; Approve and Reject can be flipped any time.
Approved reviews appear on your product-page widget. Rejected reviews are kept but never shown. Deleted reviews are removed entirely.
Where reviews show up once approved
Approved reviews render on your product pages via the BetterReviews widget. Each product’s widget shows:
- The product’s average rating (approved reviews only) and review count
- Individual review cards with rating, title, body, photos, and reviewer name
- A filter bar (ratings 1–5, photos-only, clear)
- A “Write a Review” button that starts a new chat
Photos attached to reviews also appear in a media gallery near the top of the widget.
Merchant replies
Every review detail modal has a Your reply section: write, edit, or delete a public reply that renders beneath the review on the widget. One reply per review — saving a second reply overwrites the first. See responding to reviews for the workflow, including how replies propagate to the storefront.
If a customer asks to change their review
Customers can’t edit their review directly after submission. If they want to change something, the cleanest path today is to Delete the review from the admin and ask them to submit a new one.