What happens after your customer submits
Last updated: May 12, 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-moderation preset
By default (Manual), every review waits for your approval. Nothing publishes until you say so. This is deliberate — we don’t want to surprise you with a review you haven’t seen.
When you’re ready to automate, choose a preset in Collect → Auto-moderation. Each preset sets a scoring threshold: reviews that score above it publish automatically. Reviews that fall short land in your pending queue as usual.
| Preset | Who it auto-publishes |
|---|---|
| Manual (default) | Nobody — all reviews wait for your decision |
| Open | Most positive reviews; neutral reviews with solid quality |
| Relaxed | Solid positive reviews; high-quality neutral reviews |
| Balanced | Clear positive reviews; excellent neutral reviews |
| Careful | Only high-quality positive reviews |
The score is calculated from sentiment, quality score, and whether the customer is a verified buyer. Spam, abuse, and complaint reviews always require manual review regardless of preset — no preset can auto-approve those.
Switching out of Manual also re-evaluates your existing pending backlog. Reviews you already collected via BetterReviews get scored against the preset you just chose; ones above the threshold auto-publish. You’ll see a preview before any changes apply. Imported reviews from Okendo, Judge.me, or CSV are not re-scored — only reviews collected through BetterReviews chat or the public form.
Screenshot of the Collect page auto-moderation preset — manual capture, drop in here.
For technical details on how the score is calculated, see the auto-publish score formula.
The pending queue
Reviews that don’t auto-approve land in your Reviews tab in the BetterReviews admin. The list is filtered by a row of seven stage chips:
- Inbox — reviews where the AI has finished analyzing and a human is needed. Spam-flagged reviews show here too with a sub-counter (“Inbox 8 · 1 spam”).
- Emailed to CS — emailed to your CS reps for moderation via email-driven moderation. They’re working it from their inbox; you can still click in if you want to. (The customer is not contacted at this step — this stage is about your internal team handling the review.)
- Support — parent chip for the support-routing cascade (reviews the AI tagged as a support ticket). Count is the total across the cascade’s sub-stages (Awaiting CS response → On hold → Stale). Click in for the breakdown.
- Stale — support-routed reviews where the email cascade ran its full course without a CS click. Standalone chip so digest-disabled stores never miss the stalled pile.
- Published — live on the widget.
- Archived — hidden from the storefront but kept in your records. Restorable.
- Rejected — submitted but never shown. Kept for record-keeping.
The default chip is Inbox — the reviews that need a human now. 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 the Inbox chip selected — manual capture, drop in here.
From the modal you can Approve, Approve & reply publicly, Reply privately, Archive, Reject, Mark as spam, or Delete. The same actions are surfaced as buttons in the per-pending-review notification emails when email-driven moderation is on — your CS team can act without logging into the admin. See approving, rejecting, and other review actions for what each one does and when to use it.
Published reviews appear on your product-page widget. Rejected and Archived 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.