Review groups

Last updated: May 8, 2026

When you sell the same shirt in eight colors, each color has its own Shopify product — and each product gets reviews about the same garment with different colors mentioned. Review Groups let you combine those reviews into one pool that shows on every variant’s product page, so a shopper looking at the Navy color sees all 47 reviews instead of just 5.

Plan availability. Review Groups is available on the Pro and Enterprise plans.

Group management UI is rolling out in May 2026. The storefront rendering and the API are live now (see groups API reference). If you’re a Pro merchant who needs grouping today, contact support and we’ll set it up for you while the dashboard ships.

What grouping changes

When a product is in a group, three things change on its product page:

  • Aggregate count — the headline review count shows the group total, not just the product’s own count.
  • Subtitle disclosure — under the stars, the widget reads “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants” or, if you’ve set a name for the group, “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants in the Summer Tee collection.” This is required for FTC review-disclosure compliance: you can’t show a 47-review aggregate without surfacing that some of them are about siblings.
  • Per-row attribution — each review row that wasn’t submitted for this product shows a small “Reviewed: Red Shirt — Navy” label, so the shopper knows which color the review is actually about.

What does not change:

  • Submissions — when a customer reviews their navy shirt, the review still attaches to the Navy product, not to the group. Variant context stays accurate.
  • JSON-LD search-result stars — Google’s product reviews policy prohibits cross-product aggregation in product schema. The visible widget shows the group aggregate, but the rich snippets in Google reflect the product’s own count only.

Setting up a group

In your BetterReviews admin, go to Reviews → Groups and click Create group.

  • Name (internal) — the merchant-only name for the group. Shoppers never see this. Use whatever helps you find it later: “Summer Tee variants 2026”, “Beach collection”, “Bundle: Yoga starter kit”.
  • Display name (optional, customer-facing) — what the shopper sees in the disclosure subtitle. Setting “Summer Tee” makes the subtitle read “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants in the Summer Tee collection.” If you leave this blank, the subtitle falls back to “across 8 product variants.” Cap: 100 characters; HTML tags and template markers are rejected for security.
  • Products — pick up to 500. Each product can only display from one group at a time.

Conflict resolution

If you try to add a product that’s already displaying from another group, BetterReviews asks: “This product is currently showing reviews from Other Group. Switch its PDP to display from this group instead?” Click Switch display to move it; click Cancel to leave it where it was.

This question is asked once, at the moment of the conflict — not as a permanent setting on every product. If you ever want a product out of a group’s display, just remove it from the group.

How review ordering works in groups

When the group has wildly uneven volumes — say one color has 200 reviews and the other seven have 5 each — we cap any single product at 30% of the displayed slots. So if the widget shows 10 reviews from the group, no more than 3 of them will be from the same product. The other slots fill from the remaining members weighted by recency. If a product has fewer reviews than its quota, the slots reflow to the next-best member.

This is meant to keep the displayed pool diverse so one prolific SKU doesn’t drown the others.

Edits and their timing

When you add or remove a product from a group, the storefront usually catches up within 60 seconds. The admin shows a “Syncing across N products — usually under 60s” banner during the sync; you can refresh the PDP yourself to confirm once it’s done.

Removing a group

Reviews → Groups → Edit → Delete soft-deletes the group. Each member product reverts to its own per-product reviews on the storefront within 60 seconds. The group is recoverable for 30 days; after that it’s permanently dropped.

What’s not in v0

  • Shopify Collections sync — you can’t currently auto-populate a group from a Shopify collection. Defined groups are merchant-curated; collection sync is on the roadmap.
  • Group-level analytics — group-aggregated reporting is on the roadmap. The per-product reviews table still works as-is for grouped products.
  • AI-recommended groups — coming. We’ll suggest groups based on product similarity once we’ve collected enough signal.