Review widget

Last updated: April 17, 2026

The review widget is the main surface where your approved reviews show up on your store. It lives on each product page, shows the reviews customers have left, and gives new customers a clear “Write a Review” call-to-action that kicks off a BetterReviews chat.

This page covers what the widget does. Two dedicated pages go deeper on what your customers see and how to customize it.

What it looks like

Screenshot of the review widget in a product page — manual capture (storefront), drop in here.

The widget sits on your product page and shows:

  • A summary panel — rating score and stars beside the 5-bar distribution, with the Write a Review button alongside (either under the bars when photo reviews exist, or in a dedicated prompt panel when they don’t)
  • A media gallery — up to 12 thumbnails from reviews that included photos. When a product has no photo reviews yet, this slot becomes a “Write a Review” prompt panel with the CTA centered.
  • A metrics row with 4 tiles — total reviews, positive %, photo count, verified count
  • A “mentioned most” row of tag pills surfacing common phrases customers use
  • The actual review list, sortable and filterable by rating

Your customers can click a photo to open a lightbox, expand a long review, filter by rating (5★ / 4★ / etc.) or photos-only, and vote on whether a review was helpful. They can also search across review text — matched terms get highlighted, and the full review body (no truncation) is shown for each matching card so the matched word is always visible.

What your customers see in the widget →

Installing the widget

BetterReviews installs as Shopify theme extension blocks. You need two blocks on the product page:

  1. Reviews Widget — the visible widget itself
  2. BetterReviews Script — the shared JS/CSS bundle that powers the lightbox, sort drawer, and inline interactions (installed as an embed block, not visible on the page)

To add them:

  1. Open your Shopify admin
  2. Go to Online Store → Themes → Customize on your active theme
  3. Navigate to a Product page
  4. In the block sidebar, click Add block on the main product section and choose Reviews Widget
  5. Drag it to where you want it (most stores put it below the product description)
  6. In Theme settings → App embeds, enable BetterReviews Script
  7. Click Save

Screenshot of the theme editor with the Reviews Widget block selected — manual capture, drop in here.

The widget shows up automatically on every product page once you save. No per-product configuration needed — it pulls reviews for whichever product is being viewed.

If you’ve grouped variants together via review groups (Pro/Enterprise), the widget on any group member’s PDP renders the group-aggregated review pool with a “Based on N reviews across M product variants” subtitle and per-row “Reviewed: other variant name” attribution where applicable.

Uninstalling

Same places — open the theme editor, remove the Reviews Widget block, and disable the BetterReviews Script embed. Reviews themselves stay in your BetterReviews admin; the widget just stops showing them on your storefront.

Where reviews come from

Every review in the widget was submitted through BetterReviews or imported from your old platform. They come in via:

  • Post-purchase emails — automatic review requests sent after the trigger event you configure in Collect. With order fulfilled (default) or order delivered, BetterReviews sends one email per physical shipment so split-warehouse orders cover every shipment. Order paid and order created fire per order.
  • The “Write a Review” button — customers visiting your product page can start a chat directly
  • Your customer review hub — if a customer has multiple orders’ worth of unreviewed products
  • Imports from Okendo / Judge.me / CSV — historical reviews brought over from other platforms

Reviews pass through your moderation queue (or auto-approve, if you’ve enabled rules) before appearing on the widget.

Customizing the look

The widget picks up some styling from your theme by default — fonts, a few accent colours — but you can override most of it. See customizing the widget for the full list of controls.

Performance and SEO

The first page of reviews, the metrics row, the customer pulse, and the media gallery all render server-side via product metafields. That means Google sees everything on first request, no JavaScript required. Pagination, sort changes, search, and filter updates happen client-side with fetches to our API. Existing cards stay on screen during a refresh — a thin top-edge progress bar appears only if the fetch takes longer than 150 ms — so customers never see a blanked-out list.

Structured data (JSON-LD AggregateRating) is emitted by the widget block on every page, on every plan, so your product pages get rich-snippet star ratings in Google results out of the box. No separate block to enable.

If you’ve enabled review groups (Pro/Enterprise), the visible widget renders group-aggregated stars and counts, but the JSON-LD AggregateRating schema stays per-product. Google’s product-reviews policy prohibits cross-product aggregation in product schema — keeping the two layers distinct is intentional.