Quick start

This is the shortest path to a working review programme. Every step has a fuller page behind it if you need one.

1. Create your account and connect a store

Sign up at app.evidentugc.com. Onboarding asks you to connect a store straight away — pick BigCommerce or Shopify and complete the OAuth flow, or skip it if you are on a custom storefront and follow Headless storefronts instead.

Connecting kicks off a catalogue sync and an order backfill in the background, and registers the webhooks that keep both current. See Connecting your store for what each platform needs and the scope traps to avoid.

2. Check the sync landed

Open Settings → Integrations. You want products counted and a recent sync timestamp. Products appearing but orders staying at zero usually means the connection was made with a narrower scope than Evident asked for.

3. Set up your review request emails

Go to Emails → Templates and build a sequence. A typical one is two steps: a first request some days after the order ships, and one reminder five to seven days later that is skipped if the customer has already reviewed.

Pick a template style while you are there. Minimal is close to plain text and tends to land in Gmail’s Primary tab; Standard is the branded HTML layout. Details in Review request emails.

If you already run Klaviyo, Omnisend or Mailchimp, connect it instead and Evident will fire an event into your platform rather than sending anything itself. See Integrations.

4. Authenticate your sending domain

Go to Emails → Sending Domain, add a subdomain such as mail.yourstore.com, and publish the DNS records it gives you. Do this before you send at volume — an unauthenticated domain is the single biggest cause of review requests landing in spam. See Sending domain & deliverability.

5. Install the widgets

Go to Storefront → Install & Theme for the script tag, then add containers where you want content to appear. On a product page template:

<div data-evident-widget="star-badge" data-product-id="{{ product.id }}"></div>

<div data-evident-widget="review-list" data-product-id="{{ product.id }}"></div>

The script is async and mounts every container it finds, including ones your framework renders later. Full list of widgets and their attributes in Installing the widgets.

6. Approve your first reviews

Incoming reviews land in Reviews → All Reviews as Pending. Approve one and it appears on the storefront immediately — there is no publish step and no cache to wait out.

Once you trust the flow, turn on auto-approval for verified purchases so only the exceptions need your attention. Moderating reviews covers the rules and what they do to your workload.

What to do next

• Nothing is arriving? Orders are the trigger. Confirm orders are syncing and that your qualifying status matches what your platform actually sets.
• Want more reviews out of the same order volume? Increasing review volume.
• Coming from another platform? Import first, so your product pages are never empty: Importing & exporting reviews.