Importing & exporting reviews

Import before you launch. A product page with your competitor’s five years of reviews missing converts worse than one with no reviews at all, because the empty state reads as “nobody bought this”.

Supported sources

Reviews → Import / Export. Evident understands the CSV exports from:

• Yotpo
• Stamped
• Judge.me
• Okendo
• Loox
• BigCommerce and Shopify native reviews
• Generic CSV, for anything else

Each source has its column names pre-mapped. Anything unrecognised drops into a mapping step where you point columns at fields yourself.

The process

1. Export from your current platform. Ask for everything — ratings, titles, bodies, author names, emails, product identifiers, dates, and image URLs.
2. Upload the CSV and pick the source.
3. Check the mapping. The two columns to get right are the product identifier and the date.
4. Run it. Progress, processed rows and failed rows are shown per batch.
5. Review the failures. A failed row is almost always a product identifier that does not match anything in your catalogue.

Match on the identifier your catalogue uses

The single most common import problem: the export contains the old platform’s internal product ID, and your Evident catalogue is keyed on your platform’s product ID or SKU. Nothing matches, every row fails, and the import reports itself as finished.

Check the count. An import that completes having attached zero reviews to products has not worked, whatever the status says. Sync your catalogue before importing so there is something to match against.

Dates

Map the original review date. Evident orders approved reviews by published date, falling back to creation date — so a correctly dated import keeps five years of chronology, and an undated one puts every review you have ever received on today’s date.

Images

Image URLs in the export are downloaded and re-hosted by Evident rather than hotlinked. This is deliberate: a linked image on your old provider’s CDN disappears the day you stop paying them, and takes your photo reviews with it.

Expect the image portion of a large import to take noticeably longer than the text.

After the import

Imported reviews land in the same moderation queue as new ones. Filter to the batch, spot-check a sample, and bulk approve — see Moderating reviews.

Verified-purchase status is derived from orders in Evident, so imported reviews will not be verified unless the matching order history is also in Evident. If that matters to you, backfill orders first. On a headless store, push orders with scheduleReviewRequests left off so the backfill does not email anyone.

Exporting

The same screen exports your reviews as CSV — everything, or a filtered selection. There is no export fee and no notice period.

This is worth doing periodically regardless of whether you are going anywhere. Your review corpus is the asset; make sure you hold a copy.

Loyalty data

Loyalty balances are a separate import with different rules, including one that will silently ruin your tiers if you get it wrong. See Importing loyalty members.