Moderating reviews

Reviews arrive in Reviews → All Reviews as Pending. Nothing is visible on your storefront until it is Approved.

The three states

• Pending — submitted, not shown.
• Approved — live on the storefront, immediately. There is no publish step and no cache to wait out.
• Rejected — kept, never shown.

Rejecting is not deleting. The row stays, which means your counts stay honest, the same customer cannot quietly resubmit, and the decision is in your audit trail.

Auto-approval

Settings → Store carries the moderation rules. The one worth turning on early is auto-approval for verified purchases — a reviewer whose email matches an order containing the product they reviewed.

That typically removes most of the queue while keeping a human in front of anything anonymous, off-catalogue, or from an address you have no record of.

Rating thresholds are a separate question, and worth thinking about before you set one. Auto-approving only four and five stars will produce a product page nobody believes. See Handling negative reviews.

Replying

Every review can carry one merchant reply, shown beneath it on the storefront under your store name.

Replies are the highest-leverage moderation work you can do. A calm, specific reply under a two-star review does more for conversion than the two-star review costs you — future shoppers read it as evidence you exist and pay attention.

Verified purchase

The badge is not a setting; it is a fact Evident derives. A review is verified when the reviewer’s email matches an order in Evident that contains that product.

It fails in exactly two situations:

• The order never reached Evident — a gap in sync, or a headless store that pushed reviews without pushing orders.
• The customer bought under a different address than the one they reviewed with.

If verification is missing across the board on a custom storefront, you almost certainly pushed the catalogue and reviews but not the orders.

Photos and video

Reviews can carry photos and video where the request asked for them. Both are moderated with the review — approving a review approves its media.

Approved media is also what feeds Galleries, so a photo review does double duty.

Bulk work

The list supports filtering by state, rating, product and date, and acting on a selection. After an import this is the fastest way through: filter to the imported batch, sanity-check a sample, approve the rest.

Ordering on the storefront

Approved reviews are ordered by published date, falling back to creation date. This matters after a migration — imported reviews keep their original dates rather than all appearing to have been written on the day you moved.