Moderating reviews

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

The 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.

Spam works like Rejected, and marks the review as junk rather than as a genuine review you chose not to show. Neither state ever reaches your storefront or your Google feed.

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.

No auto-approval

Evident does not approve anything automatically. Every review waits for a person, whatever its rating and whether or not the purchase is verified.

That is deliberate. Approving by star rating, such as publishing fours and fives and holding the rest, is the practice Google’s product ratings policy calls out, and it produces a product page nobody believes. Approve every genuine review, including the critical ones, and answer those with a reply. See Handling negative reviews and Review integrity.

You cannot rewrite a customer’s review

A review a customer wrote stays as they wrote it. You can approve it, reject it, mark it as spam, reply to it, remove a photo or delete it, but you cannot change its rating, its text, the reviewer’s name or whether it is a verified purchase. That holds in the review editor and when you re-import an edited CSV export: changes to those columns on a customer’s review are left out, and the import tells you which rows they were. A status change in the same row still applies.

Reviews you imported from another platform stay editable, so you can clean up a migration that came through mangled.

Replying

Every review can carry one merchant reply, shown beneath it on the storefront under your store name. A reply is public only: Evident does not email the reviewer when you post or edit one.

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.