Review incentives

Evident can issue a coupon automatically when a review is submitted. It is off by default.

Configuring it

Settings → Store → Review incentives. You set:

Field	Notes
Discount type	PERCENTAGE or FIXED.
Text / photo / video amounts	Three separate values, so you can pay more for the content that is worth more. Leave one blank to offer nothing for that kind.
Coupon prefix	Prepended to generated codes, so they are recognisable in your platform’s reporting.
Expiry	Days from issue. Leave blank for no expiry.
Thank-you subject and body	The email that delivers the code.

Issued coupons are listed with the review that earned them, so you can see what a review actually cost.

The tiering is the point

A photo review is worth several text reviews to a shopper, and a video review more again. If you are going to pay for reviews at all, pay in proportion — a flat rate across all three buys you a wall of one-line text reviews, which is the least persuasive thing you can put on a product page.

A shape that works: nothing or very little for text, a meaningful discount for a photo, more for video.

Requirements

• Coupons are issued through your ecommerce platform, so the connection needs the scope to create them. On BigCommerce that is store_v2_marketing; on Shopify, write_discounts. Without it, everything looks configured and the last step fails.
• The incentive fires on submission, not approval. A customer who writes a review gets their code whether or not you publish it. That is deliberate — withholding the reward pending approval creates an obvious incentive to write only what you want to hear.

Disclosure

If you incentivise reviews, say so. Most jurisdictions require it, several review-schema consumers require it, and shoppers work it out anyway when every review mentions a discount code.

The honest version costs you nothing: a line on your reviews section saying reviewers are offered a discount, and no filtering of what they then write.

Whether to do it at all

Incentives raise volume. They do not raise trust, and past a point they lower it.

They are worth it when you have too few reviews to be credible — under ten per product, a new catalogue, a new store. They are worth much less once you have a healthy corpus, at which point the same budget spent on increasing response rate through better timing and better email will get you more, cheaper, and without the disclosure problem.

If you are going to use them, use them to bootstrap and then turn them off.

Loyalty points instead

If you run loyalty, awarding points for a review is usually a better instrument than a coupon: it costs nothing until redeemed, it pulls the customer back rather than discounting the next order unconditionally, and it does not need a coupon scope. Set it up as an earning rule instead — see Earning rules.