Review integrity

A review is only worth showing if a shopper can believe it. This page sets out how Evident collects, verifies and moderates reviews, and what a merchant using Evident can and cannot do to them. It describes how the product works today, not intentions.

Who can leave a review

Anyone can submit a review through a store’s review form. Each email address can review a given product once; a second attempt is refused.

Submissions are rate-limited per client, to a handful a minute, so a script cannot flood a store with reviews.

Verified purchase

The “verified purchase” mark is decided by Evident when the review is submitted, and nothing sent from the reviewer’s browser can set it. A review is verified when either:

• it was written from a review request Evident emailed after an order, through a link signed for that store, that customer and that product; or
• the reviewer’s email address matches a completed order in Evident that contains the product.

For a review written by a customer, the merchant cannot add or remove the mark afterwards.

Asking for reviews

When review requests are switched on, Evident asks every customer whose order qualifies. A request is skipped only when:

• the order has been cancelled or refunded;
• the customer’s address has bounced, reported a previous email as spam, or unsubscribed;
• the customer has already reviewed everything in the order; or
• the merchant has excluded the product from review requests.

None of these depend on what the customer thinks of the purchase. Evident itself offers no way to ask only customers expected to be happy, or to send unhappy customers somewhere other than the review form. A merchant who sends review requests through their own email platform, such as Klaviyo, controls that platform’s flows. Evident cannot see or enforce what those flows do, and Google’s policy applies to them just the same: they must not filter who is asked by how satisfied they seem.

Moderation

Every review a customer submits starts as pending and is not shown until a person approves it. Nothing is approved automatically, whatever the rating.

A merchant can approve, reject, or mark a review as spam. Rejected and spam reviews are never shown on the storefront and never sent to Google. Evident’s guidance to merchants is to approve every genuine review, critical ones included, and to answer criticism with a public reply rather than by hiding it.

Evident cannot stop a merchant rejecting a genuine review. What it does is keep the decision: a rejected review is retained, not deleted, so it stays in the store’s counts and audit trail.

What a merchant cannot change

A review a customer wrote stays as they wrote it. A merchant cannot change its:

• star rating;
• title or text;
• reviewer name;
• verified-purchase mark.

This applies everywhere a review can be edited in Evident, including a re-imported spreadsheet. A merchant can reply publicly, remove a photo (for example one showing a face or an address), or delete the review.

Reviews imported from other platforms

A merchant moving to Evident can import their existing reviews. Those reviews were collected by the previous platform, not by Evident, so:

• they are labelled as imported throughout Evident;
• they keep the dates, verified status and published status the previous platform recorded, so a review that was live there arrives live;
• they remain editable, so a migration that arrives garbled can be corrected; and
• when they are sent to Google, Evident makes no claim about how they were collected or whether they were incentivised, because it does not know.

Incentives

A merchant can reward customers for leaving a review, for example with loyalty points. Any reward depends only on the kind of review, such as text, photo or video, and never on its rating or what it says. A one-star review earns exactly what a five-star review earns.

Reviews that earned a reward are marked as incentivised in the feed Evident sends to Google, as Google’s policies require.

Reviews about other stores

Reviews syndicated from one store to another stay the original store’s. They are never included in the receiving store’s Google feed, and the receiving merchant cannot edit them.

What Evident does not do

Evident does not currently score reviews automatically for spam or fraud. Detection relies on the measures above, on merchants marking spam during moderation, and on reports.

Reporting a review

If you believe a review on a store that uses Evident is fake, was written by someone connected to the business, or breaks these rules, contact us with a link to the product page and the review. We look into every report.