Migrating from another platform

A review migration has one hard requirement: your product pages must never be emptier after the move than before it. Everything else is logistics.

Before you touch anything

Export from your current provider while your account is still live. Do this first, today, before you have agreed anything with anyone. Exports get harder to obtain once you have given notice, and some providers make you wait.

Ask for reviews with: rating, title, body, author name, author email, product identifier, original date, verified status, and image URLs. Ask for loyalty with: email, current balance, lifetime points, tier, and account creation date.

Keep the raw export permanently. It is your rollback.

The order of operations

The sequence matters, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Connect the store to Evident and let the catalogue sync. Reviews match to products; there must be products to match to.
2. Backfill order history if you can. This is what makes imported reviews eligible for verified-purchase status.
3. Import reviews.
4. Check the match rate before doing anything else.
5. Install the widgets on a staging theme.
6. Import loyalty, if you have it.
7. Switch the storefront over, and only then remove the old provider’s scripts.
8. Cancel the old account — after, not before.

The failure everyone hits: identifier mismatch

Your export contains the old platform’s internal product ID. Your Evident catalogue is keyed on your ecommerce platform’s product ID or SKU. Nothing matches, every row fails, and the import reports itself finished.

Before importing everything, import fifty rows and check how many attached to products. If it is zero, remap the product column. If it is most of them, proceed.

An import that reports Completed having attached zero reviews has not worked, whatever the badge says.

The second failure: dates

Map the original review date.

Evident orders reviews by published date, falling back to creation date. Import without dates and five years of reviews all appear to have been written the day you migrated — which looks exactly like a store that bought a thousand fake reviews.

Images

Image URLs in the export are downloaded and re-hosted by Evident, not hotlinked. This matters more than it sounds: linked images on your old provider’s CDN stop resolving the day you stop paying, taking your photo reviews with them.

Expect the image portion of a large import to run considerably longer than the text. Let it finish before you cancel anything.

Loyalty: the field that ruins tiers

If you are also moving a loyalty programme, this is the one to get right.

Accounts have a current balance and lifetime points. Tiers are calculated from lifetime points. Import only the balance and every customer who ever redeemed anything arrives with an understated lifetime — and your entire membership drops to Bronze on migration day.

Map a lifetime column. If your provider does not export one, reconstruct it as balance plus total redeemed. See Importing loyalty members.

Two more:

• Set the orders start date to your migration date before creating an order earning rule, or accrual will refuse to run — or, worse, credit history you have already paid for in the imported balances.
• Referral links cannot come over. Codes on your old provider’s domain stop resolving. Evident generates fresh codes for every imported account; plan a re-share.

Verified purchase

Imported reviews are only verified if the matching orders are in Evident. If the badge matters to you, backfill orders first.

On a headless store pushing orders yourself, push the backfill with scheduleReviewRequests left off so historical orders do not email anyone. See Headless storefronts.

Cutting over the storefront

Do it on staging first.

1. Add the Evident script and containers alongside the old provider’s, on a staging theme.
2. Check a product with many reviews, one with a few, and one with none.
3. Check product cards in a collection listing — the badge there is easy to forget and is the highest-value placement.
4. Check structured data renders.
5. Publish, then remove the old provider’s scripts.

Removing the old scripts last means a bad deploy leaves you with two review sections rather than none.

Do not cancel first

Keep the old account until you have verified the import, verified the storefront, and exported one more time.

The one-way doors are: cancelling before exporting images, and letting an account lapse while a large image import is still running.

What you should expect to lose

Be realistic with whoever asked for this migration:

• Referral links already shared publicly.
• Provider-specific widget features you had customised.
• Historic email engagement data in the old provider’s reporting.
• Rich snippets, briefly. Search engines re-crawl on their own schedule; a short dip is normal.

Afterwards

• Spot-check a sample of imported reviews against the export.
• Compare tier distribution to the old system before announcing loyalty.
• Watch response rate for a fortnight — a new sending domain has no reputation yet, so authenticate it properly.
• Export from Evident once things settle, so you hold a current copy. Do this periodically regardless of whether you are going anywhere.