Review moderation helps you control which customer reviews are published on your storefront. You can choose how reviews are approved, review their status, and remove reviews that don’t meet your content requirements.
However, reviews that remain in the moderation queue for a long time can affect how accurately your storefront represents customer feedback.
How review moderation works
You can choose one of three Auto-approve options:
- All reviews — all incoming reviews are approved automatically and published on your storefront.
- 4–5★ only — reviews with 4 or 5 stars are approved automatically. Lower-rated reviews are sent to the moderation queue.
- Manual only — all incoming reviews are sent to the moderation queue and must be reviewed manually.
Review statuses
A review can have one of the following statuses:
- Published — the review is displayed on your storefront.
- Pending — the review is waiting for moderation and is not displayed on your storefront.
- Rejected — the review was rejected and is not displayed on your storefront.
Why you should review your Pending queue
Reviews with Pending status are not displayed on your storefront.
This is especially important when your moderation settings automatically publish only 4–5 star reviews. In this case, positive reviews can appear on your storefront immediately, while lower-rated reviews remain hidden in Pending.
For example, if your store has 20 published 4–5 star reviews and 10 lower-rated reviews waiting in Pending, customers visiting your storefront see the rating calculated from the published reviews only. As a result, the displayed rating and review count can give a more positive impression than the full set of submitted reviews.
The longer lower-rated reviews remain in Pending, the longer this difference persists.
About the “4–5 stars only” setting
Automatically approving 4–5 star reviews is not, by itself, prohibited. However, selecting this setting means that lower-rated reviews require your attention.
The FTC‘s (Federal Trade Commission) §465.7 Review Suppression rule prohibits a business from materially misrepresenting that the reviews displayed on its website represent most or all submitted reviews when reviews are being suppressed based on their ratings or negative sentiment.
In practice, this means that you should not use the moderation queue as a way to permanently keep negative reviews off your storefront simply because of their rating.
The responsibility for reviewing and publishing or rejecting eligible reviews lies with the store owner. The moderation setting itself does not make this decision for you.
This article provides general information about review moderation and does not constitute legal advice. If you have questions about how applicable laws and regulations affect your store, consult a qualified legal professional.
Review the queue regularly
A stale moderation queue reminder appears when reviews have been waiting for moderation for 14 days or more.
If you see this reminder, open the moderation queue and review the pending reviews. The reminder will be cleared once the outdated queue has been processed.
Regularly reviewing your queue helps ensure that customer feedback is not left unpublished simply because it received a lower rating.
How to moderate reviews correctly
When deciding whether to publish or reject a review, base your decision on your content moderation rules, not on the review’s star rating.
In the app, when you reject a review, you must select a reason. Available reasons include:
- Spam or fake
- Offensive or abusive language
- Not about this product
- Contains personal or confidential information
- Discriminatory content
- Duplicate of another review
These criteria should be applied consistently to positive and negative reviews.
The same requirements apply when removing a review that has already been published. Removing a review because it is negative or has a low rating can also amount to suppressing negative reviews. Reviews should therefore be removed only for a valid content-related reason, not because of their rating.
Recommended workflow
- Check your Pending queue regularly.
- Review each pending review based on its content.
- Publish reviews that meet your moderation requirements, regardless of their rating.
- Reject reviews only when they violate your applicable content rules, regardless of whether they are positive or negative.
- Don’t leave lower-rated reviews in Pending indefinitely just because they are negative.
- Remove published reviews only when they meet the same content-based criteria used for rejection.
- Process stale queues promptly when the 14-day reminder appears.
Keeping your moderation queue up to date helps your storefront provide a more accurate representation of the customer feedback you have received.
