Customer reviews

By default, Shopware already offers the possibility to rate products and thus provide extended product information from which all customers benefit.

Settings

In Configuration > Basic settings > Frontend > Customer reviews you have the possibility to make settings for the rating system.

  • Customer reviews must be approved (1): Here you can define if the ratings have to be enabled by you first.
  • Deactivate product evaluations (2): Here you can deactivate the ratings in the frontend.
  • Send automatic reminder for article rating (3): With this setting you can control whether the customer should be sent an email with the request to rate the purchased item.
  • Days until the reminder email is sent (4): This option allows you to define the number of days after which Shopware should remind the customer about the article evaluation. The requirement is that the order was placed X days ago and has the order status "Completely completed" or "Completely delivered", otherwise the email will not be sent.

The reminder e-mail is only sent if the cronjob Article evaluation by e-mail has been configured and activated accordingly in the cronjob settings. The sARTICLECOMMENT e-mail template is used here. The cronjob should be executed only once a day, otherwise the already sent mails would be sent again! The cronjob does not check which emails have already been sent and which have not!

  • Show only subshop specific ratings (5): Here you can choose whether you want to display all ratings for an article in every store or whether you only want to display the ratings from the corresponding store. This works for subshops as well as for language stores. For example, you can only allow ratings in the language that matches the store. Also the separation of different stores, which have no connection to the outside, is simplified. In the frontend, both the texts in the ratings tab and the calculation of stars will then be calculated per store.

In addition, under Settings > Basic Settings > Other Settings > Privacy you have the option to set whether the double opt-in function should be used for article ratings (1). If this is set to Yes, the customer must first confirm a link, which is sent by e-mail to the specified e-mail address.

Create a review

On the product detail page you will find a tab "Evaluations" (1). Here the customer can comfortably submit his evaluation for the products. Here are name, e-mail address and the summary mandatory fields.

If the customer has now filled in all data correctly, he can send the evaluation by clicking the Save button. Afterwards a success message appears here as well as the hint that the link in the e-mail must be confirmed.

Rating module

If we assume that the customer has now confirmed the link of his submitted product rating, the rating then appears in the rating module in the backend. You can find the rating module under Items > Customer reviews.

  • Enable marked ratings(1): Here you can select several ratings and then enable them.
  • Delete marked ratings (2): With this button you can delete the previously marked ratings.
  • Status (3): Here you can see whether the rating has been released or not.
  • Further options (4): Here you can release or delete individual ratings or open the detailed view and reply to the rating.
  • More Information (5): Here the details of the selected article rating are displayed again in the overview.

Display in category Listing

If there are ratings for the article, you can see this by the stars (1). The stars are displayed here depending on the average rating.

Export of the ratings

You have the option of exporting the associated number of ratings and the average rating as variables for each individual article. These two values are available to you during the export for e.g. price search engines:

{$sArticle.sVoteCount} = Product rating Quantity

{$sArticle.sVoteAverage} = product rating average

Automatic reminder

Product reviews are critical to the success of products in the store as other customers trust the reviews and buy well rated products rather than less well rated ones. With Shopware, you can remind your customers to rate your products, so you can get the most out of your sales potential.

Default settings

In order for the reminder email to be sent, you must first activate this function. Install the following extention if you haven't already done so:

Cron (see article: Cronjobs)
CronRating

Then you can make all necessary settings under "Configuration > Basic settings > Frontend > Customer reviews ratings":

Set the interval of the rating cronjob to at least 86400 seconds or 24 hours, otherwise your customers will receive the rating request several times!

With Automatically remind customer to submit reviews (1) you activate the reminder. Under Days to wait before sending reminder: (2) you can specify how many days after the order the e-mail will be sent. There are 2 things to consider:

  • The setting always starts at the day of the order completion.
  • The reminder will only be sent if the order has the status Completely delivered or Completed on that day.

We recommend not to set the value Days to wait before sending reminder under 7, due to the usual payment and shipping times, the evaluation request should not arrive too early at the customer.

Explanation of the logic

If today is the 26.03. and the field "Days to wait before sending reminder" in the basic settings contains the value 20, all orders that were placed on 06.03 are checked during the execution of the cron job. All orders from 06.03 that have the status Completed or Completely Delivere" will receive the evaluation e-mail. For testing purposes you can set the value of the days to 0, complete an order, adjust its status accordingly and execute the cronjob. After the cronjob has been started, all customers who ordered on the same day and have the corresponding status will receive an e-mail.

The cronjob will send all the item rating request emails due at that time. It is not checked here whether these have already been sent, so we recommend not to execute the cronjob several times in succession, otherwise the e-mail may be sent several times..

E-Mail Template

In Configuration > E-Mail Templates you can customize the e-mail template "System emails > sARTICLECOMMENT" according to your wishes. You can find more information about the e-mail templates in the e-mail templates article.

Available variables in the email

In order to get an overview of the available variables, you can open the bar on the right side of the screen while the e-mail template is open. All available variables will then be displayed. Note that the list is only complete when the e-mail template has been sent at least once.

Tips & Tricks

Rating using a rating portal

You can also combine this email with e.g. an external rating portal, some portals need the data, e.g. email address, in a base64 encoding. This can also be realized with Shopware. Instead of the regular variables {$sUser.email} or {$sOrder.ordernumber} these can also be specified as {$sUser.email|base64_encode} or {$sOrder.ordernumber|base64_encode}.

Example link for clarification:

https://www.evaluation-portal.de/evaluation/evaluation_XXXXXXXXXXXXX.html&buyerEmail={$sUser.email|base64_encode}&shopOrderID={$sOrder.ordernumber|base64_encode}

Problems sending the mail

If the function does not send e-mails, please check the following points:

  • Is the order status of the order "Completelydelivered" or "Completed"?
  • Is the extention "Cron" activated?
  • Is the extention "CronRating" activated?
  • Is the cronjob active?
  • Is the cronjob configured correctly on the server?
  • Are the settings in the basic settings correct?

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