Product Reviews - Workarounds / Settings?

Hi

So, I'm going to trial using Squarespace customer reviews. Unfortunately, as is often the case with Squarespace, this seems very limited in functionality and has some issues that I wonder if anyone has worked around?

1. It doesn't seem possible to change the delay between purchase and a review request email being sent. This is currently 14 days, which I appreciate is probably fine for lots of businesses, but it's not good for ours. We supply sewing patterns and typically it will take longer than 14 days (possibly a month or more) before the customer has actually used the product and made something with it, so requesting a review after 14 days is either going to solicit no response because the customer hasn't used it yet, or will result in reviews that just comment on delivery speed, etc. rather than their experience of the product itself. Is there any setting buried somewhere that lets me change this? I can set up automations manually, but not an automation that requests a review using Squarespace's system as far as I can tell.

2. I've imported my Etsy reviews so we're not starting from scratch, which is nice, BUT turning on product reviews now hides the Related Products sections... urgh. This is obviously a really useful selling tool. Surely we can display the reviews AND the related products? Is this a bug? Does anyone have a workaround?

Personally I'm getting really tired of Squarespace releasing half baked features that then never get updated or improved, and the list of things you can't do with product reviews (e.g. reply to them!) seems longer than the things you CAN do. The FAQ's for this feature is literally a long list of questions followed by the answer "no, you can't".

Thanks @paul2009 I'll look into those options!

For anyone else wondering about this - I took @paul2009's advice and looked at the HelpfulCrowd and Judge.me plug-ins. After looking at the features and pricing of both I decided to opt for HelpfulCrowd. Although I wouldn't say it was painless to set up (the on-boarding process could use some work and the back end interface could be better usability wise), it wasn't THAT difficult. Feature wise it is night and day better than squarespace's review system which is extremely bare bones. I've got everything up and running using just the free tier, so that's a great bonus and means I can upgrade to a paid tier once I'm happy that this is going to meet our needs.

So far I'm really impressed with the quality of this from a user-facing point of view. I've been able to customise it to my brand colours, even on the free tier, and easily ask existing customers to leave us some initial reviews to help us get going.

Customers have successfully left reviews, including uploading photos, and these display really nicely on our site. One customer had an issue where they had accidentally uploaded an incorrect photo and asked us to remove it - it was trivial to find and fix this in the back end so that it did not display. It's also been a breeze to reply to customer reviews and thank them. And the issue I mentioned above with squarespace not letting you control the delay between purchase and review request? - that was literally a setting during the initial on-boarding process for HelpfulCrowd.

I'd definitely recommend looking at HelpfulCrowd if you are searching for a customer review solution.

I do have a couple of gripes so far, some of which I'm waiting on a reply from customer support, so will update if I hear back. The main one is that syncing my squarespace products with the app has only sync'd physical products. Half my products are digital versions, and these are not sync'd and therefore can't currently be reviewed. No idea if this is a HelpfulCrowd issue or a Squarespace issue (I know where I'd place my bet, but let's see...).

The other gripe is that although you can import existing reviews manually via csv files, it's devilishly hard to get this working, and generally hitting "upload" just does nothing when something isn't right, with no error message to give a hint what the problem is (there is feedback if a field is in the incorrect format, but there seemed no problem there). The paid tiers do include the ability to import reviews automatically from some sources, so maybe I'll look at that when I upgrade.

Anyway, nothing's perfect, and overall this seems like a really well featured plugin that adds a nice degree of professionalism to our web presence and has immediately addressed needs I had that squarespace wasn't fulfilling. I fully expect that I'll be committing to this going forward and between the free version of this plugin and squarespace's solution, there's really no comparison, HelpfulCrowd is miles ahead. 

2 hours ago, sussexseamstress0603 said:

The main [gripe so far] is that syncing my squarespace products with the app has only sync'd physical products. Half my products are digital versions, and these are not sync'd and therefore can't currently be reviewed. No idea if this is a HelpfulCrowd issue or a Squarespace issue

This is a Squarespace limitation, because Squarespace have not updated their API for these types of products. As I mentioned in my earlier reply, third party extensions are limited to reviews for physical products (not service or digital products), for this reason.