Updated January 15, 2021
Years later and Judge.me is still my favorite reviews app because of: loads of features, high performance, great support, low cost.
Reviews are Key
They improve your conversion rate, SEO, trust factor, and give you quality feedback.
Let’s visualize a few scenarios:
- You land on a website with no reviews vs a website teeming with reviews. Which one feels more inviting?
- Search any product in Amazon. Usually the products with lots of reviews dominate the search results.
- Someone lands on your home page and sees actual customer reviews. Instant social proof.
- You search Google for “your product keywords”. Some results show reviews (rich snippets), and some don’t. Which would you click on?
In the “everyone wants an online business” era, reviews help your business stand out and show you’re legit, trustworthy, and have an active community.
Displaying reviews can increase conversions by 270%source: Spiegel Research Center: How Online Reviews Influence Sales (2017)
What’s the Best Reviews App for Shopify?
In my Shopify adventures, I’m pretty sure I’ve used every product reviews app, and there’s a clear winner – Judge.me.
It’s loaded with features and priced real nice (free – $15/mo).
As of February 2020 Judge.me has a 4.9 star rating with over 1700 reviews.
Features
Judge.me is a full feature reviews app with easy automation included.
Key features:
- Automated email review requests: create the template and set when to send after purchase
- A/B test review requests to see which version converts better and more reviews
- Transfer reviews from other sources or review apps
- In-email review form: Customer can leave a quick review right from the email
- Questions/Answers: People can ask public questions you can answer, like an interactive FAQ
- Coupons: You can incentivize reviews by offering a discount code for leaving reviews
- Clean styling, responsive design, and multiple layout options
- Rich snippets to show reviews in Google search results. Judge.me handles this for products and your “All Reviews” page (not possible with all review apps)
- Show reviews in Google Shopping
- Share reviews to social media (either manually or automatically based on conditions)
- You can also integrate 5 star reviews into your remarketing ads. Nice!
Preview of the Dashboard
It’s overwhelming the first time you log in, but just start going through each tab and configuring the settings for your brand. Set this up once and you’re system is on autopilot.
Curating Reviews
You can set to automatically publish reviews, or send you an email notification on new reviews to curate them.
From the email notification, you can click through to the review and have these options:
- Publish or hide
- Respond/comment publicly or privately
- Add to featured reviews carousel
- Share on Facebook
Rich Snippets / Schema setup
You’ll get these nice looking rich snippets for all your products:
You even get a little bonus over Amazon by showing your price.
Do a Google search for any product and you’ll see results with and without rich snippets. The ones with snippets look nice right?
Judge.me automatically configures your schema code to validate with Google Structured Data to make these rich snippets appear in search results.
Performance Optimized – Speed Boostr Approved
The Judge.me team takes pride in performance and claims the title to fastest reviews app for Shopify.
Check out these speed tactics:
- Review widgets load with Shopify metafields instead of Javascript. This means faster loading time.
- Optimized scripts: Judge.me will asynchronously load two scripts that are minified, compressed, and cached.
- Imgix dedicated image hosting: Imgix is a real-time image processing service and content delivery network (CDN) to optimize for page load time and image quality
- Lazy loading for review pictures: Review images load when your visitor scrolls down to them, instead of all on initial page load.
- File loading via KeyCDN: KeyCDN is a high-performance content delivery network (CDN) with data centers all across the world to load Judge.me files with maximum speed worldwide.
- First Impression CSS: Loads a quick piece of CSS early during page load to pre-style your reviews while waiting for the complete design to load a fraction of a second later.
Installation Quick Tips
After you install the app you can have Judge.me run the basic setup for you. Then go through each tab and configure for your brand.
Give them a shout if you run into any problems, their support is top notch.
I like to add a reviews carousel on home page. I like a lean page, but here the social proof on first impression is worth the compromise.
Set up coupon rewards. For example, when someone leaves a review, have it send them a discount code “for your next purchase or to share with friends”. You can either do a static discount code or send unique codes with the Bulk Discounts app.
Create an All Reviews page and link to it from your footer. I’ve found through heat maps that people like to check this page.
Integrations
Judge.me has a ton of integrations with other apps. Here are a few:
- Share reviews and make ads on Facebook (can make automatic too)
- Storefront search apps
- Product recommendation and upsell apps
- Enable automated tasks integration like Zapier and Slack
- Marketing apps like Klaviyo (email), Shoelace (retargeting), Smile (rewards)
- Push notifications and SMS marketing
- Import reviews from other platforms, like Amazon or Ali Express
- Works with translation apps
See their support portal for details and integration lists.
Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are OK. Treat them as an opportunity to improve your product, expectations, or messaging.
If it’s a legit complaint, you have honest feedback on how to do better.
Sure you’ll get some unmerited bad reviews too by someone that’s having a bad day, but that’s life online. That’s a challenge to turn it around and show you’re a brand that cares.
People actually trust a site more if they see negative reviews so don’t stress.
I got a bad review recently on a product because it was “too small”.
That did two things: 1) indicated the product description/images need to be improved, and 2) allowed the opportunity to comment on the review and let them know the product is intentionally compact, but they can exchange for a similar larger product free of charge.
Now the next customer has a more informed buying decision, and they see that they’re safe to purchase a product, knowing that returns/exchanges are easy.
Level Up Your Store with Automated Reviews
You can get Judge.me here on the Shopify App Store.
Enjoy your boosted conversion rate :)
P.S. if you’d like some other ideas on boosting your conversions, check out our full Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization Guide.