Review solicitation is asking customers to write a review. Almost all reviews are solicited. The share of customers who write one unprompted is small enough that a brand relying on it will have a thin product page indefinitely.
The request goes out after the customer has had the product long enough to form a view, which varies by category. That might be days for a consumable and weeks for something durable.
Timing is the main lever. Too early and the customer has nothing to say. Too late and the purchase has faded. The second lever is friction. A request that lands the customer directly in a review form converts far better than one that asks them to find the product first.
The third lever is the incentive, and it is the one with rules attached. In the United States, offering something in return for a review is permitted. Conditioning it on the review being positive is not, and neither is failing to disclose that the review was incentivized. The request must go to everyone regardless of how they feel, the reward must be paid regardless of the score, and the resulting review must carry a disclosure.
Review volume does not accumulate on its own, and the gap between a brand that asks systematically and one that does not is the difference between a product page that persuades and one that does not.
For a brand selling through third-party retail there is a further problem, which is that it often does not know who bought. A customer who purchases in a grocery store leaves no contact record, so there is nobody to ask. This is the practical reason brands in that position build member programs. The request requires a relationship, and the retail transaction does not create one.
A brand sends a review request two days after an online order arrives and sees a reasonable response rate. For the same product sold through retail it sends nothing, because it has no idea who those buyers are. The online channel builds a review base, and the retail channel, which is the larger one, contributes nothing.
Asking only the customers likely to be happy. Suppressing the request to dissatisfied buyers produces a score nobody believes, and in the United States it carries regulatory exposure. Ask everyone and respond well to the critical reviews.
Where TrueLoyal fits: Members who scan receipts are known buyers, tied to their loyalty account along with the store and the items they bought, so the brand knows who its in-store buyers are. The reward for contributing a review runs through the member program.
In the United States, yes, with conditions. The incentive cannot be conditional on the review being positive, it must be offered to all reviewers regardless of sentiment, and the review must disclose that it was incentivized.
Ask once the customer has used the product enough to have an opinion. For consumables that is usually days, and for durable goods it is weeks. The right delay is category-specific and worth testing rather than inheriting.
They have to build the relationship separately, because the retail transaction does not create one. Receipt scanning and member programs are the usual route to knowing who bought and having permission to contact them.
Yes. Selectively soliciting only satisfied customers distorts the rating, is visible to shoppers who read the spread, and carries regulatory risk in the United States.
A rating is a score a customer gives a product, usually out of five stars. A review is the written account that goes with it. Together they are the most consulted form of user-generated content and, for most categories, the single largest influence on whether a shopper buys.
Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews arrive on a product, measured in reviews per week or per month rather than the total. It measures whether a product page is currently gathering evidence or coasting on reviews written a long time ago.
A photo review is a written review with a customer photograph attached. The shopper sees the product as it arrived, in a real home, rather than as it appeared in the brand's studio photography.
User-generated content, usually shortened to UGC, is content made by customers rather than by the brand. That includes photographs, videos, written reviews, social posts, and questions and answers. The brand did not commission it, did not art-direct it, and does not automatically own it.
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