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.
Velocity is counted over a rolling window and read against the product's sales rate. A product selling steadily but collecting no new reviews has a solicitation problem rather than a satisfaction problem.
Two features make it a different measure from review count. It is a flow rather than a stock, so it falls the moment a brand stops asking, regardless of how many reviews have accumulated. And it decays into recency. A product that stops gathering reviews does not merely stop growing. It gradually acquires a page of reviews that describe an older version of the product to shoppers reading today.
Shoppers check dates. A page of strong reviews all written eighteen months ago raises a question the score does not answer, which is whether anything changed since.
Recency also carries weight beyond the shopper. Retailer site rankings and the systems that summarize products for answer engines both favor pages with current content, so a product with a healthy total and no recent additions is weaker than its star rating suggests.
Velocity is the measure that surfaces this early. Review count only falls if reviews are removed, so it never warns anyone. Velocity drops the week the program stalls.
A brand runs a review push at launch and collects two hundred reviews in six weeks. The push ends. A year later the product still shows a strong average across two hundred reviews, every one of them dated to launch, and it is losing comparisons to a competitor with a lower average and reviews from last month.
Treating review generation as a launch activity. Reviews are a flow, and the brands whose product pages keep working are the ones asking continuously rather than in campaigns.
Where TrueLoyal fits: A continuous member program produces a continuous reason to ask. Brands can set up workflows that send a review request email automatically when a member makes a purchase, which keeps the flow running rather than concentrating it at launch.
There is no general number worth quoting, because it depends on sales volume and category. The useful version is relative, meaning reviews per hundred purchases, tracked over time and compared against the products you lose comparisons to.
It matters because shoppers read dates and treat old reviews as describing an older product, and because retailer rankings and answer engine summaries both favor current content.
Count is the total accumulated. Velocity is the rate of arrival now. Count never falls, so it cannot tell you the program has stopped working, and velocity can.
No, and the overlap is unfortunate. In retail, velocity usually means units sold per store per week. Review velocity refers only to the rate at which reviews arrive.
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 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.
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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