# Product Reviews

**Category:** Storefront  ·  **Min plan:** Free  ·  **Slug:** `product-reviews`

Allow customers to leave reviews on products, with automatic verified-purchase detection against delivered orders.

## Video tutorial

[Product Reviews](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Wb_1m-V3MHA)

## Features

* Star ratings (1-5)
* Automatic verified-purchase badge, matched against delivered orders
* Manual "mark as verified purchase" action
* Review moderation dashboard
* Anti-spam: one review per device per product, plus IP rate limiting

## How it works

After activation, every product page renders a review widget below the description. Customers leave a **name** and a **1-5 star rating** — both mandatory — plus an optional comment and an optional phone number. The phone number is never displayed publicly and is not kept in readable form.

Reviews display **verified ones first**, ten at a time behind a **Show more** button.

A moderation dashboard lives at [`/dashboard/reviews`](https://dzbuild.com/dashboard/reviews). While the add-on is on, a **Reviews** link to it appears in the dashboard sidebar, and the add-on's card in the **Management Tools** section of the Add-ons page links there too. From that page you publish, reject, delete, or manually verify reviews. You cannot reply to a review; there is no public reply feature.

## The verified-purchase badge

A review earns the **Verified purchase** badge automatically when DZBuild can tie the reviewer to an order that reached **delivered** status. A placed-but-undelivered order does not qualify.

The matching is automatic and best-effort. It can miss a genuine buyer (use **Verify manually** in the dashboard for those) and it can occasionally credit someone who is not the buyer. Treat the badge as a strong trust signal, not as proof.

## How to activate

1. Open **Dashboard → Add-ons** at [`/dashboard/addons`](https://dzbuild.com/dashboard/addons).

2. Find **Product Reviews** under *Storefront*.

3. Click **Activate** (Free plan).

4. Configure it from the collapsible **Settings** card on the [`/dashboard/reviews`](https://dzbuild.com/dashboard/reviews) page — the add-ons card's button is just a link there. Three settings:

   <!-- -->

   * **Auto-approve**: on by default.
   * **Minimum rating for auto-approve**: reviews below this rating queue for moderation (1-5, default 1, i.e. all auto-approve).
   * **Show on product page**: on by default.

The reviewer name is always required (2-200 characters); there is no setting to make it optional.

## Moderation

Open [`/dashboard/reviews`](https://dzbuild.com/dashboard/reviews) to see the queue. Four stat cards sit at the top: **Total reviews**, **Pending**, **Published**, **Verified purchases**. The Pending card is where you check the moderation backlog; there is no pending-count badge on the sidebar link.

For each review you can:

* **Publish** / **Reject** / **Delete** (Reject and Delete are icon buttons: a cross and a bin)
* **Verify manually** (the badge icon): if you recognise a genuine buyer that automatic detection missed, you can grant the badge by hand. The dashboard records that it was done manually.
* See the linked product, the rating, and whether it carries the verified-purchase badge

Filtering is by **status only**: All / Pending / Published / Rejected, plus a free-text search box that matches the reviewer name and the review text. There is no product or rating filter.

## Anti-spam

Two distinct protections:

1. **One review per browser per product** — a repeat submission on the same product from the same browser is rejected outright.
2. **Rate limiting per IP address** — a burst of reviews from the same connection is throttled.

There is no keyword or profanity filtering. The only content handling is HTML stripping and length limits: name 2-200 characters, review text up to 2000 characters. For stronger spam protection on storefronts that take cold traffic, also activate [Captcha Protection](https://dzbuild.com/docs/addons/captcha-protection.md).

## Turning it off

Deactivating hides the storefront widget and the dashboard link, but **never deletes reviews** — re-activating brings them all back exactly as they were. The sidebar link can take up to 5 minutes (or a re-login) to appear or disappear after you toggle the add-on.

## Tips

* Leave **auto-approve** on if your store is low-volume — you will catch any abusive review later. Turn it off only when running heavy paid traffic.
* Set **minimum rating for auto-approve** to 3 or 4 if you start receiving spam: 1- and 2-star reviews queue for review while normal positive reviews still flow through.
* Verified-purchase badges are powerful trust signals for cold traffic. Don't filter them out by being too strict on moderation.
* Reviews appear inline on the product page. They do **not** currently feed the product structured data, so star ratings will not show in Google results.