Review requests that only go to customers whose order arrived on time

Situation

Reviews mattered, and asking for them was a chore

For a store selling printed canvases, reviews on Google are a large part of how new customers decide. Asking for them was manual: someone looked through recent orders, picked the ones that seemed to have gone well, and sent an email. On busy weeks it did not happen. The alternative, a plugin that emails everyone a few days after purchase, asks the customer whose parcel is still with the courier to rate the experience. That is how a store collects one-star reviews it did not need.

What we did

Ask the right customers, at the right moment, automatically

• Eligibility rules An order is asked only if it is paid in full, was dispatched within five working days of being placed, has not been disputed, and has not been flagged by staff as “no review”. Orders that shipped late are skipped and stay skipped.
• Timing The request goes a week after dispatch, so the print has arrived and been hung. Emails leave at 11:30 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, never on a bank holiday, a few at a time rather than in a burst.
• Second chances An order that was not ready yet, because the week had not passed or the shipment had not been confirmed, is looked at again on the next run rather than written off.
• One link, tracked The email has one button. Which review site it goes to, Google or Trustpilot, is a setting in the admin, and each click is recorded against the order with bot traffic filtered out.
• Visible to staff A Review Request tab on the order shows what was decided and why, orders can be sent to by hand from the order grid, and a daily summary email tells the team what was queued, skipped and sent.

Built on our own copy of the store against real order history, with a test mode and a send-test command, and switched on in production with a cap on the first day’s sends.

Result

Reviews from the customers who had a good experience

The store now gets a steady run of reviews without anyone remembering to ask, and without asking the customer whose order went wrong. At the time of writing it stands at 4.9 on Google from 79 reviews and 4.4, rated Excellent, on Trustpilot from 40. The team sees every decision the system made, and can override it for a single order when they know something it does not.

Worth checking on your store

If you send review requests

• Find out whether your review emails check the dispatch date, or just count days from the order.
• Look at your last ten low reviews and check how many were asked for by an automatic email.