Product reviews are ratings and written comments that customers leave about a specific product they have bought, displayed on that product’s page and often summarised as stars in search results and Shopping ads. They differ from seller or company reviews, which judge the business as a whole, such as delivery and service.
How product reviews work
Most shops collect reviews by email or text a few days after delivery, using their ecommerce platform’s built-in tools or a dedicated review service. The customer gives a star rating and a comment, sometimes with photos, and may answer prompts such as “how did it fit?”. Reviews are moderated against a published policy, then appear on the product page with an average rating and a count.
The average rating and count can be added to the page’s Product structured data, often alongside review markup, so search engines can show stars in organic results. Google allows sites to mark up reviews of their own products, unlike reviews of the business itself. For Shopping ads and free listings, product ratings come from reviews supplied to Google through approved review partners or a review feed in Merchant Center, and Google only shows them once a product or brand has enough reviews.
Why it matters
Reviews answer the questions a product page cannot answer convincingly by itself: does it really fit as described, how does it hold up after a month, is the colour true to the photos. Shoppers trust other buyers more than the seller, so a page with a body of genuine reviews usually converts better than an identical page without them. Reviews also add fresh, original wording to a page, including the phrases customers actually use.
They are also an early warning system. A pattern of “runs small” or “arrived damaged” points to a product description to fix or a packaging problem to solve, often before returns data makes it obvious.
In the UK, the rules tightened considerably in April 2025. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, it is banned to write, commission or publish fake reviews, to commission or publish incentivised reviews without making the incentive clear, and to present reviews in a misleading way, such as suppressing negative ones or mixing reviews of different products. Businesses that publish reviews must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent fake and misleading reviews appearing. The Competition and Markets Authority can now enforce these rules directly and fine businesses up to 10% of global turnover, and it has published guidance explaining what it expects.
Common mistakes
- Asking only customers you expect to be happy, a practice known as review gating.
- Offering a discount or prize in return for a five-star review.
- Holding back negative reviews, or publishing them more slowly than positive ones.
- Copying reviews from a marketplace or supplier site onto your own pages without saying where they came from.
- Requesting reviews before the product has arrived.
- Marking up ratings in schema that visitors cannot see on the page.
- Never replying, so a fair complaint sits unanswered on a bestselling product.
How to act on it
Set up an automatic request to every buyer, timed for a few days after expected delivery, and include one or two specific prompts so reviews are useful. Publish a short moderation policy that explains what you remove (abuse, personal data, reviews unrelated to the product) and follow it consistently for positive and negative reviews alike.
Reply to critical reviews calmly and with a fix where there is one. Feed recurring comments back into product descriptions and size guides. Check that ratings appear in your Product schema and pass the Rich Results Test, and, if you run Shopping ads, find out whether your review platform can supply ratings to Google.
Reviews are part of how product pages earn rankings and sales, so I include them in ecommerce SEO work alongside page content and structured data.