WooCommerce Reviews are Powerful
Every week I share with you what's been going on in WooCommerce in the last week. This past week the latest version (4.9) was released. They made some things faster (including the API), and they worked on the dashboard. All good things. But my favorite is whenever they work on WooCommerce reviews.
You can read the release notes here where they mention the update to how they fixed the product counts for reviews,
“Product review count: An issue related to incorrect review count has also been fixed. If you were impacted by this bug, then add/remove a product review manually to correct the review count. We are also working on another fix to update the product review count retro-actively for convenience. Again, thanks to all for reporting this issue promptly and in detail. #28624“
Now, you know I love talking with folks about reviews. So much that I convinced my team at Nexcess (though you'll see the reference to our parent company, Liquid Web) to build me a better review plugin for WooCommerce.
What Makes Better WooCommerce Reviews Better?
If you read either of those posts, you'll know that I don't think most websites do reviews as well as they should.
After all, if someone complains, I have no idea if the real issue is the product, or the product reviewer. That's a problem.
Also, I don't know how the reviewer is using the product – and that context is critical. If I don't have context for your review, how can I determine that your word should count for me. I can't.
So we built a WooCommerce extension that would help store visitors evaluate the reviewer and understand the context. And that's what makes the plugin better than the other ones out there. We took our inspiration from UnderArmour.
Here you see that they not only collect product reviews on a 1-5 scale. They also ask questions about fit, comfort and performance. That helps a lot when I want to buy something that I can't touch. If I know it runs small, I can make my own adjustments.
Secondly, it allows reviewers to tell us more about themselves. This is critical because I want to find reviews that are more like me.
Notice that I can look for casual athletes who are male and about my height. I don't want to see what Olympic track stars say, because it won't necessarily apply.
The best news of all is that our WooCommerce reviews plugin is available to anyone who wants it. You don't have to host with Nexcess to get it. You just have to download it from WordPress.org.
If you want it, you can have our Better WooCommerce Reviews plugin for free.