Want to boost your conversion rates by collecting and displaying customer reviews?
Over the years, we’ve built a library of hundreds of customer reviews for the WordPress plugins we develop through our partner companies. We know first hand that when it comes to boosting sales and building trust, nothing beats helpful, informative customer reviews.
Originally, we added and displayed these reviews manually. However, this took time and effort and we found that the right plugin can speed up this task. Some review plugins can also help you collect reviews by sending email reminders, or offering incentives such as coupon codes.
With that said, could YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews be the right customer feedback plugin for you? Let’s find out, in this in-depth review.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews: Why Use It in WordPress?
By default, WooCommerce lets users submit a basic review and star rating. However, according to our eCommerce research statistics, 95% of shoppers look for reviews and other forms of social proof before making a purchase. With so much at stake, many smart store owners use a plugin to redesign and improve this built-in reviews area.
That said, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews is a popular WordPress product review plugin that adds a sortable, filterable review section to WooCommerce. It also displays your average star rating, a breakdown of the different review criteria, and the number of shoppers who’ve selected each star rating.
In this way, shoppers can get an overview of each product at a glance. They can then decide whether to buy this item, explore your reviews in more detail, or buy a different physical or digital product instead.
Going further, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews displays each customer’s feedback in a nice layout that’s easy to read and understand. You can also create unique criteria for each product or product category so reviewers can rate each item based on these factors.
You may have noticed that big eCommerce sites such as Amazon allow shoppers to upload their own images and videos. This is because shoppers often see user-generated content as more trustworthy and credible, compared to any professional product images or promotional videos you create.
With that in mind, you’ll be happy to learn that YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews lets customers submit their own photos and videos.
After you’ve collected some reviewers, shoppers can mark their favorite customer testimonials as helpful so they’re highlighted on your website. In contrast, visitors can report any reviews that violate your guidelines.
Want to get more reviews on your online store? This YITH plugin has a system of built-in email reminders that it will send to shoppers automatically after they make a purchase. This gives you an easy way to request customer reviews. In addition, it even has a coupons dashboard so you can reward customers who submit a review to your site, which will encourage them to leave more reviews in the future.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews: Is It the Right WooCommerce Plugin for You?
WooCommerce comes with a built-in review feature, but it’s fairly limited and isn’t very customizable. With that said, many smart store owners use a dedicated WordPress plugin to help them collect, manage, and display customer feedback in a nice layout.
That said, let’s see if YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has the features you need, to build trust, boost sales, and improve your store’s reputation.
1. Customizable Review Section
WooCommerce comes with a basic review area. However, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews replaces this area with a fully customizable customer feedback box. Here, you can change the colors used for your hover effects, star ratings, call to action buttons, and more.
In this way, you can create a review section that perfectly compliments your company or personal branding, and your WooCommerce theme.
2. Mobile-Friendly Reviews
According to our internet usage statistics, mobile internet traffic accounts for almost 55% of total web traffic. With that in mind, you’ll want to make sure your reviews look great across smartphones and tablets, as well as desktop computers.
Thankfully, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews is optimized for mobile so all your reviews will look and function correctly, no matter what device the visitor is using.
3. Unlimited Review Boxes
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews comes with a ready-made General review box that it’ll add to all your WooCommerce product pages.
However, you can create as many different review boxes as you want, with their own unique layouts and settings. For example, you might create review boxes for specific product categories and tags, or even for individual items on your online marketplace.
For each box, you can choose whether to show the average star rating, sorting options, a ‘most helpful’ tab, and other content.
Going further, you can set different criteria for each review box. For example, if you run a hotel website then you might ask customers to rate your cleanliness, staff, position, and location.
In this way, you can create review boxes that are genuinely helpful, even if you sell a wide variety of different products and services.
4. Add Unique Review Criteria
As already mentioned, YITH lets you create different review criteria for different WooCommerce products, categories, and tags. For example, if you’ve added equipment rentals to your WooCommerce store, then you might ask them to rate the booking process, the vehicle’s condition, and your pickup options.
When creating a review box, you can add new criteria with just a few clicks.
Shoppers can then leave a star rating for each criteria when writing their review.
In this way, you can collect specific feedback for the characteristics and areas that customers care about.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews will then display the average star rating for each criteria. This helps potential customers evaluate each product based on the factors they care about.
You can even add an optional image to each criteria, so visitors can get important infromation at a glance.
5. Customizable Star Rating Bars
To help visitors understand your reviews at a glance, YITH displays its various star ratings as a graph bar.
This bar is fully customizable, so you can show or hide the percentage value for each star rating.
You can also change the color scheme to perfectly match your WordPress theme or branding.
Alternatively, you can disable this bar chart completely.
6. Accept Multiple Reviews
By default, shoppers can only review the same product once. However, this may be a problem if you sell recurring subscriptions, or products and services that customers may buy multiple times.
In that case, you can allow customers to review the same item as many times as they want.
7. Accept Customer Images and Videos
When you sell products online, shoppers can’t physically see or touch the items in question. That said, online customers often rely on product galleries and videos to make more informed purchasing decisions.
With YITH, shoppers can add images and videos to their reviews.
Potential customers can then scroll through this additional content, and make a more informed purchasing decision. Since this content is provided by impartial customers, shoppers are more likely to trust these photos and videos, compared to the content you provide.
If you do enable this feature, then you can limit how many photos and videos customers can upload. You can also specify the file formats they can use, and the maximum file upload size.
8. Supports Pagination
Displaying lots of reviews on the same product page can hurt your site’s loading times. Thankfully, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews supports pagination, so you can control how many reviews appear on each page.
When you reach this limit, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews will create a new page automatically. This can help boost your website’s performance and the shopper experience.
9. Ready-Made Review Filters
When looking through reviews, many shoppers use filters to see the positive or negative reviews, especially if a product has lots of feedback.
To help customers do this, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has a modal that allows visitors to see all the reviews that have a specific star rating.
If you prefer, then you can disable this modal in the YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews plugin’s settings.
Going further, you can allow visitors to filter your reviews based on most recent, least recent, best rated, and worst rated.
10. Highlight Helpful Reviews
Some reviews are more helpful than others. For example, a review may be particularly detailed, include lots of photos and videos, or answer some frequently asked questions. In that case, you’ll want to help visitors find these excellent reviews.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has a ‘Helpful’ button so visitors can vote on their favorite reviews.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews will then add this content to the product’s ‘Most Helpful Reviews’ tab, so visitors can find it with ease.
In the plugin’s settings, you can type in how many votes a review needs to get, before YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews adds it to the ‘Helpful’ tab.
Beyond marking reviews as helpful, visitors can report inappropriate reviews and reply to each other’s testimonials. This gives them a chance to ask questions to verified buyers, and get impartial opinions on your products and services.
11. Auto Approve or Manual Review
With YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews, you can either manually approve each new review or publish them automatically.
If you do auto-approve this content, then YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has a range of settings that limit who can submit customer feedback. For example, you can block anonymous reviewers or accept testimonials from verified buyers only. This can help you avoid spammy comments, even when auto-approving reviews.
12. Limit Customer Reviews
Accepting reviews is a great way to make your site seem more trustworthy and genuine. However, there is a risk that bots or malicious third-parties may submit spam or fake reviews, in an attempt to manipulate a product’s rating or even hurt your reputation.
If you’re worried about fake reviews, then you can block anonymous reviews, so only registered users can post their feedback.
Alternatively, you can go one step further and only accept reviews from verified buyers.
If you do limit reviews in this way, then you can display a ‘Verified buyer’ label next to the user name. Immediately, this makes the customer testimonial seem more trustworthy, which will improve your reputation.
13. Avoid Review Spam
Form spam is a big problem for all WordPress website owners. If you accidentally publish spammy reviews then it may hurt your store’s credibility and cause you to lose sales.
With that said, you’ll be happy to learn that YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews supports Google reCAPTCHA, so you can protect your submission forms against bots and spammers.
14. Control the Reviewer’s Information
Some customers may not want to display their full name or even their username next to a review. To help protect the shopper’s privacy, you can decide whether to show their full name, username, or a limited number of letters.
You can also show or hide their country.
By limiting the personal information you display publicly, you may get some additional reviews, especially from privacy-conscious shoppers.
15. Manage Your Reviews
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews provides a central dashboard where you can see and manage all your customer testimonials. Here, you can easily filter this content based on whether it’s Pending, Reported, or Approved.
You can also filter reviews based on star rating, search by username, and more.
To change a review’s state, simply check its box and then choose whether to trash, approve, or unapprove that content. You can also make bulk edits, which will save you a ton of time if you need to update multiple reviews at once.
16. Add Reviews Manually
Already have reviews on third-party websites, such as Tripadvisor or Trustpilot? Then YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews comes with an editor so you can easily copy this content to your online store.
You can also assign each review to a customer in your site’s database, and mark it as verified or featured content. In this way, you can show your best reviews to more people, even when that content was originally published on a third-party website.
It’s also perfect when you’ve just installed YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews, and want to quickly add some customer feedback to your WordPress blog or website.
17. Automated Email Reminders
Want to remind customers to review your products? YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews comes with a built-in reminder email that it will send to shoppers automatically, 1 day after their order is marked as ‘complete.’
This email works out of the box, but it’s also fully customizable so you can change the messaging and design.
You can also fine-tune the settings, so YITH only sends reminders for specific conditions. For example, it can send an automated email when a customer makes their first purchase. In this way, you can avoid overwhelming frequent buyers by messaging them every single time they place an order on your website.
You can also change how long YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews waits before sending this email.
Do you use Google Analytics? Then you can enable link tracking so you can monitor every message that YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews sends.
If you do use reminder emails, then you can add a GDPR checkbox to the WooCommerce checkout page.
In this way, users can opt-in or out of receiving messages, which will help you comply with important privacy laws including GDPR.
After setting up these emails, you can see all the scheduled messages in the YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews dashboard.
Here, you can cancel any upcoming emails or even manually add messages to the schedule.
18. Automated Coupon Codes
To encourage customer feedback, many online stores offer incentives for leaving a review. In particular, rewarding customers with an exclusive coupon code is a great way to get more customer testimonials.
To help you share these coupons, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews comes with built-in email templates. By default, it will send these emails to your customers automatically, every time they review a product or service.
Alternatively, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews can send an email and coupon code, once a customer has left a certain number of reviews. For example, you might reward them with a coupon once they’ve posted 10 reviews.
All these email templates are fully customizable so you can add your own messaging, branding, dynamic content, and more.
Even better, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has an area where you can create as many coupon codes as you want.
You can also set the triggering event, which can be a single review or multiple reviews. If you choose ‘single,’ then you can limit the coupon code to certain product categories or even individual products.
If you choose ‘multiple review,’ then you can specify how many reviews a user must post before YITH sends them a coupon.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews can even send an email highlighting how many more reviews the shopper needs to post, to get the next coupon code.
No matter what kind of coupon you create, you can make it a percentage discount, fixed cart discount, or fixed product discount.
You can then choose whether to include free shipping, set the coupon to expire after a certain number of days, specify a minimum and maximum spend, and more.
19. Multiple Review Blocks
Sometimes, you may want to display reviews in other areas besides your WooCommerce product pages. For example, you might add all your five star reviews to a landing page or sales page.
In that case, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews comes with several review blocks that you can add to any page or post.
With these blocks, you can show all the reviews from a particular product category, or the feedback for a specific product.
Alternatively, you can display all the reviews from across your entire site. This may be a good option if you’re creating a customer reviews page, About Us page, or similar content.
20. Built-In Statistics Panel
Reviews can help you identify your most popular products, or an item you may want to remove from your inventory.
To help you spot these trends, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has a user-friendly dashboard that shows your average score, best rated products, worst rated products, latest reviews, plus the products that have the highest and lowest number of reviews.
You can also use these insights to inform your marketing campaigns. For example, you might create an email blast promoting the product that has the fewest reviews.
21. Community and Professional Support
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews is designed with ease of use in mind, so you should have no problems accepting customer reviews and displaying them on your online store. However, if you want to use the plugin’s more advanced features or integrations, then you may need some additional help.
To start, there’s online documentation that you can access 24/7. Here, you’ll find detailed guides covering all the plugin’s major features, plus advice on how to convert WooCommerce visitors into customers.
Do you prefer one-on-one support? Then you can submit a ticket and a member of the YITH team will get back to you as soon as possible.
When creating a support ticket, it’s always a good idea to include as much detail as possible, so the experts can understand your problem fully and post a helpful response. For more on this topic, check out our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews: Pricing and Plans
Unlike some other eCommerce plugins, YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews has a single plan. For $89.99 per year, you’ll get access to all the plugin’s features.
This plan also includes 1 year of updates and support, plus a 30 day money back guarantee.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews: Is It the Right WooCommerce Plugin for You?
To sum up this review, we’re confident that YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews is a great WooCommerce plugin. It can upgrade the standard WooCommerce feedback section with multimedia reviews that customers can filter and sort based on the criteria that matters to them.
Shoppers can also mark reviews as helpful, report inappropriate content, and reply to other reviewers. In this way, customers can help each other make informed purchasing decisions, and even answer frequently-asked questions.
YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews also has a system of email notifications, coupons, and reminders that encourage shoppers to review your products or services. At the same time, you can add reviews to your site manually, including any feedback that customers have left on third-party sites such as Tripadvisor and Trustpilot.
In this way, you’ll have no problems building a library of positive, helpful reviews on your WooCommerce website.
We hoped this review of YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews helped you decide whether it’s the right WooCommerce plugin for you. You may also want to learn how to track website visitors, or see our expert pick of the best live chat software for small businesses.
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