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Shopify (Cartridge)

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If you use Shopify or Shopify Plus as your eCommerce platform, use the following guide to implement PowerReviews for your storefront.

 

The PowerReviews Shopify cartridge (also referred to as the Shopify app or PowerReviews app) places code on the files within your Shopify store. We recommend working with your developer resources to add, change, or remove any code as needed. If you experience any issues during the integration process, contact your Implementation Team or PowerReviews Technical Support. 

This article contains the following sections:

 

Product Data

For the PowerReviews app to work effectively, you need to ensure that the appropriate and correct product information is provided. As you add products to the app via the Products navigation menu, ensure you add the following required fields at minimum:

  • Key - this Shopify field is required and should state PR Field
  • Title - the name of your product
  • Description - a brief description of your product
  • Product Type - the category of your product (for example: Shoes)
  • Image - the publicly-hosted URL of the product image
  • Vendor - the brand of the product
  • Variants - any variants of your product (if you aren't using product variants, ignore this field)

Additionally, you must include the following fields if you participate in PowerReviews Syndication:

  • Barcode - the UPC of the product
  • SKU - the manufacturer ID of the product
  • Variant Barcodes - the UPCs of the variant of the product

 

Overview

Whether you're working with a PowerReviews Implementation Team or completing a Self-Service Implementation, you'll be provided with access to basic code to implement your software through a guided Portal experience. Further customization is available after the automatic install process is completed. Please review the Shopify (Manual) documentation for detail regarding the placement of your review content and additional installation options. For information on CSS overrides and the appearance of your content, see Customizing Your PowerReviews Platform.

To begin:

1. Ensure your PowerReviews Implementation Team has created your PowerReviews Portal account and you have provided your Shopify URL
2. Connect to Your Shopify Store
3. Install the PowerReviews Software

 

Connect to Your Shopify Store

1. Navigate to shopify.powerreviews.com.
2. Enter your Shopify store URL into the text box and click Install.

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Connect_Your_Store_.png

You will be asked to give PowerReviews permission to install the PowerReviews app on your Shopify store.

3. Click Install App.

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Install_App.png

 


Install the PowerReviews Software

You can choose between an Automatic or Manual installation:

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Choose_Installation_Method.png

In order to perform an automatic installation of the PowerReviews software, your store must meet the following criteria:

  • You have one product page template (ie., you do not have different templates for different products)
  • Your product page template is named Product.liquid template
  • You have a Theme.liquid template, and you have not changed the name of this template (customizing within the template is fine)

If your store does not meet these criteria, some aspects of the automatic installation will not be applied correctly. We would therefore then recommend our Manual Installation option that does not use the PowerReviews Shopify cartridge, which you can find here.

If your store does meet the above criteria, choose to proceed with the Automatic Installation option.

Upon clicking Automatic Installation, a message will appear to indicate that the review display code will be automatically injected into your Product Liquid Template (Product.liquid). Since you confirmed your store meets the criteria for Automatic Installation, this message should not be a concern. Click Install Automatically.

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Install_Automatically.png

 

Step 1: Prepare for Installation

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Prepare_for_Installation.png

This page provides an overview regarding what will be implemented on your website. Feel free to read through the information, then click Next.

 

Step 2: Customize Email Details

In this step, you will set up your Follow-Up Email. This email is sent after a purchase is made, and asks your customers to review the item(s) they purchased. There is a preview of the email on the right-hand side of the page that changes as you update each section.

Once you've entered all of your customizations and are comfortable with the information you have provided, click Begin Installation.

The following fields are required:

  • From Name
  • Reply-to Email
  • Subject Line

The following fields are optional:

  • Body Copy
  • Logo

Note: You will be able to update your Follow-Up Email template again, if needed, after installation is complete.

 

Installation Complete

Upon a successful Automatic Installation, you will receive the following message:

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Installation_Complete.png

If you receive errors, you can manually add code based on the file name referenced in the error. For example, if you receive an error for sections/collections.liquid, it means that the PowerReviews app couldn't find the Category Page to place the Review Snippet code. If so, you can manually place code on the equivalent file on your site. See Shopify (Manual) for more instructions. 


Test Your PowerReviews Installation

Now that you've finished installing the PowerReviews app, submit a test review to ensure that your solution is working properly. To do so:

1. Navigate to a product page and click Write-a-Review.
2. Fill out the form and click Submit.
3. Log into the PowerReviews Portal.
4. Navigate to the star icon in the left-hand menu.
5. Under Native Reviews, click Search.
6. You should see all reviews submitted for the past 7 days, including the review you just wrote (this may take up to several minutes).
7. Notice that the Site Status of your review should be set to Published. If the Site Status is set to Unpublished, contact your Implementation Team as they will need to adjust your development account settings. 
8. Test reviews you write during development should automatically be set to a Published Site Status, however they will become visible on your testing instance in ~24 hours. This is because we cycle our API daily and content refresh is dependent upon this.


After you confirm that reviews are submitting successfully, you can preview how the content appears on your website.

1. Navigate to the product page for which you submitted your test review.
2. Add the following to the end of the URL in the browser: ?pr_enable_content_display_test_mode=true

Your URL should resemble this example:
https://yoursite.com/product/test-product?pr_enable_content_display_test_mode=true

3. Press Enter. Your test review should appear on the page.

 

Products and Features Included for Automatic Installations

Review Display

The PowerReviews Review Display will be added to each of your product detail pages (PDPs). The Review Display takes collected and modified user-generated content (UGC), aggregates it, and then displays the content on your PDPs for consumers to read. This enables the potential customer to dig deeper into the reviewer's experience with the product. The content in the Review Display is sortable and filterable based on some criteria from the Review Snapshot.

If you would like to change the location of the Review Display, please refer to our Shopify (Manual) documentation.

Shopify_Cartridge_-_Review_Display.png

 

Follow-Up Email

The PowerReviews app automatically sets up your Follow-Up Email after you complete Step 2 of the installation flow. The Follow-Up Email is used to request reviews and other UGC from your customers after they purchase a product. If you would like to customize this email further, see Customizing Your Follow-Up Emails.

 

Write-a-Review Form

The PowerReviews app automatically creates your Write-a-Review (WAR) page for review collection within your store. Customers use this form to write reviews about their purchases. You can view this page from the Shopify Portal by navigating to Online Store > Pages > Write a Review.

Shopify_Cartridge_-_WAR_Form.png

The WAR form fields include:

  • Rating
  • Headline
  • Comments
  • Service Comments
  • Bottomline
  • Nickname
  • Location
  • Media Collection (Image & Native Video)

 

Additional Customization Options

Appearance & Placement of Content

To customize the look-and-feel of the PowerReviews solution using CSS overrides, see Customizing Your PowerReviews Platform.

For other customization options including placements of the PowerReviews code on your website, see our Shopify (Manual) documentation.

 

Revisiting Follow-Up Email Settings & Content

You already set up your Follow-Up Email as part of the Automatic Installation process, but further customization is always available within the PowerReviews Portal. 

Once logged in:

1. Click + Setup in the left navigation menu
2. Click Email Manager on the Products page

Follow the email configuration best practices discussed here. Be sure to Save your content before moving to the Settings tab to schedule your email sends.

 

Syndication

If you participate in PowerReviews Syndication, use either the UPC, EAN, or GTIN for each product in the Shopify Barcode field. This field is required to ensure the best possible Syndication results. Enter this information before you begin adding the PowerReviews code to your Shopify store.