Judge.me is a review app that helps online stores collect and display star ratings and reviews about their products and stores. In line with our strict authenticity and privacy policies, we have developed relevant features to make sure your rights as a reviewer and consumer are protected:
1. Asking for reviews
- Judge.me sends review request emails on behalf of the stores based on the conditions they set in their app settings.
- When you place an order at a store and your order is fulfilled, you may receive a review request email from that store. You may also receive additional emails as reminders of the initial review requests, as well as push notifications and SMS if the stores enable these features.
- As a consumer, you have the right to decline to receive review request emails. Judge.me has features that let stores stop sending review request emails to some customers or even all customers when the stores operate under stricter jurisdictions (like in Germany). These features include:
- Disabling requests for customers who opt out of Shopify marketing emails.
- Disabling requests for domestic orders, international orders, or both.
- Adding Shopify tags to automatically exclude some orders, customers, or products from the request email schedule.
- Disabling requests for customers who click the "Unsubscribe" link in the request emails.
- Once you have submitted a review, the store may also send you a reply or request a review update via email.
2. Verifying reviews
- Judge.me verifies reviews automatically based on the order history of our e-commerce platform partners (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace). If the reviews are not associated with existing orders (e.g. coming directly from merchants’ websites), stores can request manual verification by submitting evidence of orders.
- A verified buyer badge is added after the review is verified by Judge.me to inform the consumers that this review comes from a buyer of the store. The badge may be translated and customized, but cannot be added by the merchants themselves.
2. Publishing reviews
- We encourage stores to publish their reviews, even unfavorable ones. Potential customers are usually more concerned about the context of a negative review and how stores follow up and handle negative reviews, rather than the negative review itself.
- Stores can reply to reviews both publicly and privately to resolve issues, and ask the reviewer for a review update (see the "Updating reviews" section below for more details).
- To protect the privacy of reviewers, we pass all reviews through an automatic filter for Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and censor this information.
- Stores are also allowed to mark a review as spam and use our profanity filter to hide reviews with offensive content.
- Judge.me has a system of medalsthat are awarded to shops as an indicator of transparency and authenticity.
- Stores obtain Transparency medals if they publish at least 80% of the total verified reviews they receive. Verified reviews include reviews submitted by customers with fulfilled orders or imported reviews with proof of authenticity. Total verified reviews include published, hidden, and archived reviews that have been verified.
Stores are awarded Authenticity medals if at least 80% of the reviews they publish are verified reviews. Verified reviews include reviews submitted by customers with fulfilled orders or imported reviews with proof of authenticity. The total number of reviews a store can publish may include unverified reviews that are collected directly on their e-commerce store or imported from other sources.
- Stores can display their medals as widgets on their storefront (opt-in by merchants).
- Judge.me also invites stores with at least 10 verified reviews and above 80% transparency to be added to the Judge.me platform. This reviews platform showcases product and store reviews under the Judge.me brand name.
- If a store has a listing, you will be able to see all medals a store has obtained, including the total number of verified reviews and the percentage of verified reviews that have been published.
- To look up a store's listing on the review platform, go to https://judge.me/reviews and enter the store's name or domain in the search box:
3. Updating reviews
- Stores cannot update review ratings. This means that it is not possible to change a review from 2 stars to 5 stars.
- A change was made to the Reviews Dashboard in December 2020 to prevent any review rating updates.
- Instead, stores can ask reviewers for an update on review rating if they have a good reason (e.g. the issue in a negative review has been resolved). As a reviewer, you can reject this update request simply by ignoring this email.
- Stores can make small text corrections. We understand that stores may want to showcase reviews quite publicly (e.g. on their storefront homepage) and it can sometimes be difficult to convince reviewers to make the effort to correct spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors.
- To prevent abuse of this from merchants, Judge.me sends reviewers a notification email to inform reviewers about the changes made.
- Reviews can undo these changes simply by clicking on the link provided in the email, displayed below:
- All reviewers can also make changes to their reviews by directly logging into their profile on Judge.me.
- When a reviewer submits a review on a store using Judge.me, the reviewer has a personal profile where all reviews are associated.
- Profiles are identified by the email used to write the review (and also associated with the order made).
- To log in to your profile:
- Go to judge.me/login
- Enter the email address you used to submit your reviews
- Judge.me will send a "magic link" to your email, follow the link to continue the login process.
- To edit your reviews:
- Find the review you want to edit. You can find all your reviews in the My Reviews tab, or reviews of specific items in an order in the My Orders tab.
- Then click Edit or Edit your review button.
- You can also display, change or hide your name and profile picture when submitting reviews on stores.
