How to use Bee Reviews

What the app does

Bee Reviews handles three things: asking customers for a review after their order ships, giving you a place to approve what comes in, and displaying the result on your storefront. Everything is scoped to your store, and the storefront widgets read through your own domain over the Shopify app proxy, so there is no third-party script on your pages.

Quick start

Five steps between installing and your first collected review. Skip step four if this is a new store.

1. 1

   Install the app

   1 min

   Add Bee Reviews from the Shopify App Store and approve the permissions.

2. 2

   Place your first block

   2 min

   Settings → Theme → Review List → Add to Theme. Save the theme.

3. 3

   Set the email schedule

   1 min

   Settings → Email. Pick the delay after fulfilment and the send hour.

4. 4

   Import your old reviews

   optional

   Settings → Import if you are moving from another review app.

5. 5

   Turn on automation

   1 min

   Automation → enable rules so good reviews publish without you.

Install and connect

Install from the Shopify App Store and approve the permission screen. Three things wire themselves up on first load, and none of them need your attention:

• Order webhooks. Order creation and fulfilment events arrive so review requests can be scheduled.
• Product sync. Product titles and handles are mirrored so each review attaches to the right product.
• Store record. Your store settings and an API key are created, ready for the widgets to read.

The app asks for order, product and customer read access plus product write access. Order data schedules the emails, customer data addresses them, and product write access stores the rating metafields that Google reads.

Add widgets to your theme

Reviews only appear where you place a block. Open Settings → Theme. Each block has an Add to Theme button that opens the theme editor with that block ready to drop in. Place it, drag it where you want, then save the theme.

Where to put each one

Review Summary belongs high on the product page, near the title or price, because it is the signal shoppers scan for first. Review List goes below the product description. Media Gallery sits between them if you collect a lot of photos. UGC Photo Gallery is a homepage block, not a product one.

Match your brand

Settings → Widget Styling controls how every block looks. Set it once and all four blocks follow.

Save, then open a product page in a new tab to check the result. Styling is read live by the widgets, so there is no theme republish involved.

Review request emails

This is the part that decides how many reviews you collect. Open Settings → Email.

The trigger

Requests are scheduled when Shopify marks the order fulfilled, so the clock starts when the parcel leaves, not when the payment clears. The sender runs hourly and picks up everything that has come due.

The delay

Aim for the day the product has been used once or twice. For most physical goods that is five to ten days after fulfilment. Ask too early and you get a review about the packaging.

Send time and international orders

Set the hour the email should go out in your store's timezone. Turn on the separate international schedule if you ship abroad, choose your domestic country, and give everything outside it a longer delay to cover slower transit.

Templates and reminders

Pick a template from the gallery on the same page. The previews are rendered by the same code that sends the mail, so what you see is what lands in the inbox. Reminders go to customers who did not respond to the first request. One reminder is enough. A second one mostly buys unsubscribes.

Orders and resends

Orders lists your orders and the line items inside them, each with its own review request status. Use it to answer questions like "did this customer ever get asked?"

• Send or resend a request. Pick one or more line items and send immediately, ignoring the schedule.
• Send a reminder. A separate action for customers who were asked but did not reply.
• Sync orders. Pulls recent orders from Shopify if a webhook was missed, for instance during an app update.

A fresh install only knows about orders that arrive after it. Run a sync once after installing if you want recent history in the list.

The review form

The link in the email opens a form tied to that specific order line, which is how a review earns its verified badge. The customer picks a rating, writes their review, and can attach photos or video. Uploads are stored on our object storage and served from a CDN, not from your theme.

Shoppers can also review straight from the product page through the Review List block. Those reviews arrive without a verified badge, which is the honest signal: the badge means the person bought the item.

Moderation

Reviews is where everything lands. Filter by status, rating or search text, then act on each review:

Store feedback has the same controls in its own tab. A useful habit: filter to unpublished, work top to bottom, and let automation handle the four and five star reviews so the queue only holds things that need a decision.

Photo gallery

Gallery collects every photo and video submitted with a review in one grid. Filter it, approve or hide individual media, and mark your best shots as featured.

Featured media is what the UGC Photo Gallery block shows on the storefront, so the gallery screen is effectively the editor for that homepage section. Filter to five-star reviews to find the photos worth featuring.

Media moderation is separate from review moderation. You can publish a review while hiding a blurry photo attached to it.

Automation rules

Automation decides what happens the moment a review arrives. Set a positive threshold and a negative threshold, then choose the actions for each.

A sensible starting point: positive threshold at 4, auto-publish on, thank-you email on. Negative threshold at 2, auto-hide on, alert on. That publishes the bulk of your reviews without you touching them and puts the rest in front of you the same day.

The Activity tab logs every automated action against the review it ran on, so you can check what fired and when.

Analytics

Analytics answers two questions: are reviews coming in, and are the emails working.

Export to CSV from the same screen when you want the raw rows for a spreadsheet or a report.

A response rate between 5 and 15 percent is normal. If yours sits below that, the delay is usually wrong before the template is.

SEO and rich results

Star ratings under a Google result come from structured data on your product pages. Bee Reviews writes that markup and then checks it for you.

• SEO Health. Scans your products and reports each as healthy, warning or error, with the reason. Run it after a theme change or a bulk product upload.
• Review sitemap. An XML sitemap of your review content, published on your own domain. Submit it once in Google Search Console.
• Hosted review pages. Server-rendered pages per product handle, so review text is crawlable even when the widget loads client side.

Import and export

Moving from another review app does not have to cost you your history. Open Settings → Import, choose the source, and upload the file.

Steps

1. 1. Export your reviews from the app you are leaving.
2. 2. In Settings → Import, pick that app as the source.
3. 3. Download the template if you are unsure about the columns.
4. 4. Drop the file in and start the import.
5. 5. Check Reviews afterwards: imported rows keep their original dates.

Export works the other way too. Analytics exports your reviews as CSV whenever you want them, which is worth doing before any large change.

API and webhooks

For a headless storefront, a custom widget, or piping reviews into another system. Settings → API Access holds your key and your base URL.

Authentication

Send your key in the X-API-Key header. The key identifies your store, so there is no store ID to pass. A missing or wrong key returns 401.

curl "https://apireviews.getbee.app/api/v1/reviews?status=published&limit=5" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Endpoints you will use most

List endpoints accept page and limit (default 10) and return a pagination object alongside the data.

Outgoing webhooks

Register an endpoint under API & Webhooks and pick the events you care about. Recent deliveries are logged with their response, so a failing endpoint is easy to spot.

Languages

Review emails and the review form are available in eight languages, picked from your store's locale settings:

Each locale has its own email schedule and copy, so a French customer can be asked at a different interval than a domestic one, in their own language. Review text itself is shown as the customer wrote it.

Plans and billing

Plans are priced on review request emails per month, not on how many reviews you collect. Collecting and displaying reviews is unlimited on every plan, including free.

Billing runs on Shopify Managed Pricing. Open Plan in the app and Shopify handles the upgrade, downgrade or cancellation, and the charge appears on your Shopify invoice. Nothing is billed outside Shopify.

Privacy and GDPR

Bee Reviews answers Shopify's compliance webhooks for customer data requests, customer redaction and shop redaction, and removes the data within 30 days of the request. When you uninstall, your sessions are torn down immediately.

Customers manage their own email preferences from a link in any review email, and an opt-out applies across every order, not just the one they clicked from.

Troubleshooting

Support

Stuck on something this page does not cover, or want a feature that does not exist yet? Email support@getbee.app with your shop domain. We usually reply within one business day.