Ratings and reviews software collects customers' star ratings and written reviews of a brand's products, checks them, and shows them on the brand's website and on the product pages of the retailers that sell the brand. Showing the same reviews on many retailers' websites is called syndication. Checking reviews and removing the ones that break the rules is called moderation.
The software does three jobs. First, it collects reviews. A few days after a purchase, it emails or messages the buyer and asks for a rating. Some brands also send a new product to a group of chosen consumers before launch, so that the product page has reviews on the first day. Second, it moderates. Software and human reviewers remove reviews that are fake, abusive, about the wrong product, or written in exchange for payment that is not disclosed. They also mark reviews from verified buyers. Third, it syndicates and displays. The reviews appear on the brand's own e-commerce platform, and they are sent to every partner retailer's website.
Why does syndication matter? Shoppers trust a product with many reviews more than one with none. A brand may sell one shampoo through 30 retailers. Without syndication, each retailer's page starts with no reviews. With syndication, all reviews collected anywhere appear everywhere.
Syndication is used mainly in the United States and Europe, where large retail chains have agreements with the reviews platforms. Take, for example, a hair care brand in the United States. It launches a new shampoo through its own website and through the websites of 30 retail chains. In the first month, it collects 2,400 reviews on its own website and through emails to buyers. Moderation removes 180 of them: some are spam, some mention a competitor's product, and some were written by the brand's own staff. The remaining 2,220 reviews, with an average of 4.3 stars, appear on all 31 product pages. A shopper on any retailer's website sees the same reviews.
In India, most online shopping happens on large marketplaces, which collect and display their own reviews. Indian brands that also sell on their own websites use reviews software there. India also has a standard for online consumer reviews, from the Bureau of Indian Standards, that asks platforms to check that reviews are genuine and to disclose paid reviews.
The reviews feed other products. How a brand's products, ratings and reviews look on each marketplace is measured by digital shelf analytics. The text of the reviews is read in bulk, with the brand's other feedback, by customer experience management (CXM). Reviews of a business's branches on Google are a different job, done by online reputation management. What people say about the brand on social media is tracked by social listening.