Google Customer Reviews: What is the Google Customer Reviews program?

Please note that the following explanations apply to the old Google Merchant Center interface (the "classic" Google Merchant Center experience). If Google has already upgraded your account to its new "Merchant Center Next" platform, please follow this documentation.

Google Customer Reviews is a free service that allows you to collect valuable feedback from customers who’ve made a purchase on your site. Ratings from customer surveys apply to Seller Ratings eligibility and to Product Ratings eligibility.

Here's how it works: when your customers complete the checkout process on your site, a pop-up window appears, asking them if they'd like to take part in the Google Customer Reviews survey on the quality of your service:

If they accept, a few days after receiving their order, they receive an e-mail from Google inviting them to give their feedback about their shopping experience on your site, by assigning a "seller" rating between 1 and 5 stars. They can also write a comment:

After providing feedback about their experience with you, customers will be able to rate the items they purchased (if you have met the requirements for Product Ratings) and provide text feedback.

After a certain number of "seller" ratings have been collected(*), the average of these ratings is displayed in your ads on the Google search network (such as shopping ads or text ads, for example), and in the "Google Customer Reviews" badge on your website. 

(*)You must have collected enough unique reviews in a country over the past year for users in that country to see your seller rating and associated reviews. In most cases, merchants see the rating displayed after collecting around 100 eligible reviews. To find out more about the criteria for displaying seller ratings, click here.

To read the Google's FAQs about the Google Customer Reviews program, click here.

How to activate Google's "Customer Reviews" program

First, you need to activate Google's "Customer Reviews" program. To do this, you must have an active Google Merchant Center account.

To do this, log into your Google Merchant Center account and, in the left-hand menu, click on "Growth" and then on "Manage programs":

Search for the "Customer Reviews" program and click on "Enable":

Follow the activation steps, such as filling in and signing the form. Of course, you don't need to follow the technical integration process, as our module takes care of everything for you.

Once the program has been activated, you should see a "Customer Reviews" tab appear in your Google Merchant Center account.

To know how to enable the Google Customer Reviews feature on your site, through our Google Merchant Center Pro module, click here.