Why your Magento product pages have so few reviews, and how to ask for more

A store can sell the same rucksack hundreds of times and show two reviews for it. One is from the week it launched; the other is a complaint about a broken zip. Plenty of customers were happy with it, but being happy does not make anyone go back to a product page, find the review tab, sign in and type a paragraph.

Reviews that arrive unasked come from people who felt strongly enough to go looking for the form, which is not a fair sample of your customers. Asking everyone, at the right moment, with as little effort as possible, gives a fairer picture of the product and more of it.

What Magento does with reviews

Magento has product reviews and ratings built in. Customers write them on the product page; a new review waits in Pending status until someone approves it under Marketing > User Content, and only approved reviews are shown¹. A setting decides whether guests may write reviews. That is a sound base: moderation is on by default, and ratings such as Quality or Price can be set up per store view.

What Magento does not do is ask. There is no e-mail after an order inviting the customer to review what they bought, and there is no way to review without going to the product page. The review form takes a title, a nickname, the text and the ratings; there are no photos, no way to mark reviews from people who actually bought the product, and no reply from the store².

A review request works best when the customer has had the product long enough to have an opinion, and before they have forgotten the order. For most physical goods that means some days after delivery, not on the day of dispatch. It should be one e-mail, not a series, and it should never ask twice about the same product.

The other half is effort. Every extra step between the e-mail and a saved review loses people: signing in, finding the product, finding the form. The shortest path is a link straight to a form for that product, with the star rating already chosen from the e-mail.

How Advanced Reviews sends the requests

Advanced Reviews is our module that extends Magento's own reviews rather than replacing them; reviews written with it are ordinary Magento reviews. Review reminders are off by default. When you switch them on, a cron job queues one reminder per qualifying order: you choose the order statuses (complete by default), customer groups, how many days after the order's last update to send it (7 by default), and a window so old orders are never reminded, not even when you first switch the feature on.

Each e-mail lists up to five products from the order, each with five star links and a "Write a review" link. A click opens a page with the product and the review form, stars already chosen, without signing in. The link is signed, expires after a period you set, names the order and the product, and works for one review. Reviews written this way are marked as verified buyer reviews. Each product is asked about once per e-mail address, products already reviewed are left out, and the unsubscribe link opens a page with a button, so e-mail security scanners that open links do not unsubscribe anyone by accident.

The Review Reminders grid shows every queued reminder with its status, and you can preview an e-mail without sending it, send now, cancel or queue again. Signed-in customers also get a "Products to Review" list in My Account.

What changes on the product page

More reviews are only useful if people can find the ones that matter to them. The module's review section shows the average, a breakdown by stars (each row filters the list), filters for reviews with photos, from verified buyers and with a recommendation, and sorting by newest, highest, lowest or most helpful. Reviewers can add pros and cons, say whether they would recommend the product and upload up to ten photos. You can reply under a review in the store's name, and visitors can vote reviews helpful.

The list is loaded by script after the page, so the product page itself stays in the full page cache while new reviews and votes show at once.

Moderation and photos

Every review still waits for moderation in Magento's Pending status. The module adds a grid with mass actions (approve, approve with photos, mark as verified buyer, delete) and a photo moderation page. Uploaded photos are checked for their real type, re-saved as new JPEG files with random names so no hidden data survives, and kept outside the public web folder until both the photo and its review are approved.

Approving honestly matters here. Asking everyone brings in middling and negative reviews along with the good ones. Publish them, and use the store reply for a fair complaint rather than hiding it.

The module can e-mail a coupon when a review is approved, generated from a cart price rule you set up, once per review, optionally only for verified buyers. Rewarding reviews is a sensitive area. If you use it, reward reviews whatever their rating and check the rules that apply to you, including those of any platform you send reviews to, such as Google Merchant Center through the module's reviews feed.

Limits

The reminder delay counts from the order's last update, which is usually but not always the completion date. The review form supports Google reCAPTCHA v3 (invisible) only. Review comments, video uploads, CSV import and AI summaries are not part of this version. If your store sells a handful of products to repeat customers who already talk to you, a personal e-mail may still beat any automated reminder.

The Advanced Reviews page describes the reminders, photos, the reviews feed and the structured data settings.

Sources

1. Adobe Commerce Admin documentation, "Moderate product reviews", https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/commerce-admin/marketing/merchandising/product-reviews/product-reviews-moderate, checked 12 October 2026. ↩
2. Magento Open Source 2.4.9 source code, app/code/Magento/Review (review form view/frontend/templates/form.phtml with nickname, title, text and ratings; no upload field or reminder e-mail in the module), checked 12 October 2026. ↩