When to request WooCommerce extension reviews

The best approach to increasing our top-star reviews is to identify key moments in the merchant’s journey, when they are more likely to leave a review and actively request for it.

The most distinct moments for most of our use cases are:

• When merchants feel helpless, lost, frustrated and we are able to help,
• When merchants find a bug in our code and we quickly ship a fix,
• When merchants need a feature and we notify them when it is shipped,
• When merchants feel alone and we make them feel heard and;
• When merchants contact with a question and we go out of our way to provide them with top-notch support, even if this means slightly stepping outside the official boundaries of a support policy.

Think about who is seeing the review request, and what they are doing at that time. Showing a request to a fulfillment worker just trying to ship an order isn’t likely going to work well.

Outreach after a milestone works really well. Some language we’ve used before is “Congratulations on your xxth sale! We’re delighted that WooPayments facilitated this milestone. Would you consider sharing your experience and encouraging others by reviewing our extension?”.

Another way to optimally time a review request would be to setup a prompt that aligns with use patterns. For instance, if you know that most of your merchants use your extension daily, you would likely send a review request sooner than a extension that most merchants interact very sparingly with.

SaaS/Connector extensions need to be particularly careful about requesting ratings correctly, as they are the most likely to be overlooked unless there is an issue, leading to skewed ratings not representative of the actual extension.

Consider requesting feedback at the end of every single support interaction, especially in the WordPress.org support forums. One of the largest barriers to leaving a review is the requirement of a user being logged into WooCommerce.com (or WordPress.org), and the WordPress.org support forums present a good opportunity to gather these reviews. By being highly responsive in the public support forum and solving issues there, users are already logged in and able to immediately leave a review (after being requested to!).