Product reviews

Updated Jun 3, 2026 Products & Catalog

Product reviews let your customers rate and describe what they bought, and let future shoppers see that feedback right on the product page — star ratings, written reviews, a “verified purchase” badge, and helpful votes. It’s built into TitanCart; there’s nothing extra to buy. This article covers turning reviews on, deciding who can post and whether posts are moderated, and how reviews appear to shoppers.

Note: Reviews are different from Testimonials (general store praise, managed under Storefront) and from product Tabs (your own description content). Reviews are customer-submitted ratings tied to a specific product.

1. Turning reviews on

Product reviews ship as a built-in feature that’s controlled by a toggle. Go to Extensions, find Customer Product Reviews, and make sure it’s enabled — it is on by default. While it’s on, the Products → Product Reviews page (your moderation queue) is available and the review section appears on the storefront.

Open the extension’s Settings to control how reviews behave. The settings are split into two groups, General and Display, covered in the next sections. The first setting, Enable product reviews, is the in-settings on/off switch; Reviews per page sets how many show before paging.

2. Who can leave a review

Three General settings decide who’s allowed to post:

Allow guest reviews — on by default. Visitors who aren’t logged in can still leave a review. Turn it off to require an account.
Only buyers can review — off by default. Turn it on and a customer can only review a product they’ve actually purchased (TitanCart checks for at least one completed order containing that product).
Check for duplicate IP addresses — off by default. When on, it blocks more than one review of a product from the same IP address, which cuts down on repeat or fake posts.

Note: The ✓ Verified Purchase badge is separate from the “Only buyers can review” setting. Any review left by a logged-in customer who has a completed order for that product is automatically marked Verified — even if you allow non-buyers to review too. The badge simply tells shoppers which reviews come from confirmed customers.

3. The review form

The two Display settings shape the form customers fill in:

Review form style — choose Advanced (a title, separate Pros and Cons, and a comment) or Simple (just a star rating and a comment). Advanced is the default.
Allow image uploads in reviews — on by default; lets reviewers attach photos.
Ask for customer location — optionally collect the reviewer’s Country or City to show alongside their review. Set to Do not ask by default.

Every review carries a star rating from 1 to 5. If a product has no reviews yet, the storefront shows a friendly “Be the first to write one!” prompt in place of the list.

4. Moderating reviews

By default, new reviews don’t go live automatically — they wait for you. The Auto-approve new reviews setting (off by default) controls this: leave it off and every new review lands in a moderation queue as Pending; turn it on and reviews publish the moment they’re submitted.

You moderate from Products → Product Reviews. The page has tabs for All, Pending, Approved, Rejected and Spam, each review showing its rating and current status. For any review you can:

Approve — publishes it to the storefront and folds its rating into the product’s average.
Reject — keeps it off the storefront (use for off-topic or low-quality posts).
Mark as Spam — same effect as reject, flagged as spam for your records.
Delete — removes the review permanently.

Tick several reviews to apply Approve, Reject or Spam to all of them at once. Whenever a review’s status changes, the product’s average rating and review count are recalculated automatically — so approving a 5-star review nudges the average up, and rejecting a previously-approved one takes it back out.

Tip: Only Approved reviews ever appear on the storefront and count toward a product’s rating. Pending, Rejected and Spam reviews are visible to you in the admin only.

5. How reviews appear to shoppers

On the product page, the reviews section leads with a summary: the average score out of 5, the total number of reviews, and a breakdown showing how many reviews gave each star count. Below that is the list of individual reviews, which shoppers can sort by Newest, Highest rated, Lowest rated or Most helpful. Each review shows the author, their rating, the written feedback, and a ✓ Verified Purchase badge where it applies.

That same average rating travels with the product elsewhere in the store — it shows on product cards in category and search listings, and it powers the built-in Rating 4+ product filter so shoppers can narrow a category to well-reviewed items. See Categories, tags & product filters for adding that filter to the sidebar.

6. Helpful votes

Under each published review is a “Was this review helpful?” prompt with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons and a running count. This lets shoppers surface the most useful feedback — and it’s what the “Most helpful” sort order reads from. A person can only vote once per review (tracked per account and per IP address), and votes are only accepted on approved reviews.

Note: What reviews do — and don’t. Reviews show only after they’re Approved (unless you switch on Auto-approve), so a freshly-submitted review won’t appear straight away when moderation is on. The “Only buyers can review” gate and the “Verified Purchase” badge are independent — the gate decides who may post, the badge labels confirmed buyers. Helpful votes rank reviews; they don’t change a product’s star rating, which comes only from the review ratings themselves. And reviews live entirely in TitanCart’s own tables — they don’t use WordPress comments.

Troubleshooting

I don’t see a Product Reviews page in the admin. Enable Customer Product Reviews under Extensions — the Products → Product Reviews menu item appears only while the feature is on.
A review I see in the admin isn’t on the storefront. Only Approved reviews are public. Open Products → Product Reviews, find it (likely under Pending), and Approve it — or turn on Auto-approve so future reviews publish immediately.
Customers can’t leave a review. Check the General settings: if Allow guest reviews is off, they must log in; if Only buyers can review is on, they need a completed order for that product.
The “Verified Purchase” badge isn’t showing for a buyer. The badge requires a completed order linked to the logged-in customer for that product. Guest reviews and reviews where the order isn’t marked completed won’t carry it.
A product’s star rating looks wrong. The average is built only from approved reviews and recalculates when you approve, reject or delete one. Approving or removing the offending review will correct it.
The same person reviewed twice. Turn on Check for duplicate IP addresses to block repeat reviews from one IP, and delete the duplicate from the moderation page.