Product reviews

Updated Oct 17, 2026 Products & Catalog

Product reviews let customers rate a product from one to five stars and say what they think of it, and let other shoppers see that feedback on the product page. Reviews are built into TitanCart — there is nothing to buy or install, and the feature ships in both TitanCart Lite and TitanCart Pro. This article covers turning reviews on, who may post one, the moderation queue, and exactly what shoppers see.

Note: Reviews are different from Testimonials (general praise for your store, managed under Storefront → Testimonials) and from product Tabs (your own description content). A review is a customer-submitted star rating tied to one product.

1. Turning reviews on

Product reviews are a built-in feature controlled by a toggle. Go to Extensions → Installed Extensions and, in the Built-in Extensions card, make sure Customer Product Reviews is enabled — it is on by default. While it is on, a Product Reviews page appears under Products in the sidebar (that is your moderation queue), and the product page carries a Reviews tab.

The gear icon next to the toggle opens the extension’s settings page, Customer Product Reviews, with two groups. The General group is the one that matters:

Enable product reviews — on by default. Switching it off takes reviews off the storefront: the Reviews tab, the review form and the star line under the product name disappear, and a submission sent any other way is refused with “Product reviews are currently disabled.” Existing reviews, product ratings and the moderation queue are kept, so switching it back on restores everything. To hide the tab on one product only, switch the Reviews tab off on that product’s Tabs tab in the product editor.
Allow guest reviews — on by default. On means a visitor who is not signed in can post a review after giving a name (and, optionally, an e-mail address that only you see). Off means the form asks them to log in first. It is ignored while Only buyers can review is on, because a purchase can only be matched to an account (see §2).
Auto-approve new reviews — off by default. Off means every new review waits in the queue as Pending; on means it is published the moment it is submitted.
Check for duplicate IP addresses — off by default. It applies to guest reviews only: on means one guest review per product from the same IP address, so a second attempt is refused with “You have already submitted a review for this product.” Signed-in customers are always limited to one review per product, whatever this setting says.
Only buyers can review — off by default. On means a customer can only review a product they have an order for, and that order must be in the Completed status.
Reviews per page — how many approved reviews the product page shows, newest first: 1 to 50, 10 by default (see §5). The same number is the default page size for the reviews API.

That is the whole settings page. Review photos, pros and cons, and the reviewer’s location are not collected in this release, so there are no settings for them.

2. Who can leave a review

Signed-in customers can always post. Whether a visitor who is not signed in can depends on Allow guest reviews: when it is on, the form appears with two extra fields — Your Name (required; it is the name shown beside the review) and E-mail (optional; shown to you in the moderation queue, never on the product page). When it is off, the visitor sees “Please log in to submit a review” with a link to the account page in place of the form. Guest reviews never carry the Verified mark, and the name a guest types is used as given, so keep moderation on if you want to read them first. Beyond that:

One review per customer per product. Once a customer has posted, the form is replaced by “You have already submitted a review for this product.” — even if you later reject or delete that review, the customer cannot post another unless you delete the first one.
Only buyers can review (off by default) adds a purchase check: the customer needs at least one order containing that product in the Completed status. Orders that are still Processing or Shipped do not count yet, so a customer who tries too early sees “You must have purchased this product to leave a review.” Because a purchase can only be matched to an account, this setting also closes the form to visitors who are not signed in — they see “Only customers who bought this product can review it — please log in” even when Allow guest reviews is on.

Verified purchase. Whenever a signed-in customer who has a Completed order for the product posts a review, TitanCart records the link to that order — whether or not Only buyers can review is on. In Products → Product Reviews those reviews carry a green ✓ Verified mark next to the reviewer’s name, so you can tell confirmed buyers from everyone else. The mark is not shown on the product page in this release.

3. The review form

The form sits under the review list on the product page’s Reviews tab, below the page links when there are several pages, headed Write a Review. It has three parts:

Your Rating — five stars. Hovering and clicking sets the rating, and the caption under the stars names it: Poor, Fair, Average, Good or Excellent. A rating is required.
Review Title — optional, up to 255 characters. Titles are stored and shown in the moderation queue, but the product page does not print them in this release.
Your Review — the written review, required.

On a store running the Multi-Vendor Marketplace extension, a product that belongs to an active vendor also gets an optional Rate the seller star picker; those ratings build the vendor’s own score (see Multi-Vendor Marketplace). If you protect the review form with reCAPTCHA (on by default once reCAPTCHA is configured — see reCAPTCHA setup), the check runs on submit.

After Submit Review the form disappears and the shopper sees either “Your review is awaiting moderation.” or, when Auto-approve new reviews is on, “Thank you for your review!”

4. Moderating reviews

Unless you turn on Auto-approve new reviews, every new review lands in the queue as Pending and stays off the storefront until you act on it. The queue is Products → Product Reviews. Tabs across the top filter it: All Reviews, Pending, Approved, Rejected and Spam. Each row shows the reviewer’s name (with the ✓ Verified mark and their e-mail address where known), the title and the first lines of the review, the 👍 / 👎 helpful counts when there are any, the product (click it to open the product editor), the star rating, the seller rating on a marketplace store, a status badge and the date.

The buttons at the end of each row are:

✓ Approve — publishes the review to the storefront and folds its rating into the product’s average.
✕ Reject — keeps it off the storefront. Use it for off-topic or low-quality posts.
🚫 Mark as spam — same effect as Reject, filed under the Spam tab for your records.
🗑 Delete — removes the review and its votes permanently, after a “Permanently delete this review?” confirmation. This is also the only way to let a customer post a fresh review of that product.

Tick the boxes on several rows and a bar appears above the list (“3 selected”) with ✓ Approve, ✕ Reject and 🚫 Spam to apply one action to all of them, plus Clear.

Every status change and every delete recalculates the product’s average rating and review count from its approved reviews only. Approving a five-star review nudges the average up; rejecting a previously approved one takes it back out.

Loyalty Rewards: if you run the Loyalty Rewards extension, the approved review bonus rule (50 points by default) is paid to the reviewer the moment their review is approved — immediately when Auto-approve is on, otherwise when you click Approve. It is paid once per review, never on submission, and never for a review that is only rejected and re-approved. See Loyalty Rewards.

5. How reviews appear to shoppers

Under the product name on the product page sits a row of stars and the count, for example “(6 reviews)”; clicking it opens the Reviews tab. The tab opens with a summary — the average score out of 5, stars, “6 reviews” and a bar for each star count showing how many reviews gave it — then a Sort by control (Newest, Oldest, Highest rated, Lowest rated, Most helpful; newest first by default), then the approved reviews — as many per page as Reviews per page allows, 10 by default, with numbered page links underneath when there are more. Each review shows its stars, the reviewer’s name (first name and last initial for customers, the given name for guests), a green ✓ Verified Purchase badge when the reviewer had a Completed order for the product, the date in your store’s date format, the review title if one was given, the text, and the Was this review helpful? 👍 / 👎 buttons with their counts. The Write a Review form follows. A product with no approved reviews shows “No reviews yet. Be the first to write one!” above the form instead.

For theme builders. The tab is the [titancart_reviews] shortcode (template product/reviews.php, overridable from your theme), so the same list — summary, sorting, badges, votes and page links — can be placed anywhere else a product id is known. Changing the sort order or the page reloads the page and reopens the Reviews tab.

The product’s average rating also travels with it around the store:

Product cards in the list layout show the stars and the review count under the product name (grid cards do not).
Sorting — the shop and category pages offer a Top Rated sort order (the Sort by popularity option under Settings → General Settings → Appearance, on by default).
Filtering — the built-in Rating 4+ product filter narrows a listing to well-reviewed products. See Categories, tags & product filters for adding it to the sidebar.
Top Rated ribbon — a corner ribbon on product cards for products that reach a rating and review-count threshold. Enable it under Settings → General Settings → Appearance → Top Rated Ribbon: it is off by default, requires an average of 4.5 from at least 5 reviews, and has its own label and colour.

6. Helpful votes

Every review carries 👍 helpful and 👎 not-helpful counters, and you see them in the moderation queue. A vote is accepted once per person per review (tracked per account and per IP address) and only on approved reviews; votes rank reviews under the Most helpful sort order and never change a product’s star rating. Shoppers vote from the Reviews tab on the product page (and anywhere else a theme places the review list).

7. Importing and exporting reviews

Settings → Import / Export handles reviews as their own data type, Product Reviews, in both directions. The export carries the product code and name, reviewer name and e-mail, rating, title, content, status and date. On import each row needs at least the Product Code and a rating from 1 to 5; the reviewer is matched to a customer by e-mail address (no match means the review is stored without a customer), and a row with no status column is imported as Approved, so include a status column if you want imported reviews to wait in the queue. One caveat in this release: an import does not refresh the product’s star summary on product cards, the Rating 4+ filter and the Top Rated sort and ribbon — those catch up the next time you approve, reject or delete a review of that product.

Troubleshooting

I don’t see a Product Reviews page in the admin. Enable Customer Product Reviews under Extensions → Installed Extensions — the Products → Product Reviews 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. Find it under the Pending tab and approve it — or turn on Auto-approve new reviews so future reviews publish immediately. If it is approved and still missing, the product has more newer approved reviews than Reviews per page allows; raise that number in the extension’s settings.
Customers say they can’t leave a review. If Allow guest reviews is off they must be signed in; the form itself tells them so. If Only buyers can review is on, they also need an order for that product in the Completed status — a Processing or Shipped order is not enough yet. And a customer who has already reviewed the product cannot post again until you delete their earlier review.
A review shows as “Anonymous”. The reviewer’s account has no first or last name and, if it was a guest review, no name was stored (reviews imported from a CSV or from WooCommerce without a reviewer name land this way). Add the name to the customer’s account under Customers, or delete and re-import the review with a Name column.
A product’s star rating looks wrong. The average is built only from approved reviews and recalculates whenever you approve, reject, mark as spam or delete one. Fix the offending review and the number corrects itself.
The seller rating column is empty. It is filled only on a marketplace store, for products that belong to a vendor, and only when the reviewer chose to rate the seller.