Folksy News: Introducing our new Reviews system

This week we launched the first part of our new Reviews system on Folksy. In this blog post we’re going to show you how it works and explain the next part of the update still to come.

Featured image: Green Macramé Wall Hanging by Green Lane Creative

Shops now have star ratings

Every shop on Folksy that has been reviewed by a customer will now have a row of stars where it used to say ‘feedback’. These stars appear below the shop banner. Clicking on the stars will take you to a shop’s Reviews page, where you can read all the reviews that shop has received.

We have used the feedback rating for each shop to determine the number of stars given. Negative feedback has been translated as 1 star, neutral as 3 and positive as 5.

Shop Susie West on Folksy – https://folksy.com/shops/SusieWest

New Reviews page for customers

We have also introduced a new Reviews page for registered customers. The page shows all their previous purchases, reviews and comments, with a prompt at the top of the page to review their most recent purchases. It can be found under the new ‘Reviews’ tab on their dashboard.

Customers are prompted here to leave a review for all their purchases on Folksy. We now show them a photograph of the item as well as the title of the product and the seller’s avatar.

Customers are asked to rate their experience with the seller from 1-5 stars, one star being disappointing, five stars brilliant (a text descriptor pops up when you click a star rating to help customers understand what each star signifies). If they want to, they can also leave a comment and their name. We have included a link to their original order and a link to click if they have had any issues with that order, to help resolve any issues before leaving a review.

All a customer’s reviews are then displayed on their ‘Reviews’ page. New items to review orders still waiting to be reviewed are shown at the top.

Next Steps

This is the first stage in our update of the reviews system on Folksy. The next steps are:

• to enable guest buyers to leave feedback
• to add reviews to Item pages and Shop pages, so they are visible to all customers looking at a shop or item on Folksy
• to prompt sellers to review items if they haven’t already
• to link aggregate reviews for items and shops to our index so they can be read by Google (this is a behind-the-scenes thing and won’t be visible to anyone)

Thank you to all the Folksy sellers who answered our call in the forum and in the Folksy Clubhouse Facebook Group, and gave us feedback on how what you wanted from Reviews. All your comments have helped us develop the new system and will continue to feed into what we do. We really appreciate it!