VerifiedReply

Your site asks your customers for a review by email. Their reply becomes a review on the product they bought, and any photographs they attached can go on it too.

The customer does not make an account, follow a link or load a tracking image to leave a review, they simply hit reply, the way they would to anybody, and attach a picture if they want to. The reply is tied back to the order it answers. Somebody at your end approves it, chooses which pictures go with it, and it publishes as an ordinary WooCommerce review.

Every published review carries a link to a verification page. A shopper can follow it and read an independent record of the reply behind the review. When it arrived. Which email provider signed it. Whether the words on the product page still match the reply. Whether the reply came from the person the shop wrote to.

What it does on its own, free and unlimited

Everything in this list works the moment you activate the plugin. No account, no key, no sign-up and no trial. There is no limit on how many review requests you send, there never has been, and there is no paid tier of the sending.

• Sends a review request per order, on an order status change and with a delay you configure.
• Lets you write a different request per product category, so a customer is asked about what they actually bought.
• Asks once per order, and once per WooCommerce subscription rather than once per renewal.
• Can catch up on past orders, within a window you set.
• Lets each request send on its schedule, or only when you press Send now.
• Replies come back to the address your shop already sends from, like any other email.

What an optional VerifiedReply account adds

• Routes replies to the service instead of your inbox, and pushes them back to your site.
• Holds every reply for a person to approve. Nothing is published automatically.
• Publishes an approved reply as a native WooCommerce review on the product bought.
• Shows any photographs the customer attached to their reply, and publishes the ones you tick alongside the review. JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP. The boxes start empty, so nothing is published unless you say so, and you can delete a photograph from a published review later.
• Adds a verification link to the review card.
• Never rewords, merges or re-attributes a review. Shortening is marked, disclosed and reversible.
• Adds no schema markup of its own. Your reviews are WooCommerce reviews and your theme marks them up as it already does.

WooCommerce is required. The plugin will not activate without it.

What it does without an account

Install it, write a request, and it sends review request emails from your own site on your own schedule. It adds no Reply-To, so replies come back to the address your shop already sends from and land in your inbox like any other email. No account, nothing configured, no data leaves your site.

Used that way it is a complete review request mailer, free and unlimited, for as long as you want to use it. What it does not do is collect those replies, publish them, or add a verification link, because it never sees them.

What an account adds

Connect a VerifiedReply account and the request emails carry a Reply-To at verifiedreply.io. Your customer’s reply goes to the service instead of your inbox. The service checks it, sends it back to your site for somebody to approve, and hosts the verification page the published review links to.

VerifiedReply is a service operated at https://verifiedreply.io. It has a free tier, and paid plans for shops that want more replies each month. The verification happens there rather than on your site on purpose. The point of the verification page is that a shopper does not have to take the shop’s word for anything. So the evidence behind it cannot sit with the shop being checked.

Here is what leaves your site, and when.

When you press Request a VerifiedReply Account, and never otherwise. The site address, the plugin version, the WooCommerce version, the WordPress version, and the same self-check figures shown on the screen you press it from: whether Action Scheduler is draining, how many review requests are published, whether the service addresses are set, whether credentials are present, whether replies are waiting, and the site timezone. Nothing is sent until somebody with permission to manage WooCommerce presses that button. The plugin schedules nothing and sends nothing on its own, so a site that never presses it is never heard from. It carries no account name and no key, and nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews. You may press it as often as you like.

Your customers’ replies go to VerifiedReply, not to you. The review request email your shop sends carries a Reply-To address at verifiedreply.io. When your customer replies, their message is delivered to VerifiedReply rather than to your shop. VerifiedReply keeps that message in full, indefinitely, because the message itself is the evidence behind the verification page. The reply is never published by the service.

When a review request is sent. Your account name, the WooCommerce order ID, and the customer’s email address, name and company as held on that order.

When a review is published, edited or taken down. Your account name, the published review text, the reviewer’s first name as it appears on the review, the product name, the address of the review on your site, an order reference, the time of publication, and internal identifiers for the reply and the comment. The star rating is not sent.

When a reply that came with photographs is opened or published. Your account name, the service’s own reference for that reply, and which part of the message the picture is, so the service can send that one picture back. It is asked for once to show you a picture on the screen where you decide, and again for each picture you tick when you publish. Nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews goes with it, and a picture you do not tick is never asked for. Once a photograph is published it is a file in your own media library like any other, served by your own site.

Once a day. Your account name and the version of this plugin. Nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews. The service answers with two yes or no flags: whether it is still vouching for your shop, and whether it is holding replies that have not reached you yet.

When you connect the site. A one-time enrolment code, your site address, the address of this plugin’s inbound route, and a signing secret this site generates for itself.

Everything above goes over HTTPS to verifiedreply.io and nowhere else. Nothing is sent to any other third party, and no third-party script is loaded on your site or your customers’. Every request carrying your account’s data is signed with a key held only by your site and the service. The enrolment exchange is not signed, because at that point your site has no key to sign with. The install ping is not signed either, and carries no key and no account name.

If you connect an account, you are then using the VerifiedReply service, which is governed by its own terms and privacy statement. If you never connect one, none of this applies to you:

• Terms of service: https://verifiedreply.io/terms/
• Privacy statement: https://verifiedreply.io/privacy/

What it costs

The plugin is free. Sending review requests is free, unlimited, and stays that way.

The service’s free tier verifies and publishes two replies a month, with no contract. That is twenty-four verified reviews a year, each one carrying its own verification page a shopper can follow and check. Steady, real proof on your product pages, at no cost, and a lot of small shops never need more than that.

Paid plans raise how many replies reach your shop each month. Nothing is lost if you go over: replies above your allowance are still collected and checked at the service, and they arrive when you move up. Pricing is at https://verifiedreply.io.