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Product Rating & Review (ProductRating)

Introduction

This plugin lets your customers rate and review the products on your GP247 store, and gives you — the shop owner — the tools to moderate and answer those reviews. It is written for store administrators (no programming needed); the last two sections add notes for theme designers and developers. By the end you will be able to install the plugin, know exactly what you can switch on and off, and know who is allowed to do what with a review.

Main features

• Customers must be signed in to review.
• You choose: only customers who bought it may review, or anyone.
• You choose: a new review waits for approval, or appears immediately.
• Let customers attach photos (on/off, with a limit).
• Rating scale of 5 stars or 10 stars.
• A moderation screen and a per-shop statistics screen.
• You answer publicly underneath any review.
• Customers can edit or withdraw their own review.

Installing

1. Sign in to the admin area and open the Plugins menu.

2. Find the Product Rating & Review row and click Install.

   If it works, you get a success message and the plugin switches to the enabled state.

3. Open a Terminal (on Windows, "Command Prompt"), go to your website folder, then type this exact line and press Enter:

   php artisan optimize:clear
   

   This clears the cache so the site picks up the new screens. Skip it and clicking the new menu may give you a "page not found" error — the single most common problem after installing a plugin.

4. Check the result: two new menu entries appear in the admin area:

   • Catalog → Product reviews (where you moderate)
   • Report → Review statistics (where you read the numbers)

5. Open any product page on your storefront and scroll below the description. You will see the "Ratings & reviews" block — no theme editing needed.

Uninstalling removes the review data and both menu entries.

Settings

Go to Plugins and click Config on the Product Rating & Review row.

If your site runs several stores, each one can have its own settings: pick the store in the selector at the top, then adjust. A store you never adjust simply follows the shared defaults.

How customers leave a review

1. The customer opens a product page and scrolls to the Ratings & reviews block.
2. If they are not signed in, they see a Sign in button instead of the form.
3. They pick a score, optionally write a comment, and click Submit review.
4. If you require approval, they are told the review was received and it lands in your moderation screen.
5. Afterwards they see their own review again, with an Edit and a Remove my review button.

A review from someone who actually bought the product carries a "Verified purchase" label, so other shoppers trust it more.

Managing reviews

Go to Catalog → Product reviews. You can filter by state (pending / approved / rejected) and by store, and search by review text or customer name.

Click the product name to open that product on your storefront in a new tab. An approved review also gets a View on site link that jumps straight to that review, so you see it exactly as a shopper does.

Each review offers four actions:

• Approve — the review appears on the storefront and counts towards the average.
• Reject — the review no longer appears publicly. You must pick a reason from a fixed list (see below).
• Public reply — your answer appears directly under that review, visible to everyone browsing the product. One reply per review, editable; saving an empty body withdraws it.
• Delete — removes it for good. Only a system administrator can do this; shop owners and staff do not see the button.

Why a shop owner cannot delete reviews

If a shop can delete the reviews that criticise it, its star rating becomes marketing and shoppers can no longer trust it. Two major regulators now address this directly:

• United States (FTC, effective 21 October 2024): you may not present a review section as if it shows everything while quietly holding back reviews because they are low-scoring or critical. Removal is still fine when the criteria are applied equally to all reviews, positive or negative.
• European Union (Directive 2019/2161, applicable 28 May 2022): bans misrepresenting consumer reviews in order to promote a product.

So the plugin is built this way: you can still take a review down, but you must state a reason from a fixed list, and every decision is logged (who, when, why). Your tool for a critical review is the public reply, not deletion.

The reject reasons are: spam or fake review · abusive or hateful · contains someone else's personal data · illegal content · conflict of interest · not about this product. There is deliberately no "low score" reason.

Statistics

Go to Report → Review statistics. The screen shows you:

• Total reviews, how many are published, how many await approval, and the average.
• A comparison table per shop (useful when the site has several stores or several sellers).
• A score distribution: how many 5-star reviews, 4-star, and so on.
• The most-reviewed products with their own averages.

The average counts approved reviews only. A pending or rejected review never moves the number shoppers see.

Themes (for theme designers)

You normally do not have to do anything. The review block appears by itself: the product-detail screen shipped by gp247/shop hosts an extension point, and the plugin renders into it when installed. Every theme built on that screen — GP247Front included — gets the block for free.

If your theme replaced the product-detail screen with its own markup, add the extension point wherever you want plugin output to appear:

{!! gp247_render_plugin_hook('shop_product_detail_bottom', ['product' => $product]) !!}

One line, and it hosts every present and future plugin, not just this one. A theme that does not call it simply shows nothing.

To change how the box looks without touching the plugin, create a file named livewire/productrating_review-box.blade.php inside your theme folder. The system prefers your file, and the plugin's original stays untouched on update.

Putting reviews on a shop page (for developers)

Every review remembers two stores: where the customer wrote it, and the store that sells the product. On a single-store site those are the same. On a marketplace where many sellers share one domain they differ — and the selling store is the one a shop page must group by.

The ready-made block for a shop page (average, per-score filters, the shop's rated products and the reviews themselves):

@livewire('gp247-productrating-front::store-rating-box', ['sellerStoreId' => $store->id])

To build your own markup instead, call these functions:

// Headline numbers for a shop: total, average, per-score distribution.
$summary = gp247_product_rating_store_summary($sellerStoreId);

// Which products the shop is rated on, most reviewed first.
$products = gp247_product_rating_store_products($sellerStoreId, limit: 20, offset: 0);

// One call for a whole product grid (no slow repeated lookups).
$map = gp247_product_rating_bulk_summary($productIds, $sellerStoreId);

// Per-product numbers, as used by the product page.
$summary = gp247_product_rating_summary($productId, $storeId);

All of them count approved reviews only.

Conditions & rules (know before you act)

When a customer submits a review

• They must be signed in — a hard rule you cannot switch off. Anonymous reviews are the front door for spam.
• A score is required; text alone will not submit — the score is what produces the average, and without it the comment contributes nothing to a shopper who is still deciding.
• The score must fit the chosen scale (1–5 or 1–10). This is re-checked on the server, not only in the browser.
• The comment is limited to 2,000 characters.
• One review per order — buy twice and you may write two reviews, but a single purchase can never become two scores. This is what stops one person from pushing a product's rating up or down.
• With "Purchase required" on, the customer needs an order containing that product. Cancelled and failed orders do not count — if they did, ordering and immediately cancelling would be a free pass to review.
• Photos: JPG, PNG and WEBP only, up to 2 MB each, as many as your setting allows.

When a customer edits or withdraws their review

• An edit goes back to waiting for approval (unless you turned on "Publish immediately") — otherwise an approved review could be rewritten into something else that nobody ever looked at.
• Withdrawing does not free the slot for that order — the text and photos are really deleted, but the order's review slot stays spent. Otherwise remove-and-rewrite would be an unlimited way to re-roll a score.

When you moderate

• Rejecting requires a reason from the fixed list; without one the system will not take the review down. An empty or invented reason is refused.
• A public reply is limited to 1,000 characters, and replying never changes whether the review is published.
• Only a system administrator can delete a review. Shop owners and staff can approve, reject and reply.

Q&A

Q1: I installed it, but clicking the menu gives a "page not found" error?

→ You skipped php artisan optimize:clear in step 3 of Installing. Run it and reload the page.

Q2: The review block does not appear on my product page?

→ Check that the plugin is enabled under the Plugins menu. If your site uses a theme other than GP247Front, add the snippet from "Adding the block to another theme".

Q3: I want anyone to be able to review, without buying first?

→ Open the plugin settings and turn off "Purchase required". Each customer then gets one review per product.

Q4: Why can I not see a delete button?

→ Because your account is not a system administrator. Shop owners and staff may approve, reject and reply — see "Why a shop owner cannot delete reviews".

Q5: A 1-star review says something untrue. What can I do?

→ Use "Public reply" to state the correct facts right under it. If the content matches one of the listed reject reasons (spam, abusive, off-topic…), reject it with that reason. You may not take it down merely for scoring low.

Q6: A customer buys the same product repeatedly — how many reviews do they get?

→ One per order. Three purchases earn three reviews, because those are three real experiences.

Q7: Does a review still waiting for approval drag my star rating down?

→ No. The average counts approved reviews only.

Q8: My site has several stores — are the settings shared?

→ Each store can be configured separately. A store you never configure follows the shared defaults.

Q9: Will updating the plugin wipe my settings and data?

→ No. Your choices and every review are kept, and customer photos are stored outside the plugin folder so they are not overwritten either.

Q10: A customer asks me to delete their review for privacy reasons?

→ They can click "Remove my review" themselves on the product page; the text and photos are really deleted. If every trace must go, ask a system administrator to use the delete button.

_{📅 Last updated: 2026-09-13 · ✍️ Author: GP247}