Sending Your Reviews to Shopify and the Shop App

Reorbit writes your reviews into Shopify itself — as Shopify’s own product reviews, plus a star rating and review count on every product. Once that data is in your store, the Shop app and your theme can read it directly, with no Reorbit widget on the page.

What is Shopify syndication?

Your reviews live in Reorbit, and your storefront widget reads them from there. Syndication puts a second, structured copy somewhere else as well. Sending them to Shopify writes two kinds of thing into your own store:

1. Each eligible review, in Shopify’s standard product review format — stored in your store rather than in Reorbit.
2. A star rating and review count on every product, which is what themes and Shopify’s own surfaces read.

Once that data is in your store, it can be used by things Reorbit has no control over:

Surface	What it gets
The Shop app	Your reviews on your product pages in Shop, for reviews that qualify.
Your theme	Native star ratings on product pages and collection grids — the stars your theme draws itself, with no Reorbit widget involved.
Shopify search and discovery	Products can be sorted and filtered on rating.

This does not replace your review widget. The widget is still what shows review text, photos, and your replies on your storefront. Syndication adds a structured copy of the same reviews inside Shopify.

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Before you start

• Reorbit installed, with an active plan. Nothing is sent while a plan is lapsed, and resubscribing releases the whole backlog.
• Reviews that are linked to a customer, an order, and a product. This is Shopify’s rule, not ours, and it decides how much of your review history can actually be sent.

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Turning it on

1. Open Review syndication

From the app, go to Settings → Review syndication.

2. Turn on Shopify product reviews

On the Shopify product reviews card, turn on Send reviews to Shopify product reviews, then save.

3. Wait for the first pass

Reorbit works through your reviews in the background — it does not send everything the moment you save. The card’s counters fill in as reviews go out.

A large back catalogue takes a while on purpose: your store has one Shopify rate limit shared across everything Reorbit does, and a review backfill is not allowed to starve order and points syncing.

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Which reviews qualify

Reorbit sends every review it can. Shopify decides which of those it will display — and its rules are stricter than your storefront’s. A review that has been on your product page for a year can still be ineligible here.

For Shopify to display a review in the Shop app, the review must:

• be linked to all three of a customer, an order, and a product;
• carry a known language;
• not have been imported from a CSV file or migrated from another review app.

That last one catches people out. Reviews brought over from a previous review app are usually not eligible no matter how complete they look, and there is nothing to fix in Reorbit — the disqualifier is where the review came from.

Your star ratings are not limited by these rules. The rating and review count Reorbit writes onto each product cover your reviews the same way your storefront does, including reviews still held for your response. So a product can show a rating built from more reviews than Shopify individually displays. That is expected.

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Reading the syndication card

What you see	What it means
Sent	Reviews Shopify has accepted, out of the number Reorbit has queued so far.
Waiting	Queued and not yet sent, with how long the oldest has been waiting.
Not being sent	Reviews Reorbit looked at and deliberately left out. Not failures — the table underneath says why.
Product star ratings	How many products have an up-to-date rating in Shopify. A different count from reviews: 500 reviews on one product is one product.
Last checked	The last time Reorbit ran a pass for your store, and what it did.

Two readings that look identical in the counters but mean opposite things:

• 0 sent, 400 not being sent — a working pass that found nothing eligible.
• 0 sent, 0 not being sent, 400 failed — Shopify refusing everything.

Last checked is the line that separates them. If nothing has ever picked your store up, the screen says so in a banner rather than leaving you to guess from a quiet page.

Why some reviews aren’t going out

Reason	What it means
Not published yet	Held for your response, or hidden. It goes out on its own once it publishes.
Rejected in moderation	You took this one down. Restoring it from Reviews puts it back in the queue.
No product linked	The review isn’t attached to a product, so there is nothing to attach it to at the other end.
Not linked to a verified purchase	Shopify only displays a review it can tie to a customer, an order and a product. Imported reviews usually cannot be.
Product not found	The product no longer exists in your store.
Deleted	The review was deleted.
Anonymised	Removed under a privacy request. It stays out permanently.
Language unknown	We don’t know what language it was written in, and Shopify requires one.
Too short	Below the minimum length the destination accepts.
Rejected by the destination	Sent, and refused at the other end.
Destination turned off	The switch is off. Turning it on clears this on the next pass.
No active subscription	Nothing is sent while the plan is lapsed. Resubscribing releases the whole backlog.

Most of these clear themselves. The two that generally do not are Not linked to a verified purchase and Product not found.

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Managing it

Pausing is not the same as turning it off

This is the one distinction on the screen that costs money to get wrong.

Control	What it does
Pause sending	Holds new updates. Everything already published to Shopify stays published. Press Start sending again and Reorbit picks up where it left off.
The switch, turned off	Takes back down everything already published to Shopify. Turning it on again re-sends your whole catalogue from scratch.

For a temporary stop — mid-migration, or you want to look at something before more goes out — pause. Reach for the switch only when you actually want your reviews out of Shopify.

The switch also affects your Google ratings

Turning Shopify product reviews off does one more thing that is easy to miss: it decides whether reviews collected through the Shop app count toward your star ratings — on Google as well as here. So flipping this one switch changes the rating Google shows, with no Google setting touched.

Reviews that arrive from Shop

Traffic is not one-way. Customers can leave reviews inside the Shop app, and those come back into Reorbit and appear in your Reviews list alongside the ones you collected yourself. They are moderated the same way everything else is.

The Verified by Shop badge

Reviews that successfully syndicated carry Shopify’s Verified by Shop badge, in Reorbit and on your storefront widget. It is Shopify’s mark, shown unmodified, and it appears only on reviews that actually went out — which is why it shows on some of your reviews and not others.

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Tips and best practices

• Turn it on early, even with a small catalogue. The star ratings on your products work for every review you have, and they are what your theme reads.
• Don’t panic at a large “Not being sent” number. For most stores, most of it is imported reviews that were never going to qualify, plus reviews still inside their response window.
• Pause, never toggle off, for a temporary stop.
• Check “Last checked” before anything else when the numbers look wrong. It separates “nothing was due” from “nothing is running”.
• If your theme still shows no stars after ratings report as up to date, the gap is your theme — not every theme renders the native rating on every template.

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FAQ

Do I still need the Reorbit review widget?

Yes. Syndication gives themes and the Shop app structured star ratings and review data; the widget is what shows the review text, photos, and your replies on your storefront.

Why does my product show more reviews in its rating than Shopify displays?

Because they count different things. Your rating covers the reviews your storefront counts, including ones held for your response. Shopify only individually displays reviews it can tie to a customer, an order, and a product.

Will my imported reviews go to the Shop app?

Usually not. Reviews imported by CSV or migrated from another review app are ineligible for Shop display regardless of how complete they are.

I turned it off by accident. What happens?

Everything published to Shopify comes back down. Turning it on again re-sends the catalogue from the beginning — nothing is lost, but it takes as long as the first run did.

Does a review update after I reply to it, or take it down?

Yes. Reorbit tracks what Shopify is holding and re-sends whenever a review changes, so publishing, replying to, or removing a review updates it everywhere without you doing anything.

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Related

• Sending Your Reviews to Google — star ratings in Google Shopping and free listings.
• Moderating Reviews — the response window decides when a review becomes eligible to send.