15000 fake reviews deleted

Plus: 2 notable merchant updates

July 03, 2023

Hello and welcome back to another Shop Pulse edition. It feels like we've hit the e-commerce jackpot this week. There’s so much news, it's like trying to fit an elephant in a shopping cart.

  • 15000 fake reviews deleted ❌ 

  • 2 notable merchant updates 🪄

  • Developer update roundup đź“ż

15000 fake reviews deleted ❌ 

Fake reviews have been a perennial problem. This doesn’t just affect app developers who are trying to earn an honest living but also misleads merchants into thinking an app is trustworthy.

As Harley says, integrity is everything. There has been a major announcement regarding app reviews which could give us an insight into how app reviews will work in the future.

Here are the big takeaways from Glen Coates’s thread, Shopify’s VP of Product.

Fake review detection

  • Move from manual checks to product signals to improve the detection of fake reviews

  • Review signals include checking if the reviewer is associated with the app developer and strange activity like high review volume, repetitive text in the review content, etc.

  • Check whether reviews are from active shops in “good standing” - we assume this refers to shops paying their invoices on time and not suspected of fraud

Current and future action

  • Clear cases of fake reviews are being removed but (suspected) lower-quality reviews will be de-ranked

  • Future updates could include delaying publishing the review so Shopify’s systems have more time to prevent fake reviews going live

  • Another update being considered is AI-powered review summaries

As long as there are gains to be made with fake and/or incentivized reviews, there will be bad actors who take advantage of it. But with this and future updates like review publishing delays, we hope that it becomes almost impossible for people to game the system.

2 notable merchant updates 🪄

1/ URL handle translations for different languages

For any store selling to customers in different languages, you can now manually set translated URL handles for different languages. This will be a massive boost to your SEO efforts in different languages.

Example, you may want your product URLs to be example.com/products/en-us/red-shoes for English-speaking customers and example.com/products/es-us/zapatos-rojos for Spanish-speaking customers

Credit to Youness for the feature demo 👇️ 

2/ Collabs Network launched for Collabs creators

The Collabs Network for creators launch is an extension of a beta program that started in August 2022 for a small group of merchants in the US & Canada.

It allows merchants to share their products and brand profiles with all verified Collabs creators by setting a commission offer for eligible products.

With the latest update to this program, creators can search for products and generate their own commission links to drive sales - all without needing any further approvals.

To be eligible, you have to be a creator from US, CA or UK who has completed Collabs onboarding and have at least 1000 followers on a public social media account.

This should help Shopify merchants acquire customers faster, cheaper, and easier.

Developer update roundup đź“ż

There have been an impressive 46, count it, 46 changelog entries for the last week. With coffee as the primary fuel (we guess), 39 of those came in on July 1st alone!

Let’s check out the major ones:

1/ URL resource handles are now translatable (as detailed in the section above)

2/ Checkout editor gets one-page checkout customization & preview.

3/ More checkout goodness with an increase in Checkout UI Extension limit to 50!

5/ Gift cards API available for all merchants and partners.

Pulse Check ⚡️

That's a wrap for this week! Join us over on Twitter to chat about all things e-commerce. It's like attending the coolest virtual shopping party – no long lines, pushy salespeople, or shopping cart collisions in sight (@theshoppulse)