Request a review and view reports amongst other enhancements in Reviews 2.1

Reviews for Easy Digital Downloads makes it quick and easy for your visitors and customers to review the products offered on your website. We’re thrilled to release version 2.1; a significant update for Reviews that we’ve been working on for a few months now.

Request a review

A hugely requested feature that is coming to Reviews 2.1 is store owners being able to request reviews from customers after they’ve made a purchase. This feature can allow you to follow-up customers’ purchases should they have any feedback but also help prospective customers coming to your store in making a decision before they purchase a product.

Once enabled, users will receive an email when they’ve completed a purchase, requesting a review of the products purchased.  The email can be scheduled to be sent immediately or at a later time so you can give customers a few days to get to grips with your product!

This feature can be enabled and configured from the Reviews Emails settings (Downloads > Settings > Emails > Reviews).

If the email is scheduled to send at a later time, a CRON job will be scheduled to send the email at the set time.  The setting can also have a Start Date set to ensure only customers who have made purchases since the set date will get emails.

Reporting

This update introduces three new reporting views which serve to provide site admins greater insight as to which downloads are performing well and which are being reviewed the most.

Three reports have been introduced:

• Highest Average Rating of Products
• Lowest Average Rating of Products
• Most Reviewed Products

Easier review management from the admin side

The Reviews metabox on the Download edit page which displayed the most recent reviews has been revamped to be cleaner, intuitive and easier to use.  It now displays the most recent reviews laid out in an easy-to-read manner.  We’ve also introduced inline replies allowing you to quickly and effortlessly reply to reviews.  Furthermore, you can now approve reviews straight from this metabox – without the need to refresh as well.

Guest reviews

Another heavily requested feature is guest reviews.  This has been added to Reviews 2.1 so now reviews can be posted without having a user account registered on the site beforehand. This is an optional setting that can be toggled from the Reviews Settings.

Other enhancements

• New feature to send a notification email to site admins when a new review is posted
• New feature added to allow the posting of a review to be delayed by a certain amount of days after purchasing
• [downloads] shortcode can now be sorted by average rating
• Only load CSS on single downloads and remove fixed width of labels
• Introduced an option to prevent authors from leaving reviews on their own products
• Use edd_get_option() instead of $edd_options global to ensure the correct filters are applied.
• All the review counter bars are now responsive
• “Insert Review” media button wasn’t displaying anything when modal was opened
• Rating stars now display correct on the “Vendor Feedback page”
• Dashboard widget now links to the correct URLs

Version 2.1 of the Reviews is available now and can be downloaded directly from your Plugins page for a one-click update. The new version may also be downloaded from your account page. If you have not yet purchased a license, see the product page for more information.