shopping cart software

To download the full Version 5 Manual, please go to http://manual.volusion.com

4-stars, 2 thumbs up, Epic Win or Epic Fail, everyone's a critic and this includes store customers. Constructive criticism can be a wonderful thing however - it can let people know of potential mistakes, issues with quality or execution. In this end, constructive criticism can help make something better overall and this goes for Volusion-based merchants and their customers.

Volusion V5 enables merchants to hear from their customers by offering a simple, intuitive product feedback system. This system can provide store customers the ability to leave feedback on store products and merchants the ability to review and manage these comments.

Getting Started:

Customers have the ability to simply post a review to rate any product within the Volusion store. This can be done directly from the Volusion storefront. This process will be discussed in Part II of this chapter.

For merchants, reviews can be viewed and managed within the Volusion Administration Page by clicking on the Customers tab and clicking the Customer Reviews link in the purple menu bar. The subsequent portions of this chapter will describe how to activate and manage customers' reviews as well as how customers can submit a product review themselves.

Part I - Activating Customer Reviews:

In order for customers to be able to post reviews of products within the Volusion storefront, merchants must first enable this function of Volusion V5. Merchants have the ability to allow customers to post reviews or simply leave this option inactive.

Merchants can activate Volusion V5's customer review functions as follows:

• Log into the Volusion Administration Page and click the Inventory tab.
• Click the Products link in the green menu bar.
• In the Products page, click the Products Settings link in the purple field.
• Once this area has expanded, click the EnableCustomerReviews link.
• Click Save Changes to activate the Customer Review function in V5.

Part II - Submitting a Customer Review:

Volusion customers can post a product review for any active product within the Volusion store by simply going to the product's details page within the storefront and clicking on the "Write a Review" link below the product's description.

When submitting a review, customers can provide their name, geographic location, a title for the review, comments on the product or service and finally rate the product from 1-5 stars.

When posted to the product, each review will be displayed near the bottom of the product's details page, displaying the review rating, title and comment. Additionally, other visitors to the product's details page can rate if a review was helpful or not by clicking either a "Yes" or "No" button available for each review.

Additionally, the total number of customers that rated a review as helpful will be listed above each review. Finally, an average score (between 1 and 5 stars) for the product, based on all reviews applied to it will be listed just below the product's description.

Any review submitted to a product will automatically be displayed on the product's details page, provided it is not flagged by the system's content filter. Merchants who wish to remove a particular review from a product must edit the review by deleting it or making it inactive from within the Customer Reviews table in their store's Admin Page

Note:

As mentioned earlier, merchants have the ability to review all customer reviews contained within their Volusion store by logging into the Volusion Admin Page. From here, merchants can view and edit any review that has been posted to their site - even ones that have been made inactive due to the system's content filter (see Part IV for information on the "Review Content Filter" functions).

Customer reviews can be viewed by logging into the Volusion Admin Page, clicking on the Customers tab and clicking on the Customer Reviews link in the purple menu bar. Click on the ID number for any review to edit it. Each review contains the following information:

* These fields are required to have entries for any customer review.

Part IV - Review Content Filter:

Constructive criticism from online customers is warranted - destructive criticism however is not. In reality, 99% of customers who would submit a review simply want to express their honest opinion on a product or service. It's that 1% however that can make a mess of things. If someone leaves a rude or derogatory comment within a customer review, have no fear - Volusion has an automatic filter built into the Customer Reviews portion of the system to handle such issues.

While logged into the main Customer Reviews page within the Volusion admin, click on the "Edit Offensive Language Filters" link near the top of the page.

This will redirect to a page containing a table of offensive language or terms. Volusion V5 comes equipped with filters to prevent offensive language from being posted to an online store using the customer review system. Merchants can in addition, create their own filters by clicking the Add button and entering the offending word or phrase.

If a customer review is posted to the Volusion store with content that matches any entry in the "Offensive Language Filter" table, the review will be recorded in the Customer Reviewers database however, it will, by default, be set as inactive - hiding it from public view.

Note:

This content filter is not case sensitive. If any content within a review matches an entry in the review filter - regardless of case, the review will be made inactive.

Tips and Special Settings:

Note on Filtered Reviews:

Merchants may notice that, despite coarse or foul language, the "Offensive Language Filter" merely hides reviews when it discovers objectionable content rather than delete the review outright.

This is an intentional effect of the system's design. The decision to purge inactive reviews from the system is left to the discretion of the merchant. One reason for this is to accommodate false positives.

For example, a customer posts a very positive review to a merchant's site that contains some objectionable language. In this case, despite a positive review, due to coarse language, the review will not be displayed. Rather than lose a positive review outright, the system allows merchants to examine reviews and in the case of this example, possibly edit them to remove the offending term then make the review active on the storefront.

Summary:

With the Customer Review page in Volusion V5, merchants can not only offer their customers the chance to give feedback on products and services offered online but also manage that feedback. Merchants can quickly see an overview of feedback on their products as well as keep unwanted terms or phrases out of the review process. Customers can even rate reviews. This can provide merchants with useful feedback and also allow their store to engage their customers online - making for a more interactive experience with V5.