Importing reviews

Last updated: October 17, 2026

If you’ve been collecting reviews on another platform (Okendo, Judge.me, or via a CSV export from anywhere — Feefo, Yotpo, Loox, Trustpilot…), you can bring them into BetterReviews without losing them.

Importing is step 1 of onboarding — /onboarding/connect lets you pick your source platform and routes you through the right import flow. Importing is free: you don’t need a subscription to bring your reviews in or to render them on your widget. AI analysis (the marketing-ready and support-routed tags) runs on every plan, Free included. Imported reviews get a lighter analysis pass across the whole import; on a paid plan your newest 500 imported reviews also get the full pass when the import finishes.

What you can import

Okendo — direct API connection. Reviews, photos, videos, ratings, customer info, and replies.
Judge.me — OAuth connection. Same coverage as Okendo. Judge.me videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo aren’t shown; videos uploaded directly to Judge.me are copied like photos.
CSV — upload a CSV export from any other platform (Yotpo, Loox, Feefo, Trustpilot, Google, etc.). Feefo’s column names are recognised automatically. Q&A exports from Okendo also work — see Importing Q&A →.

Connecting Okendo → · Connecting Judge.me → · CSV import and export →

More direct integrations (Yotpo, Loox) are planned. If you need one that’s not listed, let us know.

What gets imported

For each review from Okendo or Judge.me:

Star rating
Review title and body text
Reviewer name (preserved as it was on the source platform)
Reviewer email — imported and stored encrypted at rest (via our PII vault). We also compute an email_hash for deduplication. Imported reviewers do not receive review request emails unless they place a new order at your Shopify store.
Erased customers stay erased — if the customer previously had their data erased from your store (a GDPR or Shopify customer-erasure request), their review is imported as Anonymous with no email, customer, order, or location details. CSV re-uploads of an erased customer’s reviews are skipped.
Photos and videos — copied from the source platform onto our storage (JPEG/PNG/WebP photos up to 10 MB, MP4/MOV videos up to 50 MB). The widget shows them once the copy lands, usually within minutes; videos show a still frame taken from the video itself. A photo the source platform no longer serves is hidden automatically instead of showing as a broken image
Submission date — we preserve the original date so your review history is accurate
Verified buyer status — if the source platform marked the review as verified
Merchant replies — pulled during the initial bulk import. Replies added on the source platform after initial import currently do not sync via webhooks.
Product mapping — we match by Shopify product ID. A review whose product doesn’t match your Shopify catalog is still imported and kept in your dashboard, but it isn’t shown on any product page
Store reviews — reviews about your shop rather than a product (Okendo calls these “site reviews”) are imported as Store reviews. They’re labelled “Store review” on the Reviews tab of your dashboard and never appear on a product page. Show them on your storefront with the Store Reviews block — see Store reviews page

What doesn’t get imported

Helpful / not-helpful votes — schemas differ per platform
Source-platform-specific fields — custom attributes or tags specific to your old tool

Moderation status on imported reviews

Imported reviews preserve the source platform’s status:

Approved on Okendo → approved in BetterReviews (publishes on the widget)
Pending on Okendo → pending in BetterReviews
Rejected on Okendo → rejected in BetterReviews

If the source status is missing, empty, or a value we don’t recognise, the review imports as approved and publishes on your widget. Map the status column explicitly if you want reviews held for moderation. There is no “import as pending” toggle — status always comes from the source.

After import, a synced review you reject in BetterReviews stays rejected even if Okendo or Judge.me sends it again. Approvals you make here normally stick too.

Imported reviews do not run through your auto-approve rules — at submission time, on source-status change, or when you change your auto-moderation preset. The threshold rule only ever evaluates reviews collected through BetterReviews’ chat or public form.

Imported reviews do flow through BetterReviews’ AI analysis pipeline — the same one that powers marketing-ready filtering and support-routed detection — on every plan, Free included. Every review from a CSV or platform import runs through a lighter analysis pass, up to a generous per-store allowance; it fills the same fields (sentiment, quality score, marketing potential, keywords, use cases) and the storefront treats them the same way. On a paid plan, the newest 500 reviews of each import also get the full pass as soon as the import finishes, and reviews mirrored from Okendo or Judge.me get the full pass as they arrive. Reviews you collect yourself always get the full pass, on every plan.

Large libraries are analysed a slice at a time, so a very big import can take a few days to catch up. Imported reviews that were pending on your old platform appear in your Inbox once they’ve been analysed (up to your store’s import analysis allowance).

When you subscribe, we re-run the full prompt across your imported reviews, newest reviews first, up to 25,000 reviews per activation. Recent reviews are usable within minutes; older ones catch up in the background. If your library is larger than 25,000, tell us and we’ll run the rest. Analysis is purely a tagging step (sentiment, marketing potential, support flags) — it never changes a review’s approval status.

Ongoing sync vs one-time import

Two modes:

One-time historical import

When you connect a platform, we fetch every historical review. This runs in the background and usually finishes within an hour for stores under 10,000 reviews.

Ongoing webhook sync

After the historical import, we subscribe to the platform’s webhooks (where available) so new reviews continue to flow into BetterReviews. Useful during a transition period when you haven’t fully switched yet.

Judge.me caveat: webhook sync requires the Awesome plan. On the free Judge.me plan we can still do the one-time import, but you’d manually resync via the “Sync Reviews” button to pull new reviews.

You can disconnect anytime. Disconnecting stops the ongoing sync; previously imported reviews stay in BetterReviews.

Timing and scale

Typical import speed:

Under 1,000 reviews — under 5 minutes
1,000 – 10,000 reviews — under an hour
10,000 – 100,000 reviews — a few hours, often runs overnight
100,000+ — we batch to respect source-platform rate limits; reach out first

You can use your BetterReviews admin during the import. The Reviews tab populates incrementally.