Review groups

Last updated: September 30, 2026

When you sell the same shirt in eight colors, each color has its own Shopify product — and each product gets reviews about the same garment with different colors mentioned. Review Groups let you combine those reviews into one pool that shows on every variant’s product page, so a shopper looking at the Navy color sees all 47 reviews instead of just 5.

Plan availability. Review Groups is included on every plan — Free, both current paid plans, and every legacy plan (no longer sold), Starter and Reviews included. Groups you’ve already created keep rendering on your storefront regardless of plan.

Managing groups. Create and edit groups in your BetterReviews admin under Collect → Product groups. If you have many products to group, a developer can create and update groups in bulk through the Review Groups API.

What grouping changes

When a product is in a group, three things change on its product page:

  • Aggregate count — the headline review count shows the group total, not just the product’s own count.
  • Subtitle disclosure — under the stars, the widget reads “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants” or, if you’ve set a name for the group, “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants in the Summer Tee collection.” This is required for FTC review-disclosure compliance: you can’t show a 47-review aggregate without surfacing that some of them are about siblings.
  • Per-row attribution — each review row that wasn’t submitted for this product shows a small “Reviewed: Red Shirt — Navy” label, so the shopper knows which color the review is actually about.

What does not change:

  • Submissions — when a customer reviews their navy shirt, the review still attaches to the Navy product, not to the group. Variant context stays accurate.
  • JSON-LD search-result stars — Google’s product reviews policy prohibits cross-product aggregation in product schema. The visible widget shows the group aggregate, but the rich snippets in Google reflect the product’s own count only.

Setting up a group

In your BetterReviews admin, go to Collect → Product groups and click Create group.

  • Name (internal) — the merchant-only name for the group. Shoppers never see this. Use whatever helps you find it later: “Summer Tee variants 2026”, “Beach collection”, “Bundle: Yoga starter kit”.
  • Display name (optional, customer-facing) — what the shopper sees in the disclosure subtitle. Setting “Summer Tee” makes the subtitle read “Based on 47 reviews across 8 product variants in the Summer Tee collection.” If you leave this blank, the subtitle falls back to “across 8 product variants.” Cap: 100 characters; HTML tags and template markers are rejected for security.
  • Products — pick up to 500. Each product can only display from one group at a time.

Conflict resolution

If you try to add a product that’s already displaying from another group, BetterReviews asks: “This product is currently showing reviews from Other Group. Switch its PDP to display from this group instead?” Click Switch display to move it; click Cancel to leave it where it was.

This question is asked once, at the moment of the conflict — not as a permanent setting on every product. If you ever want a product out of a group’s display, just remove it from the group.

How review ordering works in groups

When the group has wildly uneven volumes — say one color has 200 reviews and the other seven have 5 each — we cap any single product at 30% of the displayed slots. So if the widget shows 10 reviews from the group, no more than 3 of them will be from the same product, and those slots fill from the remaining members newest-first. If a product has fewer reviews than its quota, the slots reflow to the next-best member. This diversity cap applies to the first page the PDP renders; once a shopper loads more reviews or changes the sort, the list is the group’s reviews in their chosen order with no per-product cap.

This is meant to keep the displayed pool diverse so one prolific SKU doesn’t drown the others.

Edits and their timing

When you add or remove a product from a group, the storefront usually catches up within a minute. Refresh the product page to confirm.

Deleted products stay in the group

If you delete a product in Shopify, it stays in its group. Its reviews keep counting toward the group’s rating and review count on the other members’ pages. This is on purpose: when you replace an old product with a new one, keeping the old product in the group keeps its reviews showing on the new product’s page.

If you don’t want a deleted product’s reviews in the pool, open the group and remove the product.

Removing a group

From Collect → Product groups, open a group and choose Delete. Each member product goes back to its own per-product reviews on the storefront, usually within a minute. Deleting can’t be undone; to group the products again, create a new group.

What’s not in v0

  • Shopify Collections sync — you can’t currently auto-populate a group from a Shopify collection. Defined groups are merchant-curated; collection sync is on the roadmap.
  • Group-level analytics — group-aggregated reporting is on the roadmap. The per-product reviews list still works as-is for grouped products.
  • AI-recommended groups — coming. We’ll suggest groups based on product similarity once we’ve collected enough signal.