Open Reviews from the left sidebar, under Interactions, and you land on the moderation queue: "Approve, hide, or reply to reviews submitted from your website." Six more tabs sit beside it. This guide is written from what each control really does — which reviews publish without you, which are held, what a reply actually posts, and what schedules an automatic request — rather than from what the labels sound like.
Two different things in IcloneU are called reviewing. Reviews is what your customers say about your business: star ratings, comments, photos. Approving what your Clone wrote before it goes out is a separate surface with its own guide — Reviewing and editing AI responses. Nothing on the Reviews page holds, releases or edits a Clone reply, and nothing on that page touches a customer review.
The seven tabs
Every tab is its own address — /reviews?tab=items, ?tab=settings and so on — so you can bookmark whichever one you live in.
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Reviews | The moderation queue — every review on the account, whatever its status, newest first. This is where you approve, hide, reject, feature and reply. |
| Items | "Products, services, or locations that can be reviewed individually. Leave this empty to collect company-wide reviews only." Each item gets a Slug, which is what pins a widget to one product. |
| Requests | Send a review request to your contacts by email or WhatsApp, remind the ones who never answered, and read the history of everything sent. |
| Q&A | "Questions shoppers asked on your widget. Answer and publish them." Every question arrives held for approval — there is no AI classification on this tab. You can also publish a question and answer you wrote yourself. |
| Staff mentions | "People your reviewers named — extracted automatically from the review text." A tally per name with positive, negative and neutral counts, and the reviews behind each one. |
| Testimonials | "Hand-pick reviews as testimonials for your website. Trim or correct the quote and add the person's role and company." A separate, ordered wall you curate — editing a testimonial never changes the review it came from. |
| Settings | The publishing policy, Clone-drafted replies, the widget look, WhatsApp and automatic requests, and your Google review link. |
Reviews is included with every paid plan, so the entry is not a tier upgrade. It also needs the View reviews permission on the team member, which all three built-in roles carry — so an administrator, an expert editor and a response editor all see the same seven tabs. There is one permission for the whole module rather than one per tab: anyone who can open Reviews can also approve, reject and reply.
How a review gets in
There are four ways a row appears in the queue, and they do not all behave the same.
- The reviews widget on your site. A visitor rates you in the embedded widget. Up to five photos (JPEG, PNG or WebP) and one video can ride along, and only files IcloneU itself stored are accepted — a hand-edited submission cannot slip an outside image into your widget.
- The review page behind a request link. An emailed or WhatsApp request carries a one-time link to a hosted page: pick stars, add a name, a title and a comment. The link works once — once it has been used, or if it was never issued, the page says so instead of showing the form.
- A WhatsApp conversation. With in-chat capture switched on, a customer who replies to your request rates you inside WhatsApp with a star menu and then types the comment. Nothing opens in a browser.
- A CSV import. "Bring in existing reviews from a CSV export — they're added as published." Imported rows skip the AI step entirely and go live whatever your publishing policy says, which is the point: they are history you have already moderated. Recognised columns are "rating (required, 1–5), title, body, name, email, date, item", and a blank or unrecognised item column makes the row a company-level review.
The reviews widget authenticates with the same site integration key your web chat widget uses — the one that starts with hk- — and the request is refused unless the browser's origin is on that key's allowed list. Your public API key (ik-) is a different credential, for server-to-server calls, and must never appear in page HTML.
A review is stamped Verified Buyer when the email the reviewer typed matches one of your contacts that either carries purchase history or has the Verified buyer flag set by hand. The stamp is applied when the review is stored, but it is not final: importing contacts or orders re-checks the reviews already on file and promotes any that now qualify, and toggling Verified buyer on a contact re-stamps that contact’s reviews immediately, in either direction. A reviewer who leaves the email blank never gets it at all.
Deciding what goes live without you
Open Settings and the first card is When a review is submitted. You pick exactly one of three modes. It is the default path for every incoming review, and you can still override any single review afterwards.
| Mode | What happens |
|---|---|
| Auto-publish, hold flagged ones | "Clean reviews go live immediately; the ones you flag below are held for approval based on their AI classification." This is the default, and the only mode in which the flags below do anything. |
| Publish everything automatically | "Every review appears on the widget right away. You can still hide any review afterwards." The flags are shown greyed out, because nothing is held. |
| Hold everything for approval | "No review appears until you approve it." Classification still runs and still shows in the queue, but it changes nothing. |
Under the modes sits Hold a review for approval when it is — four flags, all four on by default: Negative, Rated 2 stars or lower, Detected as spam and Abusive or offensive. The first, third and fourth are decided by the AI classification you see in the Classification column; the second is decided by the star count alone and needs no AI at all.
A review with text is classified as Positive, Neutral, Negative, Spam or Abusive. When that step fails, the review is stored as Unclassified — which matches none of the three content flags, so it publishes. Leaving Rated 2 stars or lower ticked is what still catches the angry ones in that case. A review with a rating and no text at all skips the AI step entirely and is treated as negative at two stars or lower, positive above.
The mode and the flags are applied once, as a review arrives. Switching to Hold everything for approval does not pull back anything already published, and switching to Publish everything automatically does not release what is already waiting. Work the queue for that.
Working the queue
The Reviews tab lists the two hundred most recent reviews, newest first, with four filter chips above it: All, Pending, Published and Hidden. Select a row and use the toolbar, or double-click it to open Manage review, which shows the full text, any photos or video, the classification, and the reply history.
- Approve — publishes the review. It appears on your widget from that moment, and the publish date is stamped the first time it goes live: approving a review you had hidden restores it with its original publish date, not today's.
- Hide — takes a published review back off the widget. Offered only on a review that is currently published.
- Reject — the stronger version of Hide, meant for spam and abuse. The review stays in your account and stays in the queue.
- Feature / Unfeature — offered only on a published review. A featured review sorts to the top of the widget ahead of every other review, whatever sort order the visitor picked: "Review featured — it now shows first on your widget".
- Import reviews — the CSV importer, on the right of the same toolbar.
A rejected review carries the status Rejected, but none of the four chips selects it — only All shows it. Rejecting is also not final: open a rejected review and Approve is offered again, which publishes it. Treat Reject as a strong Hide with a clear label, not as a delete.
On the Items tab, deleting a product, service or location also deletes every review filed against it and every reply on those reviews. If you only want to stop collecting new ones, untick Active instead — the item keeps its reviews and simply stops being offered as a target.
Replying to a review
Open a review, write under Add a reply, and press Send reply. Nothing reaches your site before that press — not a draft, not a suggestion.
- Show this reply publicly on the widget is ticked by default. Untick it and the reply is stored as Private — visible to your team in this popup, never sent to the widget. Public and private replies can sit side by side on the same review.
- Draft with AI appears once you have turned on Let the Clone draft replies in Settings. It writes a suggestion into the box and labels it: "Clone-drafted — review and edit before you post." Edit it freely; it is ordinary text until you send it.
- With drafting on, opening a review that has no reply yet seeds a draft for you automatically — once per review. Close the popup without sending and it will not re-draft that one when you come back.
- A reply can be deleted from the reply list, which removes it from the widget too. There is no edit — delete it and write a new one.
A review submitted through a widget is answered in the voice of the Clone attached to the key that widget uses. Everything else falls back to the Default Clone you pick in Settings, exactly as the field explains: "Reviews left through a widget are answered by the Clone on that API key. This Clone covers the rest — WhatsApp, emailed review requests and imported reviews."
Asking for reviews
The Requests tab sends a one-time review link to your contacts. Each send creates a row in Sent requests that stays Pending until that link is used, then flips to Reviewed.
Pick a Channel
Email is always available. WhatsApp appears only once the WhatsApp card in Settings is complete — see the warning below.
Pick who it goes to
Send to is either All contacts or one contact tag. Nothing previews the resulting count before you send, so a tag is the safer way to try it the first time.
Pick what it is about
About is either Company — a review of the business itself — or one of your review items. This decides which widget the review will show up in, so it is worth getting right before you send.
Send requests
The toast reports how many went out and how many were skipped. Skipped is not an error; the list below says why a contact is skipped.
- On email: "Only opted-in contacts with an email are emailed. Opted-out and archived contacts are skipped automatically."
- On WhatsApp: "Only opted-in contacts with a phone number are messaged. Uses your configured WhatsApp template." A number WhatsApp has already reported as not reachable is skipped too, and so is any contact whose template send fails.
- A manual send does not check whether you have asked that contact recently. Sending the same tag twice sends twice.
- Remind non-responders re-sends to requests that are still Pending, were sent at least three days ago, and have never been reminded. One reminder per request is the ceiling — pressing the button again the same day does nothing.
- A reminder goes out on the channel the original request used, so a WhatsApp request is reminded over WhatsApp.
Under Settings → WhatsApp review requests three fields have to be filled in: the WhatsApp number to send from, an approved Template, and the Review link variable — the body variable of that template that will carry the link. Miss any one of the three and WhatsApp is not offered as a channel anywhere. Customer name variable (optional) and Product/item variable (optional) are what put the person's name and the product into the message; leave the product one unmapped and a purchase-triggered request arrives without naming what they bought.
Where reviewers leave the review decides that. Web link (opens a page) sends them to the hosted review page. In WhatsApp (reply with stars + comment) keeps the whole thing in the chat — but only if your template invites a reply, because the flow starts when the customer answers. After the review is stored, a customer who reviewed in chat is also sent your Google link, whatever they rated you.
Automatic requests after a purchase
Automatic review requests in Settings turns the manual send into a standing rule: Send review requests automatically after a purchase, then a channel, Days after purchase and Reminder after (days, blank = none). The card says plainly what it is waiting for: "Automatic sending activates once a purchase source (e.g. Shopify order sync) is connected. Your settings are saved and ready."
- One event books a request today: the Shopify connector's Order fulfilled event. An order that has been paid but not yet fulfilled books nothing — Order paid is a separate event and it schedules no review request — so on a store that ships slowly the clock starts later than customers expect.
- The delay runs from the moment that event arrives, not from the order date. Days after purchase takes 0 to 90, and 0 means the next sweep, which makes it the value to use for a test.
- The buyer is turned into a contact first, so the request has somewhere to go. An order carrying neither an email nor a phone number is dropped and nothing is booked.
- Four things then stop a booked request from sending: a request already sent to that contact in the last 90 days, the contact being opted out, no usable phone or email for the chosen channel, or that channel not being configured. Any of them stamps the request skipped rather than retrying it.
- The 90-day rule looks at the contact, not the product — a manual request you sent that person about something else still blocks the automatic one.
- If that contact has a conversation currently handed over to a human, the request is not skipped: it is postponed an hour and tried again, so the follow-up waits for the handover to close.
The automatic card reads your WhatsApp configuration as the page loads. Fill in the WhatsApp card and tick the automatic one in the same visit and the channel picker still offers Email only. Save, leave the tab and come back, and WhatsApp is there. Skip that step and an automation you believe is going out over WhatsApp is quietly emailing instead.
A manual send skips archived contacts along with opted-out ones. The purchase-triggered send only checks the opt-out. If you want someone left alone by every review request, opt them out rather than only archiving them.
Putting the result on your site
Published reviews are shown by an embedded widget. Open Connections → API keys, select the key the widget should use, press Embed, and go to the Reviews tab of that dialog. There are three snippets there.
- All reviews — the storefront view, with one tab for your products and one for the store itself. Paste it wherever a reviews page belongs.
- One product — the same widget pinned to a single item by its slug, with that item's image and name on top. The slug is the one you set on the Items tab.
- Testimonials wall — the curated quotes from the Testimonials tab, in the order you arranged them. Separate widget, separate script; it never shows a review you did not promote.
- Visitors can mark a review helpful, and the default ordering puts the most-helped first — beneath the featured ones, which always lead.
- A product widget also emits the structured data Google reads for star snippets. A company-level target emits none, deliberately: Google does not reward a business marking up reviews of itself.
A review filed against one of your items and a review filed against the business are two separate populations, and the widget keeps them apart. The store side shows only reviews that named no item — it is not the sum of your products' reviews. When a widget looks emptier than your queue, that split is usually why.
Widget look in Settings is a summary of the API key you select there, not an account setting: "Shared across your Web Chat and Reviews widgets — driven by the API key you pick here." Change the brand colour, theme, corners or headline through Customize look and it is written to that key the moment you close the dialog — "Widget look saved to the API key" — without touching the unsaved-changes bar at the bottom of the page. Everything else on the Settings screen does go through that bar.
Pointing customers at Google as well
Google reviews in Settings takes a Google review link or Place ID and offers it to customers on the way out — in request emails, on the thank-you screen after someone submits, in the widget, and in the WhatsApp chat after an in-chat review.
- Paste the full link or just the Place ID. Anything that is neither is refused when you save, rather than stored and silently ignored.
- The invitation is not conditional. As the field itself says: "The invitation is shown to every reviewer — Google doesn't allow asking only happy customers." Showing it only to the people who rated you well is review gating, and Google prohibits it.
- Download QR code gives you a QR for print. It encodes an IcloneU address that looks your Google link up at scan time, so changing the link later does not invalidate a poster you already printed.
- The emails, the thank-you screen, the widget and the QR all route through that counting address, and the total plus the last thirty days appear under the QR once there is anything to count. The link sent inside a WhatsApp chat goes straight to Google and is not counted. Open the review form also uses the raw link on purpose, so your own testing does not inflate the number.
Common questions
The default policy holds anything the AI reads as negative, spam or abusive, and anything rated two stars or lower. Any one of the four is enough on its own. Open the review and read the Classification column to see which one caught it — and remember the star flag fires on the rating alone, so a two-star review with a perfectly pleasant comment is still held.
In order: a Shopify store has to be connected and reporting fulfilments, because Order fulfilled is the only event that books a request; the order needs an email or a phone number for the buyer; the contact must be opted in and must not have been sent any review request in the last 90 days; and if the channel is WhatsApp, the number, template and link variable all have to be saved. An open handover is not a cause — that request is postponed an hour and retried, not dropped.
Not on the review. The text is the customer's, and your levers over it are publish, hide, reject and feature. What you can edit is a testimonial: promoting a published review to the Testimonials tab makes a separate, editable copy, so you can trim a long quote there without altering the review the widget shows.
No. The item is fixed when the review is stored — by the widget's slug, by the request that was sent, or by the item column in a CSV import. To correct one, hide or reject the original and ask again with the right target, or re-import that row against the right item.
No, that is the design. Imported reviews are added as published, skip the AI classification, and keep the date from the CSV rather than today's. They are treated as history you have already moderated. If you would rather approve them yourself, hide them after the import and work through the queue.
They share whatever comes from the API key you point them at — brand colour, theme, corners, language. If you want them styled differently, put them on different keys and give each key its own look.
Last updated August 25, 2026 · Contacts
