Verified Reviews for WooCommerce — Documentation

DataFirefly Reviews (dfreviews) turns the native WooCommerce review system into a social-proof machine: automatic post-purchase review requests, Verified purchase badge, customer photos, helpful votes, AI review summary on the product page, AI auto-reply to reviews, reward coupon and Schema.org rich snippets. This documentation covers installation, full configuration and troubleshooting.

Installation

1. In your WordPress admin, open Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Select dfreviews-1.0.0.zip, click Install Now then Activate.
3. A new WooCommerce → DF Reviews submenu appears: this is the plugin’s control center.

Requirements: WooCommerce 8 or 9, WordPress 6.0+, PHP 8.0 to 8.3. The plugin is HPOS compatible (High-Performance Order Storage) and runs without jQuery or Composer.

OpenAI key configuration

The AI summary and auto-reply use your own OpenAI API key:

1. Create a key at platform.openai.com.
2. Paste it in WooCommerce → DF Reviews → Settings, OpenAI section.
3. The default model is gpt-4o-mini — cheapest, recommended. A summary or reply typically costs well under one cent.

Automatic review requests

Review requests section of the settings:

• Trigger order status: the request is queued when an order reaches this status (default Completed).
• Send delay: days to wait after the trigger status (default: 3 days).
• Reminder: a single reminder email goes out if no review was posted (default: 5 days after the first email).

Every email contains a personal tokened review link: a review posted through it automatically receives the Verified purchase badge. Emails are sent in batches of 50 on each cron run. The Request queue tab lists the last 100 requests with their status (pending, sent, reminded, completed, failed, unsubscribed) and offers a manual processing button.

AI review summary

As soon as a product reaches the minimum published review count (default: 3), the cron generates a block shown at the top of the product page reviews tab: strengths, points to note and synthesis.

• The summary is cached per product and per language: with Polylang or WPML, each language version shows a summary in its own language.
• It is regenerated automatically when new reviews are published (invalidation by fingerprint of the analyzed reviews).
• The Max reviews analyzed setting limits how many reviews are sent to the model.

The AI tools tab lists generated summaries with language and date.

AI auto-reply to reviews

Every published review can receive an AI-generated merchant response, written in the language of the review. Key settings:

• Publication mode: Draft (recommended at first — each reply waits for your approval in the Comments screen) or Publish immediately.
• Tone: warm, professional or concise.
• Signature name: shown as the reply author (empty = site name).
• Reply to ratings from: 1 to reply to every review — recommended, since negative reviews benefit most from a response.

Built-in guardrails: for ratings of 3/5 or below, the reply apologizes and redirects to support, never promising a refund. Replies are capped at roughly 70 words, display with the Official response badge, and are excluded from rating averages and rich snippets.

Photos, votes and reward coupon

• Customer photos: customers attach up to 3 photos (configurable, max 10) to their review — jpg, png, webp, gif, 5 MB max, displayed with a lightbox.
• Helpful votes: “Was this review helpful?” buttons with duplicate protection per account and per hashed IP. Never shown on merchant replies.
• Reward coupon: on review publication, the customer receives a percentage coupon (default: 10%, 30 days), unique, single-use, restricted to their email. Anti-farming: one reward per email and per product.

Form and display

• Review title field, optional or required.
• Minimum review length in characters (default: 10).
• Rating distribution block (5★ to 1★ bars) above the review list.
• Star color customizable (hex, default #e7a11a).

Schema.org rich snippets

The plugin keeps WooCommerce’s native AggregateRating and Review markup while sanitizing it: merchant replies are excluded from the markup and averages, keeping your Google stars accurate. The option can be disabled in the settings, which then strips all review markup.

Cron: making delivery reliable

Processing (requests, reminders, AI summaries, catch-up replies) runs hourly via WP-Cron. Since WP-Cron only fires on site visits, set up a real server cron for reliable delivery:

1. Copy the tokened cron URL shown in Settings → Cron.
2. Add it to your host’s cron (or crontab), every 15 to 60 minutes, e.g. with curl -s "URL" > /dev/null.

A concurrency lock prevents two simultaneous runs. The Run processing now button in the Request queue tab triggers a manual run at any time.

CSV import and export

Import / Export tab:

• Export: all product reviews with rating, title, verified flag and dates.
• Import: CSV with a header row and columns product_id or sku, author, email, rating, title, content, date (Y-m-d H:i:s, optional), verified (1/0, optional). Rating statistics are recalculated automatically after import.

Customer account

A My reviews tab is added to the customer account (My Account): each customer finds their reviews with moderation status, stars and verified badge. If the tab returns a 404 after activation, re-save permalinks via Settings → Permalinks → Save.

GDPR and data

• Unsubscribe link in every request email; unsubscribed addresses stored as SHA-256 hashes, never in plain text.
• Voter IP addresses hashed with the WordPress salt.
• Only outbound call: the OpenAI API you control, and only if a key is configured.
• Uninstalling removes the plugin’s tables and settings but keeps all reviews (native WooCommerce reviews).

Troubleshooting

• Requests are not going out: check the feature is enabled, orders actually reach the trigger status, and the cron is running (last run shown in AI tools). Set up the server cron URL.
• No AI summary: OpenAI key configured? Minimum published review count reached? The summary is generated on the cron run, not instantly.
• No AI reply: check the mode (in draft mode the reply waits in Comments → Pending), the configured minimum rating, and the API key.
• Emails not received: the plugin sends through the WooCommerce mailer — test your global email setup (an SMTP plugin is recommended).