Can we respond to reviews in the App Store?

[nickm]

It'd be great if we could respond to reviews in the Shopify App store. Will this ever be in the pipeline? Whether these responses are shown or not, it'd be good for reviewers to know we read and appreciate their feedback.

I'm the developer for Madify (http://apps.shopify.com/madify), which integrates MadMimi and Shopify.

I have a review from a customer who seems to think my app is made by Shopify, and they're disgruntled over what they perceive to be Shopify's "additional charges". I'd understand if they though myself as a developer charged too much, but the impression I get is they think the apps are made by Shopify and they're getting ripped off.

Also, I can't find a record of that shop ever installing my app - in which case why are they allowed to review it?

Sidenote: this was removed from the Shopify Stack Overflow for being off topic. Forgive me, I forgot you guys were going for the whole fragmented community thing. I should really keep tabs on and post to two communities for the same topic.

[Dennis Theisen]

Not to comment on the review functionality, but to me it sounds like the customer is unhappy about the $4.95 charge for an app integration which is in addition to the charges of both Shopify and MadMimi.

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[nickm]

Fair call. I was getting my impression from the reviewer saying "I was so glad Shopify integrated it". They mightn't realise apps operate independently of Shopify and are made by outside developers. It'd probably be an easy assumption to make for the average user as well. It'd just be nice to reply is all :) 

[Edward Ocampo-Gooding]

Hi Nick,

Since we added reviews in the app store, we’ve been wanting to offer this kind of functionality, but haven’t come up with a clear way to present it while keeping customer-facing UI simple and obvious. In the meantime, I figure we should just keep things reasonable and transparent via email.

For now, what I recommend doing is this:

* If the review content states a currently untrue fact (i.e. some feature is broken and it has since been fixed), then follow up with the reviewer and ask them to revisit what they had stated. The apps team regularly receives email from merchants/developers asking for reviews to be retracted since their  cause of distress has since been resolved.

* If after reasonable effort on your part to try and contact the merchant with an issue that is also perpetuating an untruth, ask us to investigate and show reproduction steps of proof that whatever the thing is isn’t the case. You can reach the apps team at ap...@shopify.com

* If the review is just some complaint about Shopify/some pricing thing and it’s clear that they haven’t even tried the app (like in this case), contact ap...@shopify.com and let them know about the review you want to dispute and we’ll probably just unpublish it. The key part here is that the review doesn’t help make a future merchant make an informed decision about whether to try the app or not. If the review fails that test, then it’s just discouraging visitors without a factual base, so boo that.

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