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Reviews & Ratings — Setup per platform

Plans: Starter ✓ · Growth ✓ · Pro ✓ · Agency ✓ (what enables reviews is your platform or review app, not your Clione plan)

Why it matters​

Schema.org's aggregateRating on a Product is the signal that:

  • Makes a product eligible for the star rating in Google search results.
  • Gives AI assistants a concrete answer when someone asks "is X any good?".

Clione reads reviews, it never creates them​

Clione doesn't collect reviews. It reads the rating your platform or review app already has for each product, and adds it to the product's JSON-LD as aggregateRating. If a product has no real reviews, its JSON-LD has no aggregateRating at all — Clione never publishes a placeholder or an invented rating.

What Clione publishes:

{
  "@type": "Product",
  // ... other fields ...
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": 4.7,
    "reviewCount": 143,
    "bestRating": 5,
    "worstRating": 1
  }
}

The rating is the aggregate only: the number of reviews and the average. Individual reviews are not included.

BigCommerce​

BigCommerce has built-in product reviews. Clione reads each product's review count and rating total during sync and publishes the average on a 1–5 scale.

  1. Make sure product reviews are enabled in your BigCommerce store, and approve the reviews you want published.
  2. In Clione, sync the catalog (Sync → ⟳ Sync all).
  3. Publish the product. Its JSON-LD now includes aggregateRating.

Third-party review apps on BigCommerce (Yotpo, Stamped.io, Okendo, Reviews.io and others) keep reviews in their own systems. Clione reads BigCommerce's native reviews only, so either:

  • turn on your provider's option to sync reviews back into BigCommerce's native reviews, or
  • keep using the provider's own schema markup.

Don't use both for the same products: two different ratings on one page confuse search engines.

Shopify​

Shopify has no built-in reviews; you need a review app (Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, Stamped.io, Okendo, Reviews.io and others).

Clione reads Shopify's two standard review metafields on each product:

  • reviews.rating — the average, with its scale.
  • reviews.rating_count — the number of reviews.
  1. Install your review app and turn on its option to write ratings to Shopify's product metafields. Apps name it differently — look for "rich snippets", "SEO", "schema" or "metafields" in the app's settings.
  2. Check that it worked: in Shopify admin, open a product with reviews and look for the rating in the product's Metafields section.
  3. In Clione, sync the catalog (Sync → ⟳ Sync all).
  4. Publish the product. Its JSON-LD now includes aggregateRating.

A product whose review count is 0 (for example, after its last review was deleted) is published without a rating.

Troubleshooting​

aggregateRating is missing from a product's JSON-LD — Check in this order:

  1. The platform has the rating. BigCommerce: the product has approved reviews. Shopify: the product shows reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count in its Metafields section. If not, it's a review-app setting.
  2. Clione has synced since. Run a sync, then open the product's </> tab in Clione and look for aggregateRating.
  3. The product is published. The rating reaches the storefront with the product's JSON-LD when you publish. See Publish.

The average differs from what the review app shows — Apps compute averages slightly differently (rounding, weighting). Clione publishes the value the platform reports; fix any discrepancy in the review app.

The JSON-LD is right but no stars show in Google — Google decides whether to show stars, can take weeks for new products, and never guarantees it. Use Google's Rich Results Test to confirm the markup is valid.

Why we don't fabricate ratings​

The question we get most often is "can Clione generate placeholder ratings?". The answer is no, and it won't change:

  • Google's rich results guidelines forbid placeholder or self-generated ratings.
  • Fake ratings can get your rich results removed and lead to a manual penalty.
  • AI assistants increasingly discount ratings they can't verify.
  • It's bad for shoppers: 4.7 stars with no reviews behind them does more damage than no rating once someone notices.

The right path is collecting real reviews. Until you have them, the enrichment's own fields — who a product is for, when to choose it — describe it without pretending to be third-party validation.