Google Customer Reviews

Google Customer Reviews is Google's own survey: after a shopper completes an order, Google may ask them to opt in to rating their experience with your store. Enough responses feed a seller rating that can appear next to your store in Google Search and Google Ads.

This is not the same as two other things it's easy to confuse it with:

• It is not Google Maps or Google Business Profile reviews. Those are a separate Google product tied to your physical business listing, unrelated to this survey.
• It is not Brainerce's own product reviews feature (the star ratings and photos shoppers leave on your product pages). That's a Brainerce feature you moderate yourself; Google Customer Reviews is Google's survey about your store as a whole, and Brainerce never sees or moderates the responses.

Where to find it

Open Apps → Google, pick your sales channel, and open the Readiness tab. Find the row Google Customer Reviews opt-in: the checkbox and the fallback delivery days field sit inside that row. They are not in the setup wizard. You'll need a Merchant Center account connected with a Merchant ID first: Customer Reviews can't be enabled without one. See Set up Google and connect Merchant Center.

Turning it on

Ticking Confirmed on that row only records that you've told Brainerce you want this on (and unticking it records the opposite). Accepting Google's own program terms happens entirely on Google's side, separately. Brainerce does not do that step for you and does not substitute for it.

If some orders don't have a reliable delivery estimate

The survey needs an estimated delivery date for each order. Most orders get this automatically from the shipping option the shopper chose at checkout. Some don't:

• Local pickup orders.
• Orders shipped with a carrier that didn't return a delivery-time estimate.
• A manual shipping rate you set up without delivery-time fields filled in.

For orders like these, type a fallback number of delivery days into the Fallback delivery days (used only when an order has no delivery estimate) field on the same row. It saves when you click out of the field, it has to be more than 0, and clearing the field removes it. If you don't set one, the survey is simply skipped for those specific orders. A fallback is never applied to an order that does have its own delivery estimate. Brainerce never invents a delivery date to show Google. This has nothing to do with the shopper or their order being unusual; it only depends on whether a delivery estimate exists.

Every eligible order sees the same survey

The survey shows up the same way on every order that has the data it needs: Brainerce does not pick and choose which shoppers get asked based on how the order went, and completing an order is never made to depend on answering the survey. Whether a given shopper actually sees the opt-in prompt after that point is between them and Google.

Language

Google's Customer Reviews widget does not support every language. Notably, it does not support Hebrew. The languages Brainerce passes to the widget are Afrikaans, Arabic, Czech, Danish, German, English (including Australia, UK and US), Spanish (including Latin America), Filipino, French, Irish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Malayalam, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). If your store's language isn't on Google's own supported list, the survey still displays (Google decides what it falls back to), but you should not expect it to appear in your storefront's own language just because the rest of your dashboard and storefront do. The Readiness row tells you when this applies to your store, with a note that the survey widget doesn't support your language. This is a limitation on Google's side, not something Brainerce's integration can work around.

Adding it to an existing (already-live) store

If your store was scaffolded before this feature existed, turning on the opt-in above is not enough by itself: the survey component also needs to be present in your storefront's own order-confirmation page code. Your developer or storefront builder needs to add it; see the SDK documentation for getGoogleCustomerReviewsSurvey().

To check whether it's actually live, open the Readiness tab in the Google app. It has two separate rows for this:

• One confirms you've completed the opt-in step above.
• The other checks your live storefront's order-confirmation page directly and reports whether the survey component is actually there.

Confirming the opt-in does not, by itself, make the survey appear on your storefront; the second row is what tells you whether the code was actually added and is working, without needing to wait on Google's own account-level reporting to catch up.

What this does not do

• It does not guarantee a seller-rating badge or star rating will appear in your ads. Whether that happens depends on Google's own program eligibility and on getting enough survey responses over time. Turning the opt-in on is a prerequisite, not a guarantee.
• It is not a substitute for accepting Google's Customer Reviews program terms. That acceptance happens on Google's own site.
• It does not read, moderate, or store the survey responses. Those go straight to Google; Brainerce only sends the order data the survey needs to run.

What's next?

• The Google Readiness tab: what the two Customer Reviews rows on that tab mean and how to use them to verify an upgrade.
• Get found on Google: connecting the Merchant Center account this feature depends on.
• Product reviews: Brainerce's own, unrelated storefront review feature.