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Setting up your surveys

Everything you need to know about your checkout and post-fulfillment survey questions, how they are displayed, and how changes are made.

Updated over 6 months ago

What are they?

Your surveys are the core of how you collect your reviews. Without your surveys, you are not able to prompt a way for your customers to leave a review about the experience they had or the products they purchased.

There are two different types of surveys that Shopper Approved offers to give you a way to collect both merchant and product reviews: the checkout and post-fulfillment survey.

Note: If you are a service-based company and do not utilize the product review feature, the product portion of the survey will not apply to you. 

Checkout (initial) Survey

The checkout survey is the survey that pops up on your thank you page after a customer places an order on your site allowing them to review the online experience they had with your company. This survey captures the seller review. 

The checkout survey is generated through your thank you page code. To update your checkout survey you can locate this in the top left menu > Surveys > Custom Survey:

Once this code is added to your site, you will want to make sure you test it to make sure that it is working properly. 

Note: If we are adding the code for you, we will verify all is working as expected.

Additional features for the checkout survey would be to make comments mandatory and turn on the "email all" feature. These can be found under the top left menu > Setup > Seller Ratings:

  • Making comments mandatory
    By turning this feature on, each customer will be required to leave a comment on the checkout survey. The benefit of this feature is to help increase the number of reviews with comments when they are syndicated to Google. When the follow-up email is sent to your customers, the post-fulfillment survey will have the original comments auto-populated from the checkout survey. For these comments to count towards your Google Seller Rating page, the comments need to be present in the post-fulfillment survey submission since Google requires 100 reviews with comments within the last twenty four months from the post-fulfillment survey.

  • Email all
    This feature will send a follow-up email to all customers who check out regardless if they have filled out the checkout survey or not. It removes the opt-in option for a follow-up email. This feature will also make it so that anyone who goes through your checkout-out page and bypasses the checkout survey will receive a follow-up email, giving you more opportunities for post-fulfillment reviews. If you are collecting product reviews with us, the follow-up email will prompt the customer to leave a product review within the post-fulfillment survey.

    Note: If you have this feature enabled, you MUST ensure that you have the email addresses of your customers auto-populated AND that your posted privacy policy notifies your customers that you may share their email addresses with a third party.

NOTE - For auto-populating your values, any selections you make in this area will add the variables necessary but include placeholder values. You will need a programmer to populate these values with the actual values for the customer.

Post-Fulfillment (full) Survey

The post-fulfillment survey is the survey that your customers receive in the follow-up email that is sent to them after the number of days you have set in your dashboard.  This survey is where your customers can leave a final review on the service and/or product they purchased. There are additional questions that are provided to your customers for them to complete and help you as a company better understand how to sustain or improve your business. 

The post-fulfillment survey can be for both Merchant and Product Reviews. Product surveys would be for companies that sell products and have additional questions that ask about overall shipping/delivery satisfaction. Merchant surveys would be for companies that sell services and have all the same questions that are required for companies that sell products, except the shipping/delivery satisfaction question. 

Your post-fulfillment survey will be sent to your customer in a follow-up email. The number of days and email template can be located from the top left menu > Setup > Seller Ratings. You want to be sure to set the appropriate number of days for follow-up.

You can fully customize when the follow-up email is scheduled to be sent out to your customers. By default, the follow-up email is set to be sent out 10 days after checkout. It's recommended to customize this setting to be the average amount of days after checkout it takes for customers to receive the item they purchased giving customers the ability to leave a post-fulfillment review after their entire shopping experience has been completed.

Note: customize the follow-up day setting by going to (top-left menu > Setup > Seller Ratings > Customize settings for your Initial/Follow-up Survey).

The "customize your followup email" has a default template and we do not recommend making changes. This email has been tested and any changes could impact your delivery. We currently have a 93% delivery rate, a 70-73% open rate, and a 40-45% click-through rate.

While we understand the desire to make improvements, this email helps us collect over 1 million reviews a month and we do not recommend making any changes. If it is important to you to change the email format, please expect that your conversion will be greatly impacted but we won't know what it is until you make the change. This can be found under the (top-left menu > Setup > Seller Ratings > Customize your followup email). After how many days would you like Shopper Approved to send a link for the post-fulfillment survey to your customers?

Viewing Your Surveys

To view how your checkout and post-fulfillment surveys are displayed, you can generate your surveys through your dashboard. You will navigate to the Surveys > Custom Survey page and click "view survey":

Survey Questions

Both the checkout and post-fulfillment surveys will have questions that your customers have the chance to rate or answer. Some questions are required and cannot be removed being that they are required by Google, and others you have the chance to remove.

Required:

  • How would you rate your overall shopping experience so far? (Checkout survey)

  • How would you rate your overall shopping experience? (Post-fulfillment survey)

  • Please type a quick message about your shopping experience so far. (Checkout survey)

It is important to know that these questions can be altered to tailor more toward your line of business. However, these questions cannot be fully removed. 


Not required:

  • How likely are you to recommend our site to others? (Checkout survey)

  • How likely are you to buy from us again if you ever need a similar product/service? (Checkout survey)

  • How satisfied were you with the overall price that you paid? (Post-fulfillment survey)

  • How satisfied were you with the products/services that you received? (Post-fulfillment survey)

  • How satisfied were you with the order delivery time? (Post-fulfillment survey)

Any of these questions can be altered just like the required questions, and if you do not want to display them, you can deactivate them through your dashboard. You can include all the default questions and also add more if you wish; however, we do see more success from surveys that are left, simple, short, and to the point. 

What if I need to change the wording of my questions?

At this time we do not allow the wording of your survey questions to be changed on your end. If you would like to change the wording of a question, you can reach out to our support team at [email protected].

Please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team if you have any other questions or need any more assistance.

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