Why Brands Are Stopping Chasing Reviews

Many brands now send endless streams of emails essentially saying "please, please, please review us"?. Some feel that this is a bit desperate, like something that you have to do because your customers want to know your store is real, does what it says and generally operates without issue?

But you spent countless hours ensuring all these things are true, begging for validation is in fact off-brand and a waste of resources.

The Problem with Review Chasing

The review ecosystem now demands resources of you and your customer.

Buy a £5 phone charger, and suddenly you're fielding emails, text messages, and in-app notifications begging for feedback. What used to be occasional has morphed into relentless nagging as more and more stores compete for customer feedback.

And guess what? Most customers are just tuning it out. Delete, delete, delete.

After all that effort, the number of reviews is incredibly small. Take Barclays – they've got 24 million customers, but only 11,336 TrustPilot reviews. That's 0.00047% of their customer base. Let that sink in. You're allocating resources and making decisions based on what amounts to less than one person in twenty thousand.

I have worked with several online brands who dedicate significant resources (including founder time in some instances) to managing their review presence – time burnt responding to complaints, investigating suspicious one-stars, begging (paying?!) for removal of mistaken reviews.

The Case for Saying "Enough" to Review Chasing

Smart DTC brands have started asking the question: "Why the hell are we doing this?"

When you strip away the industry hype and FOMO, the case for review solicitation gets pretty flimsy. The brands I work with are increasingly longing for:

An end to the review bribery economy. ("give us five stars and we'll give you 15% off.") We all know it happens. We all pretend it doesn't. And it makes the whole system even less trustworthy.
A way to measure what normal, satisfied customers think – not just the ecstatic superfans or the perennially angry. Normal customers sit in what we term the "Review Valley" – that large gap in our understanding where the typical customer experience disappears into thin air.

Look at any review distribution and you'll spot a weird pattern – they're almost always U-shaped. Tons of 5-stars, a bunch of 1-stars, and a wasteland in the middle. That's not how satisfaction actually manifests itself in real life; in fact it's the exact opposite – a normal distribution with most in the middle neither elated or affronted, just happy people getting on with their lives.

StoreScore — A New Approach That Fits Modern Online Brands

Our approach flips the traditional review model on its head. Here's how it works: after a customer receives their order, they get one simple message: "We assume you're happy with your purchase. If that's not the case, click here." That's it.

It's like a real world customer leaving a bricks and mortar store via the revolving door. They are assumed happy with their purchase - if they later find something wrong, they come back and talk to customer service. If they are really really happy they may drop a note to the manager saying how wonderful their experience was.

See the difference? No manipulation. No begging. No psychological tricks to boost your score.

Key differences:

While traditional platforms capture a typical 0.05% of customer experiences, StoreScore tracks almost every single transaction (>99%). We generate a 'StoreScore' metric based on how many orders went smoothly over the last 90 days.
We only capture negative signals when something's actually wrong. Meaning the scale of dissatisfaction reporting is proportionate the whole customer set not just a vocal minority
The entire customer experience feels like your brand – elegant, straightforward, and respectful. No disconnect between "premium experience" to "desperate feedback surveys."
We have a whole range of other goodies as well - we have admin handling of negative experiences, testimonial capture (and display widgets) and other metrics for display to your customers.

Run It Alongside or Instead of Traditional Platforms

Look, I get it. Ripping out your existing review system feels risky. That's why we designed StoreScore to work either as a replacement OR alongside your current setup.

The system is designed to allow stores to run both systems. They use traditional platforms for the detailed stories and narratives that some customers want to share, while using StoreScore to fill in that massive blind spot – the 99.95% of customers who never speak up.

This hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds: rich, detailed feedback from your vocal minority alongside comprehensive data about your silent majority.

Small and medium sized businesses especially feel this pain. When you've poured your heart into building something, watching a single fake or mistaken review destroy your rating is soul-crushing.

Conclusion

The review status quo isn't working. While traditional platforms capture opinions from a tiny fraction of customers, StoreScore gives you visibility across your entire customer base.

Our approach is straight-forward: assume satisfaction by default (like in the real world), and make it easy for customers to let you know if something's wrong. The result is a more accurate, more representative picture of your business performance—without the constant chasing of customers.

With a straightforward 5-minute Shopify installation, you can start measuring what actually matters. Stop chasing reviews and start tracking genuine customer satisfaction.

Real Metrics. Real Transactions.