Import reviews from a spreadsheet

While Scuti collects customers’ reviews on its own, you may also want to import reviews from other external sources and showcase them on your store using the Scuti review widget. Fortunately, we’ve made this process easy. You can simply import reviews from three different external sources.

  1. Import reviews from a spreadsheet
  2. Import reviews from other review apps
  3. Import reviews from AliExpress

In this article, we will particularly focus on how to import reviews from a spreadsheet. The first step is to have all your reviews in a CSV file with a correct data format. The rest is just a few clicks which will be described later.

How to prepare your reviews in a CSV file?

Your CVS file can be created from any spreadsheet application like Google Sheet, Mac Numbers, or Microsoft Excel. Once you have access to your application, please follow the steps below:

  1. Open your spreadsheet application. Or click here to create a copy of Scuti — Review Import Template in Google sheet.
  2. (Optional) If your reviews were already stored in a file, try to import your reviews to your spreadsheet application.
  3. Make sure the first row (the header row) of your sheet includes only column names. I.e., the first row shouldn’t be a review data.
  4. (important) If your file already has its own header row, make sure the column names match the column names in Scuti — Review Import TemplateIf not, just change the column name to have the exact match with the following required columns. The review is not imported if the required columns are not found. However, the column order doesn’t matter and it is okay to have extra columns.
  5. Starting the second row, fill out the review data (one row per each review). Make sure that the required columns are filled out for each review. You can also find more information and examples in the Instruction tab of the Scuti — Review Import Template.
  6. Download your sheet as a CSV file. In Google sheet, you can click “File” -> “Download” -> “Comma-separated values”

Required Columns

The header row should at least have the following required columns with exactly the same name.

  1. product_name (or product_id): The product name for which the review is. You can find the product title from your Shopify admin, Products > All products. The name under the Product field is the product name. Note that you only need product_name or product_id.
  2. product_id (or product_name): Each product is assigned by a unique id. Follow this instruction to find the product_id from your store admin. Again, note that you only need product_id or product_name.
  3. rating: The review rating. The valid numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  4. author: The customer’s name who has written the review.
  5. body: the review’s text.
  6. review_at: The time at which the customer has left the review. The app can handle almost all standard data formats. But, for avoiding confusion, we recommend using this format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss or YYYY-MM-DD. Note that the date cannot be in the future.
  7. (Optional) photo_url: The URL (link) to the review’s photo if your review has a photo. The accepted photo formats are JPG, JPEG & PNG. Please do not leave any trailing characters after the .jpg/jpeg/png ending.

Import reviews from the prepared CSV file

Once you have your CSV file in hand, follow the below steps:

  1. Go to Import Reviews page from the Scuti left menu, and then head over Import from a spreadsheet section at the bottom of the page.
  2. Upload the ready CSV by clicking on “Add a CSV file”:
Import review from a spreadsheet: Add a csv file
  1. Click on the green “Import” button on the right-bottom corner:
Import review from a spreadsheet: Import button

Import review results

Once reviews are processed, you can see the status of importing results in three numbers:

  1. Number of successful imported reviews: This number indicates how many reviews have been imported successfully into your product pages. You can see these reviews on your store product pages.
  2. Number of failed imported reviews (not imported): This number indicates the number of reviews that were failed to be imported. Common reasons for failure are as follows:

(a) The column names of the first/header row in the CSV file doesn’t match with the names explained as above.
(b) A required column has been missed. The required fields include: product_name (or product_id), ratingauthorbodyreview_at
(c) The product_name or product_id of the review has not found in your Shopify product database.
(d) The date format of the review_at is not a standard format. If you’re not sure, please change the format to “YYYY-MM-DD” where YYYY represents the year (e.g., 2021), MM represents the month (e.g., 08), and DD represents the day (e.g., 12).

If you are sure everything is correct, please contact us via [email protected] and attached your .cvs file. We will get back to you in a few hours.

  1. Number of duplicated reviews (not imported): This number indicates the number of reviews that haven’t been imported because there was an exact same review (in terms of review’s body, author, date, rating) for that specific product.v

What’s next?

If you have any feedback or question or need us to add more features, please leave a comment below or contact us. If you haven’t tried our product yet, you can give it a shot and take the advantage of our free plan.