Okendo's Auto-Publish feature allows you to minimize the time spent manually publishing reviews and gives you the ability to determine what content you want to automatically publish.
In this article, you will learn about;
Best practices for publishing reviews
We encourage you to publish all of your reviews, positive and negative, unless the content is offensive or unrelated to your products or brand. This gives shoppers a genuine, broad understanding of customer sentiment about your products.
Do's and don'ts of collecting and publishing reviews
We also strongly recommend that you follow these guidelines when publishing your reviews:
Do collect and publish reviews only from verified customers and buyers
Don't incentivize your customers to leave reviews for your site
Don't discourage your customers from submitting negative reviews
Don't publish fake reviews to your store's site
Don't publish reviews that you don't have the ownership rights to
Respond to negative reviews
If you receive a negative review, thank the customer for their feedback and ask how you can help improve their shopping experience. A few things make a reply more effective than a generic apology:
Acknowledge the specific issue raised. Shoppers reading the reply can tell a templated response from one that shows you actually read the review.
Offer a concrete next step — a replacement, a refund, a support contact — rather than just an apology.
Keep the tone non-defensive, even if you disagree with the review. Future shoppers are reading your reply, not just the reviewer.
Reply privately instead of publicly when the issue involves personal details like an order number or account information.
✨ Use AI in Okendo to automate responses, and choose whether the reply is public, private, or internal-only. See Reply to your customer reviews.
Set up auto-publish
Keep in mind the following when you enable auto-publish in Okendo:
If the star rating or sentiment options block a review from being published, the review remains in "pending" status for 14 days before Okendo automatically publishes it.
A review must meet all of the auto-publish options you selected before Okendo will automatically publish it, and the auto-publish rules apply only to reviews you receive after you save your changes.
To set your reviews to auto-publish
Open the Okendo admin panel.
Navigate to Reviews > Settings > Publishing and toggle on Enable auto-publish.
Enter a number in the field to set the Minimum star rating required for auto-publish.
💡 The minimum star rating required for auto-publish defaults to 4. We recommend setting this to 1 and following the "respond to negative reviews" guide above.
Configure the auto-publish options
Setting | What it does |
Block auto-publishing of unverified reviews | Prevents Okendo from auto-publishing unverified reviews. You may receive an unverified review from a customer who used the Write A Review button and didn't confirm their email address after writing the review. |
Block auto-publishing of reviews with media | Prevents reviews with photos or videos from being auto-published. This also includes reviewer avatars — both a custom-uploaded profile picture and one linked via a Google account count as media for this rule. |
Block auto-publishing of reviews with profanity | Prevents reviews that contain profanity from being auto-published. Okendo analyzes the content of the review and determines if it contains inappropriate language. |
Block auto-publishing of reviews with negative sentiment | Prevents reviews that have a negative sentiment from being auto-published. Okendo analyzes the content of the review and determines if the language is positive or negative. |
5. Configure the profanity filter options
Setting | What it does |
Use default Okendo profanity list | Uses Okendo's default profanity list, which includes a long list of most words that would generally be regarded as "profane." |
Censor flagged words with *** | Automatically censors words in the profanity list. Reviews with profanity may still be valid and helpful for other shoppers, so we encourage publishing them if they're legitimate, relevant, and non-abusive. |
Custom profanity list | Lets you either replace the default profanity list or add words to supplement it. |
6. When done configuring your settings, click Save.
FAQs
Q: Why did my review change from published back to pending?
A: When a customer updates their review, for example by adding or changing their avatar or adding media, Okendo re-checks it against your auto-publish rules. If it no longer meets one of those rules, most commonly Block auto-publishing of reviews with media since avatars count as media, the review reverts to pending so you can moderate it again. You can approve it manually, or turn off that option if you don't want avatar changes to trigger re-moderation.