VerifiedReply

Your site asks your customers for a review by email. Their reply becomes a review on the product they bought, and any photographs they attached can go on it too. The customer does not make an account, follow a link or load a tracking image to leave a review, they simply hit reply, the way they would to anybody, and attach a picture if they want to. The reply is tied back to the order it answers. Somebody at your end approves it, chooses which pictures go with it, and it publishes as an ordinary WooCommerce review. Every published review carries a link to a verification page. A shopper can follow it and read an independent record of the reply behind the review. When it arrived. Which email provider signed it. Whether the words on the product page still match the reply. Whether the reply came from the person the shop wrote to. What it does on its own, free and unlimited Everything in this list works the moment you activate the plugin. No account, no key, no sign-up and no trial. There is no limit on how many review requests you send, there never has been, and there is no paid tier of the sending.

• Sends a review request per order, on an order status change and with a delay you configure.
• Lets you write a different request per product category, so a customer is asked about what they actually bought.
• Asks once per order, and once per WooCommerce subscription rather than once per renewal.
• Can catch up on past orders, within a window you set.
• Lets each request send on its schedule, or only when you press Send now.
• Replies come back to the address your shop already sends from, like any other email.

What an optional VerifiedReply account adds

• Routes replies to the service instead of your inbox, and pushes them back to your site.
• Holds every reply for a person to approve. Nothing is published automatically.
• Publishes an approved reply as a native WooCommerce review on the product bought.
• Shows any photographs the customer attached to their reply, and publishes the ones you tick alongside the review. JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP. The boxes start empty, so nothing is published unless you say so, and you can delete a photograph from a published review later.
• Adds a verification link to the review card.
• Never rewords, merges or re-attributes a review. Shortening is marked, disclosed and reversible.
• Adds no schema markup of its own. Your reviews are WooCommerce reviews and your theme marks them up as it already does.

WooCommerce is required. The plugin will not activate without it. What it does without an account Install it, write a request, and it sends review request emails from your own site on your own schedule. It adds no Reply-To, so replies come back to the address your shop already sends from and land in your inbox like any other email. No account, nothing configured, no data leaves your site. Used that way it is a complete review request mailer, free and unlimited, for as long as you want to use it. What it does not do is collect those replies, publish them, or add a verification link, because it never sees them. What an account adds Connect a VerifiedReply account and the request emails carry a Reply-To at verifiedreply.io. Your customer's reply goes to the service instead of your inbox. The service checks it, sends it back to your site for somebody to approve, and hosts the verification page the published review links to. VerifiedReply is a service operated at https://verifiedreply.io. It has a free tier, and paid plans for shops that want more replies each month. The verification happens there rather than on your site on purpose. The point of the verification page is that a shopper does not have to take the shop's word for anything. So the evidence behind it cannot sit with the shop being checked. Here is what leaves your site, and when. When you press Request a VerifiedReply Account, and never otherwise. The site address, the plugin version, the WooCommerce version, the WordPress version, and the same self-check figures shown on the screen you press it from: whether Action Scheduler is draining, how many review requests are published, whether the service addresses are set, whether credentials are present, whether replies are waiting, and the site timezone. Nothing is sent until somebody with permission to manage WooCommerce presses that button. The plugin schedules nothing and sends nothing on its own, so a site that never presses it is never heard from. It carries no account name and no key, and nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews. You may press it as often as you like. Your customers' replies go to VerifiedReply, not to you. The review request email your shop sends carries a Reply-To address at verifiedreply.io. When your customer replies, their message is delivered to VerifiedReply rather than to your shop. VerifiedReply keeps that message in full, indefinitely, because the message itself is the evidence behind the verification page. The reply is never published by the service. When a review request is sent. Your account name, the WooCommerce order ID, and the customer's email address, name and company as held on that order. When a review is published, edited or taken down. Your account name, the published review text, the reviewer's first name as it appears on the review, the product name, the address of the review on your site, an order reference, the time of publication, and internal identifiers for the reply and the comment. The star rating is not sent. When a reply that came with photographs is opened or published. Your account name, the service's own reference for that reply, and which part of the message the picture is, so the service can send that one picture back. It is asked for once to show you a picture on the screen where you decide, and again for each picture you tick when you publish. Nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews goes with it, and a picture you do not tick is never asked for. Once a photograph is published it is a file in your own media library like any other, served by your own site. Once a day. Your account name and the version of this plugin. Nothing about your customers, your orders or your reviews. The service answers with two yes or no flags: whether it is still vouching for your shop, and whether it is holding replies that have not reached you yet. When you connect the site. A one-time enrolment code, your site address, the address of this plugin's inbound route, and a signing secret this site generates for itself. Everything above goes over HTTPS to verifiedreply.io and nowhere else. Nothing is sent to any other third party, and no third-party script is loaded on your site or your customers'. Every request carrying your account's data is signed with a key held only by your site and the service. The enrolment exchange is not signed, because at that point your site has no key to sign with. The install ping is not signed either, and carries no key and no account name. If you connect an account, you are then using the VerifiedReply service, which is governed by its own terms and privacy statement. If you never connect one, none of this applies to you:

• Terms of service: https://verifiedreply.io/terms/
• Privacy statement: https://verifiedreply.io/privacy/

What it costs The plugin is free. Sending review requests is free, unlimited, and stays that way. The service's free tier verifies and publishes two replies a month, with no contract. That is twenty-four verified reviews a year, each one carrying its own verification page a shopper can follow and check. Steady, real proof on your product pages, at no cost, and a lot of small shops never need more than that. Paid plans raise how many replies reach your shop each month. Nothing is lost if you go over: replies above your allowance are still collected and checked at the service, and they arrive when you move up. Pricing is at https://verifiedreply.io.

The review request emails work as soon as you install the plugin, free and with no limit on how many you send. An account is only needed for the replies.

1. Install and activate the plugin. WooCommerce must be installed and active first.
2. Go to VerifiedReply, then Emails, and publish a review request. Write it in your own words. Set the order status that starts the clock and how many days after it the email goes.
3. Optionally write a second request per product category, so customers are asked about what they bought.
4. Optionally use Catch Up to ask customers who ordered before you installed the plugin, within a window you choose.

That is enough to start asking. Replies come back to the address your shop already sends from. To have those replies verified and published as reviews:

1. Go to VerifiedReply, then Settings, and press Request a VerifiedReply Account. That is what tells us your shop exists: nothing is sent to us before you press it. The screen lists exactly what the request carries.
2. We get in touch and send you a one-off enrolment code for this site.
3. Back on VerifiedReply, then Settings, either paste that code and press Connect, or press Confirm on an enrolment we have offered your site. Only confirm one you were expecting.

You can also ask for an account at https://verifiedreply.io if you would rather start there. From then on replies arrive on the Replies screen instead of your inbox. Each one waits for somebody to approve it before it is published. Anything a customer attached is shown on the same screen, and you tick the photographs you want published with the review.

4.5.1

• A reply that gives a rating as "5" now reads as five stars. Any number from 1 to 5 followed by an asterisk counts. An asterisk for emphasis, as in "5*", or after a longer number, still gives no rating.
• Replies you already have are read again when you open them, so one waiting for you picks up its rating after you update.
• On a narrow phone screen the Request a VerifiedReply Account button wraps its label instead of running off the edge.

4.5.0

• The home screen now shows how many reviews you have published, in a new box between Replies collected and Pending Replies. One reply can become several reviews, or none, so it differs from the replies collected.
• It counts reviews live on your shop now. One you later unapprove, bin or mark as spam drops out.
• The four boxes sit four, two or one to a row, so none is left on a row of its own.

4.4.1

• Each review written from a reply about more than one product now has its own check and its own verification page. Before, they shared one, so each showed whichever was checked last.
• Edit one of those reviews and only that one is checked again. Only it loses its mark if its words no longer match what the customer sent.
• Removing one takes down its page and nothing else.
• On the Replies screen each review has its own mark, spaced apart, opening its own page.
• Existing reviews are brought across in the background after you update, in batches. Each review shows no mark until its batch has run, and a review from a reply about several products until its own check comes back.
• Product names with an ampersand now read properly on the verification page.

4.4.0

• A review request email can now be limited to a number of times per customer. Each email has a new box under the age limit: "Send the same email address this request at most [ ] times". Put 1 in it and a customer who orders every month is asked once.
• It counts that email only, and earlier sends count too, so it covers customers you asked before updating.
• It is checked when a request is queued and again when it is due. A request that reaches the limit while waiting is not sent, and the order note says why.
• The catch-up screen respects it, so running a catch-up a second time no longer asks the same people again.
• Send now on the order screen still sends, and counts towards the total.
• Leave the box blank and nothing changes. That is how every email starts after the update.

4.3.2

• The number beside VerifiedReply in the admin menu now matches the Pending Replies card on the home screen. A held reply counts as one in both, so nothing to deal with and a reply held back reads 1+ in each.
• Nothing about collecting or publishing has changed.

4.3.1

• The Pending Replies figure on the home screen no longer reads "0+ more!" when replies are held back over your monthly allowance. It counts the held reply as one, so it reads 1+, or 4+ with three to deal with.
• While replies are held, the sentence under the figure says the number includes at least one more over your plan limit, and that upgrading unlocks it.
• Nothing about collecting or publishing has changed.

4.3.0

• A Manage your plan card on the VerifiedReply home screen, with a Manage subscription button. It appears once your site has a collection slug.
• The button takes you to verifiedreply.io on a signed link, so there is nothing to log into. A shop with no paid plan gets a checkout, a shop already paying gets its own billing page. The plugin is not told which, and it never learns whether you are paying.
• If replies are being held back because you are over your monthly allowance, the reply list says so and offers the same button. It cannot say how many are waiting or when they arrived, only that there are some. Nothing is lost while they wait.
• Nothing about collecting or publishing has changed.

4.2.0

• You can ask a customer to confirm words they already sent you. A new Verify existing review box on the order holds those words and an optional rating, and a shipped email sends them back to the person who wrote them.
• It is two steps: press Update to save the words against the order, then press Send now beside the verification email in the VerifiedReply box. Nothing is sent from the box itself.
• The email arrives as a second draft titled "Verify an existing review", marked manual only so it never goes out on its own. Two new merge tags, {quote_text} and {quote_rating}, if you would rather write your own.
• The seeding only runs on a site that has never had a review request email, so an existing shop has to add the template by hand.
• The words go out between two marked lines, and the email says what each answer means: leave the lines alone and it publishes as it stands, edit between them and the edit is published, write something different above them and that is used instead, ignore it and nothing is published.
• Where a customer writes their own line and leaves the quoted block below it, both come back and you choose which to publish, or whether to publish anything. They are never merged.
• Asking us for an account now sends the email address in Settings > General, so we can reply to you. The button's description prints the address before you press it. It is the site's address rather than that of whoever presses the button.
• The setup list and the messages after asking for an account are shorter, and the sentence about pasting an enrolment code has moved below the button.

4.1.3

• Every review request now carries an unsubscribe link, so Gmail and Outlook show their own Unsubscribe button on it. Press it and the site stops sending that address review requests. Anything to do with an actual order still goes out as before.
• Opening the link shows a page saying what will happen and a button. Nothing is recorded until the button is pressed, so a scanner or mail program following the link on its own takes nobody off the list.
• Asking to stop being emailed and asking not to be published are kept apart. Someone who unsubscribes can still have their reply published, and someone who objected to publication still gets asked about their next order.
• There is no screen listing unsubscribed addresses yet. Somebody who replies asking to be taken off still needs a person.
• Review requests carry a tidier Message-ID. The identifier has not been used to find a reply's order since last August, so it now carries nothing at all and is only there to be correct. Where your mail plugin allows it we write it ourselves, and where it does not, yours is used as before.
• The "How a reply finds its order" panel on Settings describes one mechanism instead of two, and there is a new line saying which plugin sends your site's mail.

4.1.2

• The button that asks us for an account is on the VerifiedReply home page now, in the setup list, as well as on Settings. You no longer have to find Settings to start.
• You have to tick a box agreeing to the terms of service and the privacy statement before you can press it. Both open in a new tab. The box is empty every time, and pressing without ticking sends nothing and records nothing.
• When we send an enrolment code, your site accepts it by itself. There is no Confirm to press: a code is tied to your site's address when we issue it and will not work anywhere else, so the code arrives and the site connects.
• If the site could not reach us, Settings says so and offers Try again. The code is still good. Nothing retries on its own.
• The setup list is four steps instead of five, and asking for the account is now above writing your review request email.
• No change to sending review requests, collecting replies, publishing them, or the mark on a review.

4.1.0

• Customers' photographs. A picture sent with a reply can now be published on the review, and taken down again later.
• A reply that came with pictures shows them on the same screen as the customer's words, each with its type and size. Tick "Publish this picture along with the review" on the ones you want. The boxes start empty, so nothing is published unless you say so.
• JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP are shown and kept, where your own server can process them. Anything else a customer attaches is not offered to you.
• To remove one later, open the review and use the "Photographs sent with this review" panel. Each picture has a "Delete this photograph" box, and nothing is deleted until you press Update.
• Showing a picture and removing a picture are in the same release deliberately. Publishing a customer's photograph with no way to take it down is the wrong half of the job.
• No change to which replies are collected, when they are collected, or who decides what gets published. That is still your decision on your own screen.
• One fix applies to every reply, not just ones with pictures. Some mail programs put an invisible character at the very start of a message, and a reply could arrive with blank space before the first word as well. Either used to end up at the front of the published review. Both are taken off now.

4.0.1

• Asking VerifiedReply for an account is now a button on the settings screen, under Connect this site. Press Request a VerifiedReply Account and we hear about your shop.
• It used to happen by itself, fifteen minutes after you switched the plugin on, and only if the site was already connected to an account. Those two together meant a shop that had just installed the plugin could not tell us it existed, which is the one thing it needed to do. If you installed between 5 September and today, we never heard from you. Sorry.
• Nothing is now sent to VerifiedReply unless somebody presses that button. The plugin schedules nothing and reports nothing on its own. The screen lists exactly what the request carries before you press it: the site address, the plugin, WooCommerce and WordPress versions, and the check figures shown above the button. Nothing about your customers, your orders or your products.
• You can press it as often as you like. We are told about a site once, so a second press cannot bother anybody, and if the first one went missing pressing it again is the right thing to do.
• If your site cannot reach us, it now says so instead of failing quietly.
• No change to sending review requests, collecting replies, or publishing reviews.

4.0.0

• Every reply a customer sends is now emailed to you as it arrives. This is on once you install, and you did not have to ask for it.
• Until now a reply sat on the Replies screen until somebody went and looked at it. If that is once a week, a customer who took the trouble to write waits a week for their review to appear. So does anybody asking you to stop emailing them, and every request you send promises them they can ask.
• The email arrives looking like the customer's own message. Same subject, their words, and the reply address set to theirs, so pressing Reply in your mail program answers the customer directly. It is sent from your shop's own address with the customer's name on it, because mail leaving your server cannot claim to come from their address without being treated as spam.
• Under a line at the bottom there is a link that opens that reply on your site, ready to publish. The email publishes nothing and there is no way to publish from it. Publishing still happens on your site and nothing about that has changed.
• If somebody is asking not to be emailed, that is said at the top in plain words. Nothing acts on it by itself. It is put in front of you because it is the one thing here that should not look like ordinary correspondence.
• The setting is under VerifiedReply, then Settings, under Collection. "Email each reply as it arrives" turns it off. Underneath it, "Email those replies to" takes one or more addresses separated by commas. Leave that empty and the emails go to your site's admin email, so it is worth checking that address is one somebody reads.
• A very long reply is cut short in the email, with the whole of it still on the screen. Each reply is emailed once, however many times it is delivered to your site.
• This is the first release on WordPress.org. The plugin now updates through WordPress like any other plugin in the directory.

3.14.0

• The plugin's own screens now look like VerifiedReply. Home, Send requests, Catch-up and Settings take the same design as the VerifiedReply website. Nothing your customers see has changed, and nothing about how requests are sent, how replies are collected or how reviews are published has changed either.
• You can now choose a light or a dark screen, at the foot of Settings under Appearance. The choice belongs to you rather than to the shop, so two people administering the same shop each get their own. Leave it alone and the plugin follows whatever your computer is set to.
• Settings is grouped into boxes rather than one long list, with the mark's ink and your light or dark choice together under Appearance.
• Replies and Emails are WordPress's own list screens and are unchanged.
• The download is larger, roughly 220KB against 150KB, because the plugin now carries the design and its typeface. None of it loads on your shop's front end.

3.13.1

• If your shop runs PHP 7.4 you have not been offered an update in some time. The plugin has always run on PHP 7.4, the same version WooCommerce asks for and the one its own header declares, but the file telling WordPress which shops may update said 8.0. Any shop on 7.4 was passed over silently.
• It now says 7.4. If several versions have gone by without your seeing them, this update brings you up to date in one go.
• Nothing in the plugin itself has changed since 3.13.0.

3.13.0

• The plugin's own help text now reads the same on every shop. A lot of the wording on the Replies, Home, Send requests, Catch-up and email screens was only reaching shops with their site language set to English (UK). Every other shop got a longer, more technical version of the same sentence.
• The Send requests screen can no longer be stopped by a malformed submission. It would have ended the page with an error rather than refusing the send and saying why.
• The two small blocks of styling on the plugin's admin screens now load through the WordPress style queue.
• The plugin's four built-in sentences are now written where translators can read them.
• The plugin no longer carries its own translation files. WordPress.org builds those from the source.
• The two REST routes the service uses now name what protects them, which was already true and simply was not written down.
• No change to how replies are collected or published.

3.12.1

• Corrects the plugin header, which named the same address as both the plugin URI and the author URI. The plugin URI has been dropped and the author URI kept. Nothing about how the plugin works has changed.

3.12.0

• A review request can now be set to send only when you ask for it. Each email has a new Send automatically box, and it is on. Turn it off and the email stays published and stays on the VerifiedReply box on every order, where Send now still sends it.
• Your existing emails are unchanged and still send automatically. The new box is ticked on all of them.
• Turning an email off still stops it entirely, Send now included. That is why the new box exists: switching off was the only way to take an email out of the automatic sending, and it took the button with it.
• The order box now says why an email did not go out, rather than offering a button that could never have worked.
• The install ping now waits until the plugin is connected to an account. It used to send the site address and a diagnostic profile fifteen minutes after install on every site, connected or not.
• Nothing re-arms that ping yet, so a shop that connects more than fifteen minutes after installing sends nothing.
• Direct-access guards on every file, escaped admin output, and three global functions renamed to carry the plugin's prefix.
• Your shop's pages do less work on every visit. Two database queries were running on every page a customer loaded, and a third on any product page showing a verified reply. All three are gone.
• A product page carrying several verified replies is a lot smaller. The mark now draws once per page rather than once per reply, around 80% less markup on a page showing twenty. Nothing looks different.
• The plugin's own screens have a new look. Home, Send requests, Catch-up and Settings take their colours, panels and form styling from the VerifiedReply site. Nothing has moved or been renamed, and no other screen is affected.
• No change to how replies are collected or published.

3.11.2

• A shop on a plan is now told in three places when the service is holding replies it has not received yet. There is still no count, because the service sends a yes or no and the plugin has nothing to count.

3.11.1

• The VerifiedReply home screen shows a new shop a setup checklist rather than a red warning panel.
• Settings no longer lists checks it has not measured.

3.11.0

• A review containing an angle bracket reads as a match again on the verification page. Both halves now normalise those characters before comparing. Records already written keep the verdict they have.

3.10.0

• Fixed: a customer's reply could put working markup on your product page. A review is now stored so that it always reads as text. Nothing is deleted and the customer's words stay as they were typed.
• Fixed: an account able to write posts could reach the review request editor and publish a template of its own. Review requests are now restricted to people who can manage WooCommerce.
• Fixed: an enrolment offered to a site was accepted automatically. It now waits for somebody who can manage WooCommerce to press Confirm.
• The "verified owner" badge now appears only where the reply could be tied back to an order.
• The site now checks in with the service once a day, sending its account name and plugin version.

3.9.0

• The verification page now names the review it is about: the reviewer, the product, and a link back to the review on your own site.
• A change to the name on a review now reaches the verification page. Taking a review down clears the name and the link.

3.8.0

• The mark on your review cards is now always drawn in the brand colours, with a Light option for dark review cards.
• The Collection screen is now called Settings. Its address has not changed.

3.7.1

• Corrected the wording of the "What if we stop paying?" answer in the help panel.

3.7.0

• Connecting a site no longer means copying a secret by hand. A one-time enrolment code does it.
• The two service addresses fill themselves in when they were blank. A box saved empty is still read as a decision.

3.6.0

• Fixed: the header logo sat under the admin bar on the Replies and Emails screens below 600px.

3.5.0

• The "View version details" window now has Description, Installation and FAQ tabs.
• A Settings link on the Plugins screen.

3.4.1

• The plugin shows its own icon on the Updates screen, served from your own site rather than from verifiedreply.io.

3.4.0

• The privacy and consent line in a review request can be reworded without a plugin release.
• Fixed: an admin whose profile language differed from the site's saw the wrong one.

3.3.0

• The plugin can update itself using WordPress's own update mechanism. No licence key. The check sends nothing identifying your site. Every download is checked against a published fingerprint. Automatic updates are off deliberately.

3.2.1

• Fixed: a review left without a star rating could be given one star the next time it was edited.

3.2.0

• The plugin's own wording moved into one catalogue, so a correction no longer waits on a release. Your request emails are not part of this and stay in your own site.

3.1.0

• Shortening a review is recognised more accurately, so a trim that keeps the customer's words is not treated as a rewrite.
• Verification links moved onto verifiedreply.io. The old address still redirects.

3.0.0

• Checking who a reply came from moved to the service, and the plugin records the answer rather than working it out. A check a site runs on itself is not evidence.
• The mark is withheld when the sender check or the email signature check fails. The review still publishes. Older entries are in CHANGELOG.md in the plugin's repository.