Test review request

Before you use review requests to solicit feedback from your customers, we recommend that you test review requests in your staging and production environments. This section lists the implementation details to keep in mind when testing.

In staging

When you create a feed file to test in the staging environment, keep the following in mind:

• Email addresses you use to test the process in staging must include the appropriate domain names. The domains in the email addresses must be whitelisted (with the exception of bazaarvoice.com). Do not include real customer email addresses or phone numbers in the feed until the feed has been successfully tested.
• Specify values in the feed from the staging product catalog, such as ProductPageURL.
• Make sure transactions have different product IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, and transaction dates. Otherwise, the transactions are considered duplicate and review request is not sent.

When you upload the feed to the staging server, be aware of the following limitations of the staging environment:

• Bazaarvoice can only process 100 test transactions (for each feed file) at one time.
• Review request delay is overwritten to zero (0) no matter what is specified in the review request settings.
• Multiple review requests cannot be sent to the same email address and phone number within a 120-minute window.

In production

When you create and upload a feed file to test in the production environment, keep the following in mind:

• Include email addresses or phone numbers that are internal to your company only. Also, be sure to provide one or more personal email addresses (from domains such as gmail.com or hotmail.com) to verify that underlying security does not send review requests to spam folder. Finally, do not include real customer email addresses or phone numbers in the feed until the it is successfully tested.
• Specify values in the feed from the product catalog in production, such as ProductPageURL.
• Back date transaction times in the feed by as many days as the review request delay has been configured. Or, set the review request delay to 0.
• Limit the number of transactions in the feed to 100,000 or less.
• Multiple review requests cannot be sent to the same email address or phone number within a 1440-minute window.
• Preview any custom email templates that were created to make sure they show the correct images, text, and so on.
• If possible, limit the amount of times you test review requests in production (ideally only once) in order to keep the analytics as accurate as possible.

After you test your order data file and settings in production, make sure these settings are corrected on the Configure Messages page of the configuration:

• Use product pages for submission
• Days to wait before sending the first review request
• Days to wait before sending review request reminders
• Delay between multiple review requests for the same product (in days)
• Schedule time to start sending review requests (UTC)

If you reconfigured any of these settings, be sure to redeploy the implementation to production.

Submission link expiration

The submission links in review requests and review request reminders expire in the following scenarios:

• Implementations using hosted authentication— If a user does not follow the submission link within 30 days of receiving the message, the user will no longer be pre-authenticated and won't be considered a verified purchaser. The user's email address won't be displayed on the submission form.
• Implementations using site authentication— If a user does not follow the submission link within 30 days of receiving the message, the user will no longer be pre-authenticated and must sign in using your Sign-In page to access the submission form.
• All implementations— Submission links expire after 90 days. If a user selects a link after it expires, a 404 error will display.

Invalidate review requests

 The Invalidate Order Data functionality lets you cancel specific transactions and prevent review request emails (RRE) from being sent to a particular email address or product. 

Clients using BV pixel or uploading data manually

• If you send order data to Bazaarvoice, either manually or via BV Pixel, to invalidate specific transactions, the feed file with the transaction details must be sent to the following directory: SFTP server/ppe/invalidate.
• Ensure the invalidation feed file's structure matches the order data file uploaded to the SFTP server/ppe/inbox directory, which is used to enable review requests. 

Note: If you do not have the order data file, you can retrieve it from the backup directory at SFTP server/ppe/backup. Backups are retained for 15 to 30 days from the initial upload date. 

Clients using Transactions API

• For clients sending product catalog data through the Transactions API, invalidating specific transactions requires calling the Invalidate Transaction API. For detailed instructions on how to submit a request to invalidate a transaction, please refer to the Invalidate Transaction topic in the Bazaarvoice Developer Center. Upon successful submission, an Accepted message with the transaction ID will be displayed, indicating that the request has been received.
  

Note: The invalidation request should be sent within the default wait time, which is set to 21 days by default. However, you can modify this duration in the Bazaarvoice Portal. For detailed steps, refer to the Enable and configure review requests section. 

Check your work

Verify the following:

Your team has received test email messages. When testing in staging, review requests are sent only to email addresses with domains that Bazaarvoice has whitelisted for your project.

In production, consumers have received email messages.

Users select the “Write a review” link in the email message and are redirected to the submission form on the container page or on the product page (check that the product name and image appear in the sidebar). There is no need to submit test reviews in production, but if you must, clearly indicate that it is a test to ensure it is rejected.

Reviews are being collected.

Be aware that test messages may not be sent if

• You are attempting to send a review request to the same email address using the same product ID within a given date range. Multiple review requests are not sent for the same purchase within 180 days, by default.
• You did not change the date on the order across review requests. The date must be updated for every test.
• You sent a test review request to non-whitelisted email addresses.