Workflow and timings of review requests

Here is a typical workflow and timeline for review requests:

1. A consumer completes a transaction, such as a purchase on your site or in your brick-and-mortar store.
2. A transaction record is generated within your e-commerce system and then sent to Bazaarvoice in an Order data file  or BV Pixel event.
3. Bazaarvoice determines the following:
   • Whether the consumer has submitted an approved review in the past 180 days for one or more of the products or services in the transaction. If so, the product or service is omitted from the review request. If not, the product or service is included in the review request if the transaction occurred within the last 180 days. Contact Bazaarvoice support if you want to change the number of days that a transaction is eligible to appear in a review request.
   • Whether the consumer had more than one transaction on the same date. When we receive multiple same-day transactions for a consumer (until 12 AM CST: UTC-6 or CDT: UTC-5), we create a single review request that includes up to five unreviewed products or services. Those transactions can be new, or they can come from an order data file containing historical data. 

     • If your order data file contains multiple interactions with the same timestamp (date and time), the system will skip them. However, if the transactions have the same date but different times, the system will merge the orders (products or services) into a single transaction. 
       To ensure accurate processing:

       • Combine products with the same purchase date and time into a single transaction.

       • If separate transactions are required for each product, each must have a unique timestamp, although the date can remain the same.

4. The review request lists the products or services in this sort order:
   1. Highest priced item
   2. Item with fewest reviews
   3. Next highest priced item
   4. Next item with fewest reviews
   5. Next highest priced item
   

   Note:
   1. If price is not included for the product or service in the order data file, the products are sorted strictly by the fewest reviews.
   2. The review request email shows up to 5 products. When the consumer clicks Write a review button, the review-submission form opens and lists all remaining products from the purchase.
5. We send a review request to the consumer. You can configure when to send this message, typically 14-21 days after the date and time of the transaction.
6. The consumer receives the review request. If the consumer does not submit reviews for all products or services in the message, we send a review request reminder after a set time or when the consumer completes another transaction, whichever occurs first.
   
7. The review request reminder includes unreviewed products or services from the initial review request. If fewer than five products or services from the initial review request were not reviewed, and the consumer has prior unreviewed transactions, the review request reminder will include products or services from prior transactions until the message contains up to five unreviewed products or services. For example, if the initial review request solicits reviews for three products and the consumer doesn't review any of them, the review request reminder will contain those three products plus two more from previous transactions. We use the same ordering criteria described in step 3 to determine which products and services to include from previous transactions.
8. You can configure the delay between the initial review request and reminder messages. A product or service will be included in the review request reminder if the sent date is less than or equal to the sum of 180 days and the configured review request reminder delay.
   For example, if you completed a transaction during the last 180 days, the transaction is eligible to be in the review request reminder for the next 14 days, if the configured review request reminder wait time (RRR wait time) is 14 days.
   

   Note: RRR wait time is the number of days to wait before sending the review request reminder after the initial review request.
   
9. Reviews approved by the Bazaarvoice moderation team are made available for publishing. Reviews from review requests and reminders follow the same moderation path as reviews collected from pages on your site.