Yotpo Reviews Integration Options

Written by

Kyle Dicke

January 24, 2021

This Kinful guide is here to advise you on the many ways to integrate product reviews using Yotpo. Although we’re specifically talking about Yotpo here, this same option would apply to most 3rd party review apps in a slightly modified form.

Let’s start with the basics. The first steps are obviously to sign up for Yotpo, and install the Shopify App. From there, we’d follow their integration instructions and stop at “Automatically install Yotpo on your Shop”.

The automatic feature there is what makes us weary. A tool automatically injecting code into your theme could mess things up. That's what we want to be careful about, and instead, do it the manual way. Once that's complete, we now have to consider how it looks and is stylized. Here’s where we have options.

The Reviews Widget

By far the most simple “out-of-the-box” integration is to use Yotpos pre-made widget. This is really what their integration instructions are for. It’s the quick and easy way to get reviews on your site, but there’s a good bit of pros and cons to consider.

Pros

Quick and easy integration.
Option to customize colors and CSS.
Pre-made UI/UX, meaning your developers don’t have to build that out.
Won’t take much development time to get you up and running.

Cons

Limited to what you can customize.
May or may not be able to remove the Yotpo branding, depending on your plan.
If provided a design for reviews from a web designer, it’s very tough to implement their design using the widget. We’ll likely have to give up some of the desired layout and look and feel.
Tough to get the widget to display 100% on brand with the rest of the site.
Likely to look very similar to many other websites who chose this option.
If Yotpo makes updates to the widget, you’ll likely need to re-style any new features, and it’s susceptible to break on your site.

Integration Options

Upgrading your Yotpo account to their Premium level allows you to edit the CSS of their widget directly within YotPo. This allows you a bit more flexibility with customizing it, and is a better way to ensure your widget does not break in the future.
With the free version we can still stylize the widget by overriding the basic CSS styles of the widget within the theme code. This is the more finicky way of doing it and more susceptible to break in the future. If YotPo ever changed the markup of their widget, it would break the styles that are overwritten and likely work would have to be redone.

Custom Integration via Yotpo API

If you’re working with a designer to redesign the reviews section, we’ll likely need to integrate their design custom using the Yotpo API. This is necessary when the design of the reviews varies very differently from the predetermined look and feel of the reviews widget that YotPo provides. Again, many pros and cons to consider:

Pros

Layout options. Your layout options are endless, and your designers can really do whatever they want with this section of the site.
Not limited to pre-defined UX. Can go well beyond just changing the colors and style of the widget. We’re really building our own widget here, integrated with Yotpo to use the rest of their features.
Stay onbrand. Keep the review section onbrand, with a seamless look to the rest of your website.

Cons

Time and budget. From a web development perspective, it's a more time consuming scope of work, as you’re really building out your own UX custom to your site.
Delayed Launch. If you’re launching a new website, this definitely increases the scope of the project and likely will push things back a little bit.
Complicates your technology stack. Using the Yotpo API + Shopify API requires a 3rd party hosting environment to handle the API connection (for security reasons). We typically use a serverless environment with Netlify to do this. With this, there’s the potential for more ongoing maintenance and other (minimal) 3rd party fees.

Takeaways

The two options here are acceptable in different scenarios. However, If your website is 100% custom designed and built into a custom theme (what we do), we’d also advise the custom integrated reviews section. If you’ve already invested into a custom theme, why muck it up with a widget that’s going to look like many other websites? In our opinion, the investment you’ve made on a custom website should not be hindered by that.

The biggest takeaway from this, and many like apps, is that the level of integration needed is always going to be more than what is advertised. Especially if you have a custom design to work with. Ultimately there is a somewhat easy integration route, but it probably won't look to the level of design the rest of your site has.

Wait… is there an easy route that keeps everything looking good?

Yup! The easy route is to build the reviews manually into the theme. They won’t be powered by Yotpo (or any other platform) and will require manual entry. There also won't be the ability to write reviews on the site. This is a viable option at the beginning when you’re just launching and don’t have a lot of review to begin with. We’d consider it to be more of a testimonial at that point. This is the easy way to keep things looking good, but definitely trade off of functionality.