Ratings & Reviews for Stores helps you gather and promote reviews of your company’s brick-and-mortar stores and “stores within a store,” such as automotive service centers. Collecting reviews for your stores gives you instant access to authentic customer feedback, which you can use to determine which stores are most effective.

Including reviews on your store pages can also improve search engine optimization (SEO). And unlike third-party review sites, you can control the environment where your store reviews appear.

Integrate Ratings & Reviews for Stores

Integrating Ratings & Reviews for Stores is like setting up Ratings & Reviews for brick-and-mortar stores instead of products. You can follow the same implementation processes, entering information about each store into “product” fields. Bazaarvoice strongly recommends you create or designate a Ratings & Reviews for Stores landing page on your website where customers can submit and access user-generated content (UGC) about your stores.

Complete the following processes to set up Ratings & Reviews for Stores:

  1. Contact Bazaarvoice Support to add the Ratings & Reviews for Stores feature to your implementation.
  2. Integrate Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews on your company’s product display pages (PDPs).
  3. Ensure each store has a store display page on your company’s website.
  4. Create and upload a product feed for your stores.
  5. On each store display page, add Ratings & Reviews display code. When you insert the Bazaarvoice configuration call, use your store’s product ID. The product ID is the <ExternalId> value you specified for the store in the product feed.
  6. Add schema.org markup.
  7. Add inline ratings. When you insert the display code on the page, use your store’s product ID.
  8. Enable the BV Pixel.
  9. Send a transactional interaction feed containing the email addresses of in-store customers and the stores they purchased from. We use this data to send review requests.
  10. Configure the review request message template for your store review requests.

Set up a product feed for your stores

Before you can display Ratings & Reviews for Stores content, you must provide Bazaarvoice with a data feed so your website can receive the review content. Bazaarvoice matches each store in the product feed with related UGC. A well-formed feed is critical for success.

To create a product feed for your stores, complete the steps for creating a product feed, with the following variations:

  • <Products> element (required)—Contains <Product> elements that define your stores. Each <Product> entry should include the name and other identifying information for a specific store.
  • <Categories> element (optional)—Contains <Category> elements that define your stores within the context of your organization. For example, your company might organize its stores by region, state, and city.

The following example code defines a category for stores in the state of Texas.

<Category>
  <ExternalId>texas</ExternalId>
  <Name>Texas</Name>
  <ParentExternalId>USA</ParentExternalId>
  <CategoryPageURL>http://stores.example.com/usa/texas</CategoryPageURL>
</Category>

The following example code defines a store in Austin. It includes the Texas category defined above.

<Product>
  <ExternalId>store-1234</ExternalId>
  <Name>Store Austin N</Name>
  <CategoryExternalId>texas</CategoryExternalId>
  <ProductPageUrl>http:/stores.example.cimages/1234.jpg</ProductPageUrl>
  <ImageUrl>http:/stores.example.cimages/1234.jpg</ImageUrl>
</Product>

Add schema.org markup for stores

To make your Ratings & Reviews for Stores content easier for search engines to crawl and index, and to support rich snippets like search results with star ratings, you must add schema.org markup to each store’s display page. The process is the same as adding schema.org markup to product display pages, but you must use different schemas.

Select schema for store pages

Bazaarvoice recommends using the LocalBusiness schema with Ratings & Reviews for Stores. When your site uses the LocalBusiness schema, rich snippet stars are more likely to display in search results. Other schemas may not be fully supported by Google and other search engines, reducing the chance that rich snippet stars will display.

Note: Even when you use the LocalBusiness schema, Google does not consistently display rich snippet stars in search results. The stars might display only 50 percent of the time, even if you have implemented SEO in the best way possible.

Bazaarvoice recommends including the following schema.org elements to ensure Google receives a complete picture of the stores listed on your store locator pages. Use the following examples as a guide:

  • name—The store name
  • streetAddress—The street portion of the store’s address
  • addressLocality—The city and state of the store’s address
  • postalCode—The zip code of the store’s address
  • email—The store’s contact email address, prefaced with “Email:”
  • telephone—The store’s phone number, including area code, prefaced with “Phone:”
  • openingHours—The days and times the store is open for business

Add schema.org markup

Complete the following steps to add schema.org markup to a store display page.

  1. Add the following schema.org code to your store display page code.

    <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">

    This <div> block must contain the Ratings & Reviews <div> tags. If you have implemented Questions & Answers, make sure you also include the Questions <div> tag.

    Pages must contain only one schema.org type and use appropriate nesting. Do not include multiple schema.org types in a single page. If a page contains multiple declarations, such as both schema.org/LocalBusiness and schema.org/WebPage, rich snippet stars might not display. All other schema.org content must be nested beneath the <div> declaring the schema type. For example:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <!-- Download the BV loader file. This replaces bvapi.js in existing Ratings & Reviews implementations.
     In the URL, replace <client_name>, <site_ID>, and <locale>, and replace <environment> with 'staging' or 'production'.
    -->
    <script async src="https://apps.bazaarvoice.com/deployments/<client_name>/<site_ID>/<environment>/<locale>/bv.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/LocalBusiness">  <!-- schema.org Markup -->
      <h1 itemprop="name">Store Name</h1> <!--the store name must be identified with itemprop=name attribute-->
      <a itemprop="hasMap" href="https://goo.gl/maps/W2YeCLJZWuj">Click here for a map.</a> <!-- tag elements with schema.org attributes, like maps, hours, and descriptions -->
      <!-- Rating summary  goes above the fold near store name or image -->
      <div data-bv-show="rating_summary" data-bv-product-id="ProductID123"></div>
      <!-- Instruct BV Loader to show the R&R feature for productID123 here -->
      <div data-bv-show="reviews" data-bv-product-id="productID123"></div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

  2. Tag your store name with schema.org markup. Use one of the following lines of code, replacing StoreName with the name of the store exactly as it appears in your stores feed. Google requires similar names across schema markup.

    <!-- Add schema.org product class to the h1 tag-->
  <h1 itemprop="name">StoreName</h1> 
<!-- Or add the class in meta tags-->   
  <meta itemprop="name" content="StoreName">

  3. Include additional schema.org markup in relevant content, like the store address, map, price range, and hours.