How to Export Your Reviews From Loox

Why a Loox export is mostly a photo job

Every review export is two jobs, the records and the media, but the ratio is not the same everywhere. Loox is the visual-review specialist: the photo is usually the reason the review converts, and on many Loox stores a large share of reviews carry an image. Which means the spreadsheet, the thing most migration checklists treat as the export, is the smaller half of what you are moving.

So plan in that order. The row count is easy to get and easy to verify. The images are the part with a deadline attached, because they sit on infrastructure you do not control and stop being reachable when the account closes. A store that exports the CSV, cancels, and then goes looking for the photos has lost the part of the corpus that was doing the work.

Where do you find the export?

Look where your reviews are managed in the Loox admin first, then check the settings, account, and data areas as well. App interfaces get reorganised and what a given plan includes can change, so treat the exact menu path as something to find on the day rather than something to memorise from an article. What you are looking for is a file covering every review, not a download of whatever the current screen happens to be filtered to.

If you cannot find a self-serve export, or the one you find returns less than you expected, ask Loox support in writing for a full export of your review data, and say what full means to you: the review records, the media, and the mapping between them. Asking is reasonable. These are reviews your customers wrote about your products. Do it while the subscription is active, because the same request made after cancelling is a slower conversation held under time pressure.

• Check where reviews are managed, then the settings, account, and data areas.
• Ask for the media as well as the records, and ask what format each arrives in.
• Ask whether the export covers hidden, pending, and rejected reviews or only published ones.
• Keep the original download untouched and do every edit on a copy.

What can a review export carry, and what can it not?

Open the file before you plan anything around it. A review export generally carries the parts of a review that fit in a table: the star rating, the body, the reviewer name, the date it was written, and some identifier tying the review to a product. Column headers differ between platforms and change over time, so match columns by meaning rather than by the name you were expecting to see.

What does not fit in a table is everything that made a review an object rather than a row. Image and video files are stored elsewhere and appear, at best, as links. Merchant replies may be held separately from the review they answer. Helpfulness votes and any verified-buyer flag may or may not appear, and the flag in particular is a claim the platform derived from order data rather than a portable property. None of this is specific to Loox. It is the shape of the format.

• Usually present: rating, review body, reviewer name, date, a product identifier.
• Worth checking for: merchant replies, verified status, moderation state, review titles.
• Usually links rather than files: photos and videos.
• Confirm which product key you have, a handle or an ID or a SKU, before planning any import.

How do you get the images themselves, not links to them?

This is the job worth doing first. Photo and video uploads are hosted on the review platform's own storage, so the most a spreadsheet can hold is a URL pointing at a file on a host the next app does not control. Some import tools follow those URLs and fetch the files. Many do not, and the ones that do can only succeed while the links still resolve. Cancel first and the images may become unreachable before anyone has fetched them.

So treat media as a separate export with its own deadline. Pull the files down while the account is active, store them somewhere you control, and keep a record of which file belongs to which review. That last part sounds obvious and is the step people skip: a folder of several thousand images with no mapping back to review rows is an archive, not a migration asset.

• Count how many rows reference an image or a video, so the job has a target number.
• Download the files while the account is live, not after the final invoice.
• Keep the review identifier in the filename or in a separate mapping file.
• Spot-check that what downloaded is the full-size image rather than a thumbnail.

How do you check the file before you trust it?

Do this with the file open next to the Loox dashboard. Take a store showing 2,140 reviews in the app whose export opens with 2,061 rows. Those 79 missing reviews are not a mystery to postpone. They are the work in front of you, and they are usually some mix of reviews still pending moderation, reviews marked as spam, and reviews attached to products you have since deleted. Keep going until every one of the 79 has a reason. The figures here are illustrative, the exercise is not.

A gap you cannot explain before an import is the same gap, still unexplained, after it, except that by then it is showing on your product pages and you are debugging two things at once.

• Row count against the dashboard count, with every row of difference accounted for.
• Oldest and newest review dates in the file against what the dashboard shows.
• Average rating and star distribution in the file against what the widget reports.
• Product identifier populated on every row: count the blanks now, not after the import.
• How many rows reference media, checked against what you actually downloaded.

What happens to your star ratings during a switch?

Star ratings in Google are not stored by Google. They are read on each crawl from the structured data your review app prints into the page, so the risk in any switch is a window where the old markup has gone and the new markup is not yet populated. Keep exactly one set of review markup live at any moment, and order the cutover so the new app is rendering before the old widget comes out.

Even with a clean handover, expect the numbers to move before they settle. The average usually recovers quickly. The review count can lag, because the aggregate has to be recrawled and re-associated with the product. A permanent shortfall is a different thing: that is the export gap arriving in your search results.

There is a version of this problem no migration touches. Most review apps render reviews for the shopper standing on the page and stop there, so text that is perfectly legible to a person can still be hard for a crawler or an answer engine to read and quote. An export is the one moment your whole corpus is in your hands as a file, which makes it the natural point to ask whether the reviews you already have are readable and citable in search and AI answers, not only visible on the product page. That gap is what BeyondReviews is built to close.

What if you read this and decide to stay on Loox?

Some merchants work through the media job, price the alternatives, and conclude the move is not worth it this quarter. That is a reasonable answer, and it deserves stating plainly: Loox is genuinely good at the thing it specialises in. The photo-review flow and the way galleries present on a product page are its whole design, and several cheaper alternatives will hand you the same reviews in a display that converts less well. If visual reviews are your conversion engine, test the destination's display with real photos before you assume parity on anything other than price.

Either way the export was worth running. You now hold a dated copy of your review corpus and its images somewhere you control, which is worth having whether or not you switch. Put a reminder in the calendar and repeat it. The point of exporting first is that it makes the decision reversible and lets you take it with the data already in hand, rather than as a condition of leaving.

Frequently asked questions