Migrating From Loox to Judge.me: What to Expect

What actually changes in this switch?

Not the reviews. Ratings, bodies, author names, and dates are portable, and any competent importer will land them on the right products if you give it the right key. What changes is the frame around them. Loox is built around the photo review as a display object, and its galleries are the reason many stores chose it. Judge.me is built around reviews as content, priced flat, with review HTML that crawlers can read more easily than most of the category.

So this is not a migration where one app is the better version of the other. It is a trade with a direction: you give up some visual polish and gain lower, more predictable cost and better readability for search. Whether that trade is good depends on how much of your conversion is coming from the way the photos look on the page, which is a thing you can test rather than guess.

• Moves reliably: rating, review body, reviewer name, original date, product mapping.
• Changes: the gallery, the layout, the submission flow, and how photos are presented.
• Improves, usually: monthly cost predictability and how readable review text is to crawlers.
• Needs its own plan: the image files, which are not in the spreadsheet.

What is Loox genuinely better at?

Visual presentation, and it is not close for the stores it suits. The photo-review gallery, the way images sit on a product page, and the collection flow that produces a high share of reviews with pictures are the whole design of the product rather than a feature list item. If your product is bought partly on how it looks in someone else's hands, that display is doing measurable work, and a cheaper app that shows the same photos in a plainer grid is not a like-for-like replacement.

There is a second thing worth naming. A store that has trained its customers to send photos has an operational habit, not just a widget, and the request flow that produced it is part of what you are changing. Before you move, look at what share of your reviews carry an image. If it is high, treat that number as the thing at risk, and test whether the new collection flow sustains it rather than assuming the reviews you already have are the whole asset.

What does the export give you to work with?

A review export carries the parts of a review that fit in a table, and points at the parts that do not. Expect the rating, the body, the reviewer name, the date, and a product identifier. Expect merchant replies and any verified-buyer status to need checking rather than assuming, since a verified flag is a claim the old platform derived from order data rather than a portable property of the review. There is a step-by-step version of this in the Loox export guide, including how to reconcile the file against your dashboard before you rely on it.

One column decides how much work the rest of the migration is: the product key. Apps disagree about how a review points at a product, and they use product IDs, handles, and SKUs interchangeably. If the file uses a key the destination has never seen, you build a lookup from a Shopify product export before importing anything. Finding that out early is the difference between an afternoon and a week.

• Confirm which product key the file uses, and that it is populated on every row.
• Check whether the destination importer matches on that same key.
• Ask the destination whether it preserves original review dates or stamps the import date.
• Reconcile the row count against the Loox dashboard before you plan the cutover.

Will the photos survive the move?

Only if someone fetches them. Images live on the review platform's storage, so an export can carry a link at most, and the link resolves only while the Loox account is live. Some importers follow those links and pull the files down. Many do not, and none can do it after the account closes. On a visual-review store this is the single highest-consequence step in the whole migration, because the photos are usually the majority of what the reviews are worth.

Do it as a distinct job with its own checklist: count how many rows reference an image, download the files while the subscription is active, store them somewhere you control, and keep the mapping between file and review. Then, after importing, check the same count on the other side. Reviews that arrive without their pictures still count toward your total and toward your average rating, which is exactly why the loss is easy to miss on a dashboard and obvious on a product page.

How do you sequence the cutover so your stars stay?

Google does not store your star ratings. It reads AggregateRating and Review markup from the page on each crawl, so the stars exist only while an app is printing that markup. The failure mode is a gap: the old widget removed on one day, the new one populated on another, and every product page crawled in between reporting a product with no rating. Recovery is not instant, because the page has to be recrawled on Google's schedule rather than yours.

The order that avoids it is unglamorous. Install and populate Judge.me while Loox is still rendering, validate structured data on real product pages rather than a template preview, confirm exactly one aggregate rating is present per page, then remove the Loox widget last. Two sets of review markup live at once is its own defect, so the overlap is about the data being in place, not about leaving both widgets on the page indefinitely.

• Import and verify in Judge.me while Loox is still rendering on the product page.
• Validate structured data on three live product pages, including one with a single review.
• Confirm one aggregate rating per page, never zero and never two.
• Remove the Loox widget only after those checks pass.

How do you know the migration worked?

By counting, not by looking. Three numbers, side by side: what the Loox dashboard reported, how many rows the export contained, and how many reviews Judge.me shows after the import. A difference between the first two is the export gap, and you should already have explained it. A difference between the second and the third is import failure, and import failure is almost always product mapping. Both are fixable while the old app is still installed and much harder afterwards.

Then add the media count, because on a store coming from Loox it is the number that matters most: how many reviews should display a photo, against how many actually do. Finish by checking Search Console a week later rather than a day later. Product pages are recrawled on their own schedule, so a snippet that has not returned after a day means nothing, while one still missing after a week is worth investigating.

• Total reviews in the new app against the row count in the file.
• Average rating and star distribution against the old dashboard.
• Reviews that should show an image, against reviews that do.
• Oldest review date, to confirm history was not truncated to the import date.
• Ten product pages checked by hand, including your two busiest.

How should you decide, and what should you test first?

Test the display before you trust the spreadsheet. Put a handful of your own real photo reviews into a trial of the destination app, look at them on a product page on a phone, and compare that against the Loox version you already have. If the new gallery holds up, the rest of this is logistics. If it does not, you have learned the price of the saving before paying it, which is the entire point of testing first. Pricing on both sides changes, so check current vendor pricing rather than any figure you read in an article, including this one.

One question sits outside the choice, because neither app answers it. Most review apps, Loox and Judge.me included, are built for the shopper standing on the product page. Judge.me starts from a better place because its review HTML is server-readable rather than locked inside a widget, but being crawlable is not the same as being read, corroborated, and quoted when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews whether your product is worth buying. That gap is what BeyondReviews is built to close, and a migration is the one moment your whole corpus is in your hands as a file, which makes it the natural time to ask the question rather than carry it into the next app.

Frequently asked questions