The Shopify Product Reviews App Is Deprecated: What Happened and What to Do Now

What happened, and when

Product Reviews was Shopify’s own free review app, and for years it was the default choice for new stores. In September 2023 it disappeared from the Shopify App Store, and merchants began reporting that it could no longer be installed. In February 2024 Shopify emailed stores still using it with instructions for exporting their reviews. On 6 May 2024 the app was switched off: reviews stopped displaying on storefronts and the app could no longer be opened.

A Shopify staff member confirmed the end state in the Shopify Community on 17 May 2024: the reviews that were part of the app are not accessible or exportable since the app was sunset. The App Store listing still exists today and reads: “This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store.”

1. 01September 2023: removed from the Shopify App Store; no new installs.
2. 02February 2024: Shopify emails remaining users with export instructions.
3. 036 May 2024: switched off. Reviews stop displaying and the app can no longer be opened.
4. 0417 May 2024: Shopify staff confirm the reviews cannot be accessed or exported.

What Shopify offers instead

There is no longer a Shopify-made review widget for your online store. What exists is plumbing that third-party review apps plug into, plus reviews inside the Shop app.

Shop product reviews are collected in the Shop app from customers who bought the product, with a 1 to 5 star rating and up to 1,000 characters of comment, and they display on the product’s page in the Shop app. To show them on your own store, Shopify points to partner apps: reviews published in Shop are shared automatically with Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped.io and Yotpo, carrying a Verified by Shop badge that cannot be removed.

For themes, Shopify defines two standard metafields, reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count, which review apps keep up to date and themes read to draw stars. Shopify’s developer docs describe them as API-only: you cannot view or edit them in the admin. There is also a standard product_review metaobject for storing reviews in a common format, but it is open only to approved partner apps.

Signs your store still carries the old app

Stores that never replaced the app usually have one of three symptoms. The review section on product pages is empty or missing. Stars that used to appear under product titles have gone, because the theme’s rating block reads the standard metafields and nothing is updating them. Or the theme still holds the old app’s code, which now outputs nothing.

That code is easy to find. Themes from the era typically carried a div with the id shopify-product-reviews, which printed product.metafields.spr.reviews. In Online Store, Themes, open Edit code on your live theme and search for spr and shopify-product-reviews. Remove what you find once your replacement app is installed, so the page carries one set of reviews and one set of review markup, not a live one and a dead one.

1. 01Search theme code for: spr, shopify-product-reviews, product-reviews.
2. 02Check the product template in the theme editor for an old reviews section that renders nothing.
3. 03After the new app is live, check the product page carries exactly one rating in its structured data.

If you exported before May 2024

You are in the best position. The export was a CSV of your reviews, and most review apps can import it. Before you do, open the file and reconcile it: count the rows against what you remember the store showing, check the oldest and newest dates, and confirm every row has a product it can attach to. If you have since renamed products or changed their handles, update the product column first, because a review that cannot be matched to a product will be skipped or land in the wrong place.

Keep the original file untouched and work on a copy. Keep the original review dates too. A review from 2022 imported with today’s date misrepresents when it was written.

1. 01Row count checked against your own records.
2. 02Product column matched to today’s product handles or IDs.
3. 03Original review dates kept, not reset to the import date.
4. 04Hidden or unpublished reviews identified before import, so they stay unpublished.

If you did not export: how to recover old reviews

Shopify has said it cannot return the data, so recovery means rebuilding from copies you hold. The first place to look is your inbox. If the app sent you an email each time a review arrived, those notifications carry the review. A merchant in the Shopify Community found them by searching the store’s inbox for “Product Reviews -”, then copied each one into a spreadsheet: slow work, but it recovers real reviews with their real dates.

Other copies may exist in your own records: a spreadsheet someone kept, reviews you pasted into marketing emails or ads, or old saved copies of your own product pages. Restore only reviews you can show a customer genuinely wrote, with the name and date they carried, and do not mark any as verified purchases unless you can match them to an order. A review you cannot trace back to a customer is better left out.

Choosing a replacement

Any current review app does more than the old one did: review request emails, photo reviews, star markup for Google. The question in 2026 is what you want the reviews to do once they are collected.

For reviews that display well and also bring in traffic, choose BeyondReviews. Like the old Shopify app, it keeps review text in the page HTML, so Google and AI answer engines can read it. It is free up to 100 orders a month, with unlimited review requests, photo and video reviews and Google stars included. Then it puts the reviews to work: it counts the phrases your customers repeat, drafts a reply to every review in your voice, and prints the phrases you approve into the product page. Nothing publishes until you approve it. Importing the reviews you recovered is part of setup, and they count toward your rating from day one.

If showing your Shop app reviews on your store matters most, the five apps Shopify names as Shop partners, Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped and Yotpo, are the classic way to do it, and each is a solid choice for collecting and displaying reviews. Our comparison of Shopify Product Reviews alternatives sets out prices and free plans side by side.

A 2026 checklist for stores still affected

Work through these in order. The first two are about data you can still lose; the rest are about the storefront.

1. 01Find any export CSV from before May 2024, in downloads, shared drives or old emails, and keep an untouched copy.
2. 02If there is none, search your inbox for review notification emails and rebuild a spreadsheet from them.
3. 03Install a replacement app and import the reviews with their original dates.
4. 04Remove the old app’s theme code (spr, shopify-product-reviews) from the live theme.
5. 05Add the new app’s embed and review blocks to every product template in use.
6. 06Check a product page in a private window, then check its structured data carries one rating.
7. 07Give Google a few weeks to recrawl before judging whether stars have returned in search.

Frequently asked questions