Stop sorting reviews by date! Smart sorting lifts add-to-cart by up to 20%

Every brand selling on Shopify knows that reviews are essential to building trust and selling more. 

But did you know that how those reviews are sorted on your product page can dramatically influence your bottom line? 

Most product pages display reviews chronologically. But most recent doesn't necessarily mean best or most convincing. As a result, the highest-converting reviews remain buried, and potential conversions are missed. 

Show your best reviews first, automatically

To fix this, we developed Smart Review Sorting. Smart Review Sorting uses AI to automatically analyze your reviews. It identifies your most engaging videos, highest-quality photos, and most persuasive text reviews and pins them to the top of your widget, ensuring that the most convincing content is never missed.

We recently analyzed data from a months-long A/B test comparing traditional, chronologically sorted review widgets (version A) against the same widgets with Smart Review Sorting enabled (version B). 

The results couldn't be clearer: Across multiple stores and product categories, Smart Review Sorting beat chronologically sorted reviews every time, sparking increases in add-to-cart (ATC) rates of almost 20% in some cases.

Let's break down the data across beauty, fashion, apparel, and lifestyle brands to look at what's possible when you let Loox superpower your reviews with AI.

Skincare & beauty: Handling objections for sensitive products

Skincare brands face immense consumer skepticism - and rightly so. Before buying a product to apply directly to their face, shoppers demand undeniable proof - preferably visual - that it addresses their specific concerns.

Let's see how our Smart Sorting feature handles this skepticism for Froya Organics by prioritizing customer photos that showcase real faces, paired with glowing written testimonials about results.

Hyper-Potent Arctic Balms for Mature Skin:

• ATC rate with chronologically sorted reviews: 23.7%
• ATC rate with AI Review Sorting enabled: 27.5%

The result: A +16% increase in cart additions.

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Health & wellness: Shaking up protein powder purchase intent

In the world of protein powders, many shoppers are concerned about taste, nutritional value, and other factors that affect their fitness or weight-loss journey, such as cravings.

Take a look at how Smart Review Sorting increased ATC rates on just one of the product pages on protein.com:

Fat Burning Protein Powder | 21 Shakes:

• ATC rate with chronologically sorted reviews: 14.5%
• ATC rate with AI Review Sorting enabled: 17.2%

The result: A +19% increase in cart additions.

Customized home goods: Maximizing gift-buying confidence

With custom-made home goods, shoppers often worry about the accuracy of personalization, the quality of materials, or whether the gift will look as good in person as it does online. Once again, Smart Review Sorting stepped into the product page on babyknits and gave shoppers the confidence to add their choice to a cart: 

• ATC rate with chronologically sorted reviews: 12.2%
• ATC rate with AI Review Sorting enabled: 14%

The result: A +15% increase in cart additions.

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Why does Smart Review Sorting drastically outperform chronologically-sorted review widgets?

• It prioritizes conversion, not recency: widgets sorted by recency show the latest reviews, which may be good or bad, relevant or unhelpful. Smart Review Sorting prioritizes reviews featuring rich customer media and high-sentiment details.
• It elevates visual proof: Shoppers rely heavily on customer photos to validate their purchases. AI smart sorting puts visual customer reviews front and center where it makes the biggest psychological impact.
• It shortens the reading cycle: Smart Sorting, together with AI Review Highlights, pulls the most impactful keywords straight to the top of the widget, allowing shoppers to see the essence of the product's value in seconds.

Your turn: Put these insights to work on your store

The data shows that when reviews are dynamically tailored to show what shoppers actually care about, purchase intent naturally goes up. If your store is still displaying reviews in a basic chronological order, testing that against Smart Review Sorting is a straightforward, low-effort way to see if you can replicate these conversion lifts on your own product pages.

Read more on how to test this on your storefront here.