What review-and-UGC plugin functionality maps to Yotpo, Okendo, or Judge.me on Shopify, and how do star ratings/photos actually transfer?
Review migrations move text, star ratings and dates through a CSV import wizard; videos are not imported by default, and verified-buyer status is re-earned by matching the reviewer's email to a Shopify order (per Judge.me's docs, September 2026). Shopify retired its own Product Reviews app in May 2024, so a third-party app is the only path.
First, the native option is not an option
Shopify's own Product Reviews app was retired in May 2024. Its App Store listing now reads "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store," and directs support questions to Shopify (verified on the listing, September 2026). There is no first-party replacement with the same shape. Reviews on Shopify are a third-party app decision, or a custom build on metaobjects, and any migration plan that includes a native landing spot is planning against a page that no longer exists.
How the transfer actually works
Every route runs through a CSV. You export from the legacy plugin, reshape the columns to the destination's template, and run an import wizard. Judge.me documents importing from Yotpo, Loox, Amazon, Etsy and AliExpress (per its App Store listing, September 2026), which is the widest published set of the three.
Three things behave differently from what merchants expect:
- Videos. "Since videos are not imported by default, if you have videos in your reviews, after the reviews have been imported, you can edit the reviews to upload your videos" (per Judge.me's Yotpo migration doc, September 2026). If video UGC is a merchandising asset for you, that is a manual project, and it should be sized before the cutover date is agreed.
- Verified-buyer badges. Verification is re-derived, not copied. "For an imported review to be verified via metaobjects, the reviewer's email address must match an existing Shopify order in your store" (same source). Reviews from customers whose order history did not migrate, or who ordered under a different email, land unverified. On a replatform that moved five years of reviews and two years of orders, that gap is predictable and large.
- Product mapping. Reviews attach to products by SKU or handle. If the replatform changed either, the mapping table is yours to build, and an unmapped review is an orphaned review.
The three destinations, priced
| Judge.me | Yotpo | Okendo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | Free, unlimited reviews on basic widgets | Free to 50 monthly orders | Free to 50 orders/mo |
| Paid | Awesome $15/mo | Starter $15/mo, Pro $119/mo | Essential $19/mo, Growth $119/mo, Power $299/mo |
| App Store standing | 5.0★, 46,868 reviews | 4.8★, 4,634 reviews | 4.8★, 1,422 reviews |
| Documented imports | Yotpo, Loox, Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress, CSV | CSV import (beta, per Yotpo support) | Contact-led |
Verified on each live App Store listing, September 2026. Okendo's listing lives at apps.shopify.com/okendo-reviews; the shorter apps.shopify.com/okendo returns a 404 and is not a delisting. Availability confirmed on the listing and its reviews page.
What happens to your star ratings in Google
Review count and average rating in search results come from the structured data your review widget writes onto the product page. Switch apps and that markup is written by a new app, from a new dataset, on the same URLs. If the import is complete and the widget is installed on the product template before launch, the numbers hold and Google re-crawls on its own schedule. If the import is partial, or the widget sits on a section the theme did not render, your rich results reflect the gap.
The practical control is to compare review counts per product before and after, on your top 200 revenue products, and to fix that list rather than the catalog.
A sequence that avoids the visible gap
- Export from the legacy plugin and count reviews per product. That file is your acceptance test.
- Import into the new app with the old app's widget still live.
- Verify counts on the top revenue products, then swap the widget on the product template.
- Leave the legacy plugin installed but hidden for two weeks, so a failed import is recoverable.
- Backfill videos and re-request reviews from recent unverified buyers, in that order.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Reviews are a trust asset with a search footprint, so the migration is a merchandising project with an import step in the middle, not an IT task. The acceptance criterion is counts per product on the revenue tail, not "the import finished."
- What we’ve seen: Unverified-badge loss is the complaint that arrives after launch, from merchandising rather than engineering, and it traces back to order history that was never in scope.
- Where we disagree: The category sells review migration as lossless. Video is explicitly not imported by default, and verification is recomputed against your Shopify orders, so some loss is structural and worth planning around rather than promising away.
- What this page adds: that Shopify has no native reviews app to map to at all, and precisely which two attributes degrade on import.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-13.