Implementing Trusted Vendors

In this article, you'll learn how to use our Trusted Vendors feature.

About Trusted Vendors

Authentic reviews are an essential part of earning the trust of visitors to your site. Yotpo helps you earn buyer trust by applying badges to reviews based on their verification method. In cases where review authenticity has been guaranteed by another means, the Trusted Vendors feature can be enabled to create verified reviewers or verified buyers without sending the reviewer an automatic review request or confirmation email. 

Google has strict requirements for defining which reviews are eligible for seller ratings. To find out if your site reviews are eligible, contact your Yotpo representative.

About reviewer badges

Yotpo applies reviewer badges to reviews according to their level of verification. For an in-depth description of Yotpo's Reviewer Badges, click here

Verified Buyer

The Verified Buyer badge is applied to reviews submitted via the automatic review request email because Yotpo can confirm that the reviewer purchased the product they reviewed based on the purchase information received by Yotpo.  

Verified Reviewer

Reviews submitted via API call or the Reviews Widget / Reviews Tab on your website are verified via a confirmation email sent to the reviewer. Once the review is authenticated, the review is published with a Verified Reviewer badge. The same badge is also applied to reviews where the reviewer clicked on a social media icon and logged into their social account to verify authenticity.

Creating verified reviews

If you are able to confirm the authenticity of your reviews, the Trusted Vendors feature can be used to apply a Verified Reviewer or Verified Buyer badge to reviews without sending your reviewers a verification email.

To enable the feature, you must first contact your Yotpo Customer Success Manager. Once the feature has been enabled, you can implement Trusted Vendors using one of the three methods listed below:

Creating verified reviews via a dedicated landing page

Using this implementation method, you can create a unique URL that can be added to emails or pages on your site. The URL contains a calculated signature that will direct reviewers to a Yotpo-hosted landing page when clicked. Reviews submitted via this Yotpo-hosted landing page will receive a Verified Buyer or Verified Reviewer badge based on the URL parameters. 

URL Parameters

To implement Trusted Vendors via landing page, include the following parameters in the page URL:

Base URL:

• https://landing-pages.yotpo.com/base/#/review

Example:

The app_key of the Yotpo account that is associated with this asset is xxxxxx

1. Shopper Name: Arthur Lamdas. 
   1. For privacy reasons, this name should be passed in the following format: “Arthur L.”
2. Reviewer email: arthurl@gmail.com
3. Unix timestamp at the moment of signature is: 123456789

Creating verified reviews through the Reviews Widget or Reviews Tab

Using this implementation method, reviews created through the Reviews Widget or the Reviews Tab will receive a Verified Buyer or Verified Reviewer badge based on your configurations.

Add the div element below to the DOM structure of the relevant page.

<div class="yotpo-signed-data"
data-user-name="my name"
data-user-email="some@email.com"
data-signature="F93GJPbthaNLVImLB0zbSk9PoAT6hZForCnkIWiE"
data-reviewer-type="verified_buyer"
data-time-stamp="1415107190">
</div>

Creating Verified Q&A through the Q&A Widget

To allow shoppers to ask Q&A questions without requiring a verification email, add the following data element and value to the Yotpo Main Widget div element.

• data-mode="questions"
• See line 7 in the example below:

<div class="yotpo-signed-data"
data-user-name="my name"
data-user-email="some@email.com"
data-signature="F93GJPbthaNLVImLB0zbSk9PoAT6hZForCnkIWiE"
data-reviewer-type="verified_reviewer"
data-time-stamp="1415107190"
data-mode="questions">
</div>

Using this method, visitors who ask a question on your site are not required to provide their email address and will not receive a verification email. 

Creating verified reviews by API endpoint

Using this implementation method, reviews created using the Create Reviews (Asynchronous) endpoint will receive a Verified Buyer or Verified Reviewer badge based on your configurations.

Please refer to the Creating Reviews (Asynchronous) endpoint in the Yotpo API documentation to view a full list of endpoint parameters, values, and responses.

Request example:

POST https://api.yotpo.com/v1/widget/reviews
============================================

{
"appkey": "PGIkyrrTBQ0VtQOn8rPpedQEEdBIL7vtr9Cu4LvA",
"domain": "http://www.shop.com",
"sku": "10",
"product_title": "Phone",
"product_description": "Smart Phone",
"product_url": "http://www.shop.com/phone.html",
"product_image_url": "http://www.shop.com/phone.jpg",
"display_name": "John Smith",
"email": "john@shop.com",
"review_content": "It’s really good",
"review_title": "Great Phone",
"review_score": 5,
"signature": "e3a30f856453983fc3884ca0c9ef1f31862e6ad25199803dbc192bf2a58f2b31", "time_stamp": "1426770722",
"reviewer_type": "verified_buyer"
}

Signing Reviewer Data

To verify the integrity of the posted data and to ensure the creator of the review is the verified vendor, requires attaching a digested hash signature.

There are two types of hash signatures you can use - HMAC with SHA256 hash or SHA256. 

The type of hash you choose to implement is up to you, but you must use a consistent signature type to sign all reviewer data. 

For example, if you've chosen HMAC, all of your signatures must be HMAC and vice versa.

Verified Buyer Signatures

HMAC with SHA256 - Verified Buyer

The signature is a hexadecimal representation of a computed Hash-based Message Authentication Code

• Select SHA256 as the digest algorithm (HMACSHA256).
• The Secret Key input of the HMAC should be the account’s API Secret.

SHA256 - Verified Buyer

1. The signature is a hexadecimal digest using SHA256.
2. The message input of the SHA256 should be a sorted concatenation of the following values:
   1. Reviewer email
   2. Reviewer type: verified_buyer
   3. Product ID
   4. Unix timestamp
   5. API secret key

Verified Reviewer Signatures

HMAC -Verified Reviewer

The signature is a hexadecimal representation of a computed Hash-based Message Authentication Code. 

• Select SHA256 as the digest algorithm (HMACSHA256)
• The Secret Key input of the HMAC should be the account’s API Secret
• The order of the field values should remain in the same order

The message input of the HMAC should be a sorted concatenation of the following values:

1. Reviewer email
2. reviewer_badge (optional – only use this when using the Customized Badge feature)
3. reviewer_type
4. Unix timestamp