How To Get Google Customer Reviews For Online Orders - Cheaply
My name is Siobhan and I a co-owner of Lily's Florist, and I have 19 years experience of being around flowers. In my time, I have dealt with 10's of 1000's of customers, and have taken well over 26,000 phone calls for people wanting to send flowers - even while 8.5 months pregnant for Valentine's Day in 2011. I am not a florist, but my husband and I did buy a flower and gift shop in 2006 which we later sold in 2009 to go fully online with flowers.
This post is aimed at saving you money on gathering review from your trusted customers, it's a hack! Some platforms like Feefo, Trustpilot and the like will charge you 100's of dollars per month, hopefully after reading this post you will have the skills and knowledge to do it all yourself.
Why Are Customer Reviews Essential For Your Florist Shop
I have written about this in other blog posts, but in short:
- Reviews help you build trust with potential customers
- Reviews help you build trust with Google
- Reviews can help you increase your conversion rate from your website, thereby increasing your sales
- Reviews can potentially help you increase your Google ranks
- Review can show, attached to your store, in Google search and help with your click through rate (also indirectly help you with your Google ranks
- Reviews help you build your brand and its identity
> Read about the importance of customer reviews
> Read about dealing with fake or unfair reviews
The Google Review Hack
This method assumes you have a Google Business listing or Google Business profile, if not you can get that here. That is, and in layman's terms, you show up in the Google map for a search that contains <florist/flowers> your <suburb/town>, that looks a little like the below example when I searched for phone shops in Bondi Junction.
If you have the above, the goal is to accumulate as many Google reviews as possible and, generally speaking, the more reviews you have, the higher you will rank - subject to their ranking. 500 1 star reviews will get you nowhere.
Leverage Your Online Order Confirmation Email
Yes, this may seems a little odd, but hear me out.
If you are doing 100 online orders a month, that is 100 opportunities for the possibility of someone leaving a review for your flower shop! That is a lot, and even if, out of those 100, only 10 leave a review, that is still 120 Google reviews per year, that is huge for a small flower shop.
As you can see from the example I made below, adding a small amount of text to the confirmation order email can be a very powerful tool to generate customer reviews, then of course, linking to your Google Business page - more on that below.
How to Find Your Google Business Link
It is really easy to find your map listing for your flower shop, search your business, click on it, and share the link - right? Well sort of, this method is simple and works okay, but it nowhere near as powerful as the method I am about to share. This method actually forces Google to push a big popot box to your customer that leaves them in no doubt that you would like them to review your flowers and service.
Now, follow these steps, and remember, this is assuming you already have an existing Google business listing.
Step 1
Google Place ID Finder which you can find here.
Step 2
Scroll down a tiny bit until you see the heading, above the map, titled "Find the ID of a particular place".
Step 3
Just at the little section above the map type your business name.
Step 4
Once you have found your flower shop within the map, Telstra Broadway is the example below, you are looking for you place ID, I have highlighted it in blue below. Copy that ID and save it somewhere.
Step 5
Now that you have your place ID, I want you to replace the bold part YOU_PLAE_ID
search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=YOUR_PLACE_ID
Replace with, in this example it was ChIJJxdirymuEmsRhS3fqVXd-vk (as above in blue)
with:
https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJJxdirymuEmsRhS3fqVXd-vk
If you now click on that link you will see that a review box will now pop up for the example Telstra story in Sydney. If you follow the above steps, and place your ID there, the same will happen for your flower shop. That easy!
Read to Give This a Crack?
That's it really. After 19 years in the flower game and watching hundreds of our partner florists try every marketing trick under the sun, this Google review hack is genuinely one of the best things you can implement today. And it's completely free.
Think about it. You're already sending confirmation emails to customers. They're already happy because they just ordered beautiful flowers. This just gives them the easiest possible way to tell the world about it. No friction, no hassle, just a direct link that pops up Google's review box.
The partner florists who actually do this consistently are the ones we see climbing up Google Maps rankings. It makes sense when you think about it - Google loves fresh reviews, customers trust businesses with lots of reviews, and this method makes it dead simple for happy customers to leave feedback.
The beauty is, once you set this up, it runs itself. Five minutes of work now could mean a steady stream of reviews coming in month after month. While your competitors are still paying Trustpilot hundreds a month or wondering why they're not showing up in Google Maps, you'll be quietly building social proof that actually works.
So grab that Place ID, update your confirmation email, and see what happens. In a world where everyone's fighting for attention online, genuine customer reviews are gold. This little hack just makes it ridiculously easy to collect them.