Judge.me Setup Guide for Shopify: The 12 Settings to Change on Day One

Judge.me is already emailing your customers. That starts the moment you install it, before you have opened a single settings page, because review requests are enabled at install and scheduled on the Fulfilled order trigger with a 14-day delay.

That default is not wrong. It is generic. Judge.me's own team reports that more than 76% of stores never change it, which means most Shopify owners are running the same request timing as a supplement brand, a furniture store, and a print-on-demand shop.

Here is why that matters. "Fulfilled" does not mean "delivered." It means the package left your hands. If your average transit time is nine days, a 14-day timer starts counting at the wrong moment, and some customers get asked about a product they have had for five days while others get asked before the box arrives.

The rest of the app has the same shape. Nothing is broken out of the box. About a dozen switches are set to the safest guess rather than the right answer for your store, and two of them quietly decide whether Google ever shows stars beside your product pages.

This is a Judge.me setup guide for the settings that change an outcome. Twelve of them, in the order I work through them for a new store, with a note on each about whether it is free or needs the paid plan. Eight of the twelve are free. And everything you change applies only to orders fulfilled after you hit Save, so the sooner you go through this, the less you fix by hand later.

First, work out which Judge.me you have

Two things decide what your settings screens look like, and neither is obvious from inside the app.

Your plan. There are exactly two: Forever Free at $0 and Awesome at $15 a month, flat, with no order metering and no enterprise tier. Free covers unlimited product and store reviews, unlimited photo and video reviews, Google rich snippets, and the core display widgets. Awesome adds the delivery trigger, automatic reminders, product grouping, Google Shopping syndication, and full customisation.

Your widget version. On December 9, 2025, Judge.me split the Review Widget into a new version and a legacy version. If you installed before that date you are on legacy with an upgrade banner waiting. If you installed on or after it, the new widget is almost certainly already live.

Judge.me is still my default recommendation for any Shopify store under $200K a year, and the four-app comparison goes through the reasoning. But be clear-eyed about the split before you start clicking.

Four of the twelve need the paid plan. If you are shipping fewer than about thirty orders a month, do the eight free ones now and revisit the paid four when your volume makes $15 obviously worth it.

Settings 1 to 3: when the request goes out

1. Switch the order trigger from Fulfilled to Delivered

Judge.me gives you five order events to start the clock from: Created, Paid, Fulfilled, Delivered, and Archived. Delivered is the honest one, and it sits on the Awesome plan. It waits for your carrier to report delivery back to Shopify, which USPS, UPS, FedEx, Canada Post, and Sendle do natively when you fulfil with tracking.

Turn on the fallback checkbox at the same time, then read this part carefully, because the Judge.me documentation is specific about it. The fallback only applies to orders fulfilled without tracking information. If you fulfil with a tracking number and the carrier never reports back, the request sits in "Waiting for delivery" indefinitely and the fallback timer never rescues it. Check that status filter monthly.

2. Is 14 days too long for your product?

The wait time is set separately for domestic, international, and point of sale orders, and accepts anything from 0 to 365 days. Fourteen days is a compromise, not a recommendation. Consumables and anything with a fast verdict do better shorter. Furniture, skincare with a results curve, and anything a customer has to live with for a while do better longer.

I have written up the data behind review request timing separately, so I will not repeat the windows here. The setup point is that this field is free on every plan and takes eleven seconds to change.

3. Add exactly one reminder, not three

Reminders are Awesome-only, and Judge.me lets you configure up to three per order. It also tells you, in its own reminder documentation, to limit yourself to one, because the second and third are more likely to be flagged as spam and drag your sender reputation down with them.

Take that advice. One reminder, sent a few days after the original, catches most of the people who meant to respond and forgot. If you want the fuller picture on cadence, the automation post covers what a complete flow looks like.

Settings 4 to 6: what you ask each customer for

4. Turn on the photo and video ask

Under Settings, then Widgets, then Write a Review, the review form runs as a short multi-step flow ending on a media screen where the customer can attach photos or videos. Make sure the video option is ticked. Both are unlimited on the free plan, which is unusual in this category and worth using from your first request onward.

5. Cap products per order, and change who gets prioritised

You can request reviews for between one and seven products per order. The default prioritisation rule is "most expensive," which sounds sensible and is usually wrong for a young catalog: it keeps piling reviews onto the same few hero products while everything else stays at zero. If you are on Awesome, switch it to "least reviews."

While you are here, look at the variant setting. By default Judge.me sends a separate request for each variant of the same product in an order, so a customer who bought a blue and a red shirt gets asked twice. Switching to product-level requests is free and usually kinder.

6. Decide whether repeat buyers get asked again

By default, a customer who buys the same product again gets another review request. That is right for subscriptions and consumables and annoying for everything else. In the same panel you can set a frequency limit so a customer is skipped if they already received a request within a set number of days.

The related setting worth knowing about is the out-of-store fallback, which controls what happens when someone ordered a product you have since deleted or drafted. That is also where migrating reviews off a discontinued product becomes relevant, because the reviews you collect on a retired listing are the ones most likely to get orphaned later.

Settings 7 and 8: what shows on the product page

7. New Review Widget or legacy: which should you actually use?

The new one, with two exceptions. It is not available if your product pages are built with a third-party page builder, and any custom CSS you wrote for the old widget will not carry across, because the class names changed. Screenshot your setup and copy your CSS before touching the upgrade button.

The reason to move is not cosmetic. Individual review content in your structured data, and full AI shopping visibility, both require the new widget. On legacy you get the aggregate star rating and nothing else. If the upgrade goes badly, the old configuration is kept for 14 days and reverting takes a couple of minutes, so the risk window is small and reversible.

8. Check who can see the Write a review button

This is the setting behind most "my Judge.me widget is broken" posts on the Shopify forums. Under Collection flow, the Write a review button has a visibility control, and if it is set to "No one" the button is hidden on every product page in your store. The widget looks installed. It just cannot be used.

For most new stores the right answer is "Everyone (no restrictions)." Restricting it makes sense once you are large enough to attract competitor spam, which is a problem worth having later rather than designing around now.

Settings 9 and 10: stars in Google and AI visibility

9. Turn microdata off if your theme uses JSON-LD

Rich snippets are already on. Judge.me adds review markup to your product pages by default, so the day-one job is not switching them on. It is making sure you have only one kind.

Under Settings, then Google, SEO and AI, then SEO Rich Snippets, there are two checkboxes: JSON-LD and microdata. Almost every modern Shopify theme uses JSON-LD. If both boxes are ticked, the two sets of markup collide and Search Console starts reporting a missing itemReviewed field. Run a product page through Google's Rich Results Test, look at the detected Product item, and if you see "@type": "Product" your theme is on JSON-LD and the microdata box should be unticked.

Two of Google's review snippet guidelines are worth knowing before you go further. The marked-up reviews have to be visible to shoppers on the page, and any review earned in exchange for a discount or free product has to disclose that clearly. Judge.me marks coupon-earned reviews as incentivized automatically if you enable the badge, which is the easy way to stay on the right side of that. For the wider picture, see getting star ratings into Google search results.

10. Leave AI shopping visibility on, and then verify it

This is the newest setting on the list and the one no other setup guide mentions. With AI shopping visibility enabled, Judge.me writes your review content into the page as server-rendered HTML, so assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini can read it without running JavaScript. It also expands your structured data to include up to 50 recent reviews as individual nodes.

It is on by default. The catch is that it needs the Review Widget installed as a Shopify app block. Vintage-theme installations get neither the server-rendered content nor the expanded schema. To check, open a product page, right-click, choose View page source rather than Inspect, and search for jdgm-ssr-reviews. If it is there, you are fine.

Settings 11 and 12: test it, then decide who gets emailed

11. Send yourself a real request before a customer sees one

Under Settings, then Admin notifications, tick "Send me a copy of each email sent to customers." You will be BCC'd on every outgoing request, which is the fastest way to catch a broken logo, wrong sender name, or timing you did not intend. Add up to three notification addresses while you are there, turn on new review notifications, and set the negative review threshold so anything at or below your chosen star rating can be routed to a separate inbox.

To see the actual customer experience, schedule a manual request to your own email under Settings, then Request reviews. Enter your name, your address, a fulfilment date, and a product. It sends about ten minutes later, or immediately if you use Send request now.

12. Do review requests count as marketing emails?

In some jurisdictions, yes. By default Judge.me sends review requests to every customer regardless of whether they opted into marketing at checkout, on the reasoning that a review request is transactional. If you sell into the EU or the UK, that assumption is one you should make on purpose rather than by accident.

The control sits under Request scheduling, in the Advanced section: "Send review requests to customers who have opted out of Shopify marketing emails." Unticking it limits requests to customers who accepted marketing. Judge.me is clear in its own documentation that attaching a discount code to a review request makes it more likely to be treated as marketing, so if you run review coupons, this decision gets easier.

How to pause, reschedule, or resend a request

Everything above is day-one work. These four actions come up constantly afterward, and they all live in the same place: Reviews, then Review requests.

Pause everything. Open More actions and choose Cancel unsent requests. You enter how many days back to cancel, and every unsent request for fulfilled orders in that window is skipped. To stop future requests as well, uncheck the order types under Request scheduling.

Skip one request or one customer. The three-dot menu on any row offers Skip this request and Always skip this customer. The second adds them to your blocklist permanently.

Send one now. Same menu, Send request now. It is the fix for a request stuck in "Waiting for delivery." Know the cost: force-sending breaks that order's normal cycle, so no reminders will follow it.

Change a date. You cannot, for a request that is already scheduled. Timing changes apply only to orders fulfilled after you save. If you moved from Delivered to Fulfilled last week, your older orders are still on the old schedule and always will be.

Wrapping up

Three things to take from this. Eight of the twelve settings are free, so the honest answer for a store doing under thirty orders a month is to do those eight and leave the $15 for later. The three that move real numbers are the request trigger, the widget version, and the microdata conflict, and if you only have twenty minutes today, do those. And every timing change you make applies to future orders only, which is the whole argument for doing this before the volume arrives rather than after.

What I have not covered is the part that is not a setting. Judge.me will collect reviews reliably once it is configured, but it will not reply to them, will not notice when a product page loses its widget after a theme update, and will not tell you when your star ratings quietly stop showing in Google. That is the ongoing work, and it is genuinely a few hours a month rather than a background task.

Go through the twelve in order, send yourself the test request, then leave it alone for a fortnight and read what comes back. Your first ten reviews will tell you more about your timing than any benchmark will.

Or email contact@studioniza.com if you have a specific question about your store. I read every one.

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