Reviews are the one place where content enters the system from outside. Visitors write them on the product page, the system verifies and filters them, and editors make the final call. Nothing a visitor types reaches the site without passing through you.
They live under Catalog → Reviews, and the whole module revolves around one field: status.
The lifecycle
Status
Meaning
Who moves it here
Pending Email Confirmation
Submitted, reviewer has not clicked the email link yet
The visitor, by submitting
Pending Review
Email confirmed, waiting for moderation
The reviewer, by clicking the link
Approved
Live on the site
You
Rejected
Kept for the record, never shown
You
Only approved reviews render anywhere. Everything else is invisible to visitors no matter what it contains.
What happens before you ever see one
A submission has to clear several gates on its way in, which is why the moderation queue stays manageable:
The form validates hard. Rating 1 to 5, a title, pros required, cons optional, a name and an email. Up to five photos or videos, images to 10 MB, videos to 100 MB.
A captcha blocks bots at the door.
Rate limiting allows at most ten submissions per day from the same address, and reviews only attach to published products.
Email confirmation. The reviewer gets a link valid for 48 hours. Until they click it, the review sits in Pending Email Confirmation and never reaches your queue.
Automatic cleanup. Reviews that are never confirmed get deleted after the 48 hours expire, together with their uploaded media. Do not bother moderating the Pending Email Confirmation pile, it drains itself.
Your queue is the Pending Review filter: real people who confirmed a real mailbox.
Moderating
review edit screen with status sidebar
Open a pending review and everything is on one screen: the product, the rating, the text, any attached media, and the reviewer block. Read it, then set the status in the sidebar to Approved or Rejected and save.
Points worth knowing while judging:
The name is shown on the site next to the review. The email is never shown anywhere, and the IP exists purely for rate limiting.
The locale field records which site language the review was written on. The site displays the review to every locale with a small language note, so a Serbian review is readable on the Slovenian page and labeled as Serbian.
Media attached by reviewers has already passed size and format checks, but nobody has looked at the pictures. That is your job, media moderation is the whole reason the approval step exists.
Rejecting keeps the document. Prefer reject over delete, it preserves the trail if the same person resubmits.
You can edit the text before approving, fixing a typo is fine, changing the meaning of someone's signed opinion is not.
What approval triggers
The moment a review flips to Approved it starts counting everywhere:
The product page shows it in the paginated review list.
The summary card recalculates: the average, the total and the star distribution bars all come only from approved reviews.
The rating and review count on product cards in category grids come from the search index, which recalculates during the product sync. That number follows with a delay rather than instantly, no need to report it as a bug.
Manual entries
Editors can create reviews by hand, useful for importing feedback collected elsewhere. Create the document, fill the review and reviewer fields, and set the status straight to Approved, a manually created review has no reviewer mailbox to confirm. Pick the locale honestly, it drives the language label on the site.