Importing AliExpress Reviews to Shopify: What Is Allowed

You can import AliExpress reviews into a Shopify store, but only if you present them as what they are: reviews of the same product, written by people who bought it from the supplier's listing and not from you. Label them as such, never mark them as verified purchases, leave the text as the customer wrote it, and replace them with reviews from your own customers as those come in. This guide explains why the distinction matters, how to label imported reviews, and where the risks lie with Google and with consumer law.

Whose reviews are they?

They belong to the supplier's sale, not to yours. A review on an AliExpress listing describes one transaction: that buyer, that seller, that price, that delivery. When you copy it onto your product page, only one part of it still applies to your store, which is the physical product, and even that holds only if you are selling the identical item from the same source.

Everything else in the review may be untrue of your shop:

• Delivery. 'Arrived in ten days' says nothing about your shipping times.
• Price and value. 'Great for the price' was written about a different price.
• Service. Praise or complaints about the seller concern someone else.

This is why an imported review cannot be passed off as a review from your customer. Your store had no part in the sale it describes.

Is importing them allowed at all?

Importing supplier reviews is a common practice in dropshipping, and the import is not where the problem lies. What decides whether you are being honest with shoppers is the presentation. A shopper who reads a review on your store assumes, unless told otherwise, that it was written by someone who bought from you. If that assumption is false and you have done nothing to correct it, the page misleads.

Also check the terms of the platform you are copying from before reusing content written on its listings.

How should imported reviews be labelled?

Say plainly, near the reviews, that some were collected from the supplier's listing.

Good practice has two parts:

1. A visible note in the reviews section. For example: 'Some reviews on this page were written by customers who bought this product from our supplier. Reviews marked Verified Purchase are from customers of this store.'
2. A fuller explanation in your review policy, saying how you verify your own reviews and that imported ones are not verified by you.

In the European Union, a store that shows reviews must state whether and how it checks that they come from real buyers. An honest statement for a store with imported reviews has to say that those ones were not checked by you. The wider rules are summarised in our guide to collecting verified reviews on Shopify.

Why must they never be marked verified?

Because a verified badge says your store matched the review to an order, and for an imported review there is no order in your store to match.

Reviews apps differ in how they handle this, so check yours. Marka Reviews can pull reviews from AliExpress, including on its free plan, and never marks them verified: the badge is kept for reviews submitted through a request tied to a real, fulfilled order on your store. What the badge should and should not mean is covered in what a verified purchase badge means.

Can you edit or select the reviews you import?

Do not edit the text, and be careful about selection. Rewriting a review, even to correct grammar or remove a mention of slow shipping, puts your words in a customer's mouth.

Selection is a quieter version of the same problem. Importing only the five-star reviews from a listing that averages lower gives your page a rating the product has not earned. If you import, bring across a spread that reflects the listing, including the critical ones.

Where are the risks with Google and consumer law?

The risk arises when supplier reviews are presented as your customers' reviews, whether to shoppers or to Google.

Google. Star ratings in Google Shopping come from a product ratings feed submitted to Merchant Center, and Google sets its own policies on which reviews it accepts and how they must be sourced. Read those policies before submitting anything, and take the cautious course: keep supplier reviews out of any feed that represents reviews as collected by your store. Your Merchant Center account matters to more than your stars, so it is not the place to take chances. The feed itself is explained in how to get star ratings on Google Shopping listings.

Consumer law. Fake reviews are banned in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the UK rules expect businesses to take reasonable steps to prevent them. A genuine supplier review is not an invented one, but presenting it as a verified review from your own buyer misrepresents it. This describes good practice and is not legal advice, so check the rules in each market you sell to. More background is in fake review rules every Shopify merchant should know.

How do you replace them with your own?

Treat imported reviews as scaffolding: something for a new product page to show while your own reviews build up, to be taken down as that happens.

A workable plan:

1. Switch on review requests from your first order, so every sale can produce a verified review.
2. Sort your own verified reviews to the top of each product page.
3. Set a threshold per product, for example once it has fifteen reviews from your own customers, at which you remove the imported ones.

The figure of fifteen is an example. Choose one that suits your volume.

A short checklist

1. Import only reviews of the identical product from the same supplier.
2. Add a visible note saying which reviews came from the supplier's listing.
3. Confirm that no imported review shows a verified badge.
4. Leave the text unedited and include critical reviews.
5. Read Google's policies before putting any imported review in a ratings feed.
6. Start collecting your own reviews at once and retire imports on a set threshold.

Imported reviews are a temporary support, and they are safe only while shoppers can tell them apart from your own. Marka Reviews keeps that line clear by reserving the verified badge for reviews matched to your orders.