Why your Shopify product reviews aren't showing

A store’s reviews had stopped appearing on some product pages. The reviews were there in the reviews platform, real and approved, they just weren’t showing on the site. Nothing looked wrong anywhere obvious, which is exactly what makes this one worth knowing about.

What we did

The reviews platform matches reviews to products by SKU. Somewhere along the line a trailing space had crept into the SKU on one side of that match, so “ABC123 ” and “ABC123” were, as far as the integration was concerned, two different products. The reviews were attached to one and the page was asking for the other, and you would never spot the difference by looking. We found the mismatch, cleaned the SKUs so both sides agreed exactly, and the reviews came straight back.

What to take from it

When an integration that matches on a code silently shows nothing, suspect the code before you suspect the data. A trailing space, a different case, a stray character, none of it shows up when you glance at the value, and all of it breaks an exact match. If your reviews, or your syncs, or your product feeds go quiet on some items and not others, copy the SKU out of both systems and compare them character for character before assuming something bigger is wrong.