A 4.6 can hide your problem
The average rating is the first number every shop looks at, and the least useful one for deciding what to change. It says how satisfied customers are overall. It does not say with what.
Three things the average does not show:
- What customers say. Five stars with “arrived broken, but the product is good” is a complaint about packaging.
- When something changed. An average built over years barely moves, even when reviews about delivery have doubled in the last month.
- Which problem is yours. A review about the courier is your responsibility, since you chose it. A review about a third-party product may not be something you can fix.
Every review, in one sheet
Reviews live in many places: your Google profile, Skroutz, other platforms. To read them together, you need a sheet with four columns:
| Column | Example |
|---|---|
| Date | 2026-09-14 |
| Stars | 4 |
| Text | “Fast delivery, but the box was crushed.” |
| Platform |
- Google: download your business profile reviews from Google Takeout, by selecting Google Business Profile.
- Skroutz and other platforms: check whether the merchant area offers an export. If not, a sheet with the last few months of reviews is enough to start.
The reviewer’s name is not needed for the analysis. Leave it out: it is personal data, and what you do not keep you do not need to protect.
Stars say how much. The text says about what.
Read each review with two questions: which theme it talks about, and whether it complains about that theme or praises it. Four synthetic reviews:
| Review | Stars | Theme | Tone on the theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Very good product, but it arrived in a broken box.” | 5 | Packaging | Complaint |
| “Took six days. The product is flawless though.” | 3 | Delivery | Complaint |
| “I got the wrong size, the exchange took two days.” | 4 | Returns and exchanges | Praise |
| “Awful.” | 1 | — | Says nothing specific |
The first review raises the average and at the same time tells you what to fix. The third starts with a mistake, but praises how you handled it. A review can talk about two themes, one good and one bad: count it in both.
How many reviews mention each theme, and in what tone
Once every review has a theme, count two numbers per theme: how many reviews mention it, and what share of those are complaints. A synthetic shop with 400 reviews in the last three months and an average of 4.6:
| Theme | Reviews mentioning it | Of those, complaints |
|---|---|---|
| Product quality | 160 (40%) | 9% |
| Delivery | 124 (31%) | 38% |
| Customer service | 56 (14%) | 22% |
| Packaging | 48 (12%) | 71% |
| Price | 36 (9%) | 30% |
The shares add up to more than 100%, because one review can mention several themes. The 4.6 hides that almost three in four packaging mentions are complaints, and that delivery is the second most common theme, with complaints in a third of its mentions.
Build the same table for the previous period and compare. A theme that rose the week you changed courier, packaging or campaign tells you where it started.
What counts in the score but not in the themes
- Very short reviews. A “Perfect!” or an “Awful” counts in the stars, but does not tell you what to change. Keep them in the score, leave them out of the themes.
- Reviews about the platform. A complaint about the platform’s app or its payment method is not about your shop. The courier, though, is.
- Suspicious reviews. If a review looks fake or breaks the platform’s rules, report it through the platform itself. Google, for example, does not let you delete a review, but lets you flag it for review.
What you leave out of the themes you do not remove from the score. The score is what prospective customers see, and you need to know what it is.
Reply to the negative ones, and ask everyone for a review
Where the platform lets you reply, reply to the negative reviews first: briefly, naming the specific problem and what you did about it. The reply is read by people deciding whether to buy, not only by the person who wrote the review.
And when you ask for reviews, ask every customer the same way. Inviting only the customers you know are happy is called review gating: Google’s rules prohibit it, and EU consumer law prohibits misleading presentation of reviews.
How Sightelle does it
- You upload your reviews file and mark it as public reviews. Stars and platform are kept next to the tone, without the reviewer’s name.
- Every review goes into themes together with tickets and surveys, in your customers’ own words.
- A competitor’s public reviews, from a file, are measured against your own themes, so you can see where you fall behind.
- For the first audit, we put your Google Takeout file into the right format for you.
Data only arrives from files you upload or from official integrations, never by scraping. See the page for e-shops and retail, or read how to calculate NPS correctly.
See the themes in your own reviews
A reviews file, a few minutes, one document for management.