How to import AliExpress reviews to Shopify for free

A product page with no reviews converts worse than one with a few dozen, and a new store has none. The product you are dropshipping usually has thousands of reviews on AliExpress, with photos, from buyers in many countries.

Importing them gives your page social proof from day one and tells you what buyers complain about before your own customers do. Show them honestly, as reviews of the product from AliExpress buyers (see the last section).

• A Shopify store with a review app that can import a CSV: Judge.me, Loox and Ali Reviews all do.
• The AliExpress link of your product.
• A free API key from the dashboard: the Free plan gives you 100 requests a day, no card required, and up to 20 reviews per request.

Open the product on AliExpress and look at the URL. The product ID is the number before .html:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006123456789.html

Here the ID is 1005006123456789.

One request returns the rating summary and the reviews. This one asks for the 5-star reviews:

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.aliexpress-reviews.com/v1/reviews/1005006123456789?filter=5&pageSize=20"

Each review comes with its rating, text, author, country, date and image URLs. If you want to see the JSON before writing any code, paste the product ID into the tester in your dashboard.

On the Free plan you can already filter by stars. Photo reviews (filter=image) are on the Max plan, and reviews translated to your store language (lang) or from a specific country (filter=local) are on Pro and Max.

Review apps ask for a CSV with one row per review. The usual columns are the product handle, rating, review text, reviewer name, date and picture URLs. Check your app's import template and match its column names.

We keep a ready-to-run script that does exactly this in 20 lines of Node.js in the Shopify use case. Replace my-product with the handle of your product in Shopify and run it.

1. Open your review app in the Shopify admin and find its import option (usually under Reviews, Import).
2. Upload the CSV and map the columns if the app asks.
3. Import a handful first and check how they look on the product page before importing the rest.

Repeat steps 2 to 4 for each product. With 100 requests a day on the Free plan you can cover plenty of products.

• Mostly 4 and 5 stars, but keep a few 3-star reviews: a page with only perfect reviews looks fake.
• Reviews with a real, specific comment beat one-word ones.
• Reviews with photos convert best.
• From your target country, if your customers are mostly in one market.

Read the 1-star reviews too. If many mention sizing or quality, you want to know before you sell the product.

Label the imported reviews as what they are: reviews of the product from AliExpress buyers, not from your customers. In the EU, consumer law requires you to say where your reviews come from and not to present them as verified purchases from your store. Many review apps let you mark the source. Stores that do this keep their customers' trust, and avoid problems with the platforms and the regulators.