At Growth Unlocked: The Summit, Martin Yong and Rory Jeffries, our product leads for Reviews and Email, pulled back the curtain on where Judge.me is heading over the next twelve months, and it's set to be our biggest year yet.
We're always building, always finding new ways to help you grow trust for your Shopify store. But the foundations stay the same: full-featured products, a steady stream of new features, support that actually helps, and a fair price. Here's where we're taking it next.
You can watch the full session, covering both Reviews and Email, on this page, or read the recap below.
From collecting reviews to making them work
For years, our focus has been reviews. We've helped over 700,000 Shopify stores collect reviews and build trust. We've built countless widgets with countless settings, all made for Shopify and built to help you grow.
But the point was never just getting you reviews. It's getting you sales, and better-quality reviews along the way. So while we've given you plenty of options, this year we're taking the guesswork out of collection, and giving you insight and answers instead.
That starts with making your reviews work harder in two ways: helping them drive more traffic to your store, and helping that traffic convert. But before you can make reviews work harder, you need to see how they're working now. That begins with your review collection rate, which across Judge.me averages 3.6%, and which you can see for your own store on your analytics page.
Getting under the hood: your analytics page
It's built to show you three things:
Your collection rate. Where you stand today, and how it's moving over time.
How you compare to stores like yours. Benchmarked against stores of a similar size, region, and category, not the whole world.
Ways to improve. The settings most likely to lift your collection rate, based on how your own store is performing, and applied in a click.
Take a tour if you haven't yet. It's the clearest picture you'll get of how your reviews are really performing.
Making your reviews drive more traffic
The way shoppers find products is changing, and reviews are at the heart of it. Reviews answer questions your product descriptions can't, and AI assistants now read them to decide which products to recommend. That means the reviews you've already collected can bring new shoppers to you, as long as those assistants can read them.
Several features built around this are ready to turn on today:
Reviews AI assistants can read. Your reviews, ratings, and structured data rendered so that AI shopping assistants can find and quote them, not just shoppers browsing your page.
Automatic product and store FAQs. Questions and answers drawn from your own reviews and product information, placed where both shoppers and AI assistants can read them.
The bigger piece this points toward is the Judge.me review site, which we'll come to shortly.
Making that traffic convert
Getting a shopper to your page is half the job. The other half is the moment they decide, and reviews do a lot of quiet work there. So we're building features that put reviews at the key decision moments, like the cart and the checkout, where a little reassurance tips someone into buying.
The through-line is simple: the right review, in front of the right shopper, at the moment it helps.
Letting data decide which widget you use
Your product pages get tested and measured constantly. Your review widgets get installed once and left alone. We're changing that. Instead of picking a widget on looks, you'll be able to choose based on how many shoppers actually see it and how much it drives sales.
The Judge.me Trust Badge: A trust ecosystem that works for both sides
Nearly every shopper is asking the same question, whether they realise it or not: is this a real business I can trust? The Trust Badge gives them the answer, and lets them compare stores with confidence. Across twelve test stores with the badge installed, we measured an approximate 2% lift in conversion.
The badge brings together the two things a first-time shopper looks for. It shows a Trust Score, the plain average of your verified purchase reviews, and it shows whether your store is certified: an independent check Judge.me runs against four published standards, covering transparent review practices, secure payment, a clear shipping and refund policy, and a verified trading history. The point is that the certification comes from us, not from you, so a shopper has a neutral party's word for it rather than just the seller's. Tap the badge and your reviews, score and certification open in a window on your own page, no redirects away from your store. It's free, and you can read how it works on our Trust Badge page.
The badge is the first step. We're building the Judge.me review site into a space that brings store and product reviews together, similar to Trustpilot, but a level deeper on products. The idea rewards both sides: shoppers build a profile from the reviews they write, and merchants get a route to the shoppers who write them. It means your reviews can be found, not just read on your own page. It's early, but it's a direction we think is worth getting right.
Email, the Judge.me way
The newest part of Judge.me is Email, and it came straight from what merchants told us. Reviews they had sorted; it was email they needed help with. And always the same two complaints: it costs too much, and it's too much work.
We already knew the ground. Judge.me sends over twenty million emails a month, most of them asking a customer for a review, so getting mail delivered and opened is something we've done for a decade. We started building Judge.me Email in April and launched it two weeks before the session. In its first two weeks, it sent over 4.3 million emails across 56 countries, at a 99% delivery rate.
Judge.me Email, explained
Install Judge.me Email and a set of automations come ready to run, covering the key moments in the customer journey: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back, and back-in-stock. On top of that, there are campaign tools for your whole list or any segment of it, a template editor so your emails look like your brand rather than a template, and popups to capture new subscribers.
How Judge.me Email is priced
Most email platforms bill you for the number of contacts in your list, whether you email them or not. We think that's backwards. You should pay for the emails you send, not the people you store.
So with Judge.me Email, your subscribers stay in Shopify, your list is yours to grow as large as you like, and you get 15,000 emails a month free on every plan, for good, not a trial. Anything beyond that costs 15 cents per thousand.
What that looks like in practice: an action-sports retailer with 75,000 subscribers sending 600,000 emails a month went from around $630 on their old platform to roughly $55 with us. A UK haircare brand moved from £250 a month on Klaviyo to nothing, because her volume sits inside the free tier.
What's coming to Email over the next year
Over the next twelve months, we're building toward four things:
On-brand, in your voice. Onboarding that picks up your brand tone from day one.
Emails that know the customer. Using Shopify purchase and review history to lift opens and clicks.
The email that writes itself. Prompt-based campaigns and automated flow edits.
Deeper integrations and multi-language support. So you can sell in more than one market without the extra work.
And in the meantime, there's something new most weeks. Keep an eye on the app for what lands next.
Three things you can do with Email today
You don't have to wait for the roadmap to get value from this. Three worth doing now:
Switch your automations on. They run in the background, nurturing someone toward a first purchase and reminding them to come back.
Fix your domain, then cut the deadwood. Set your sending domain up properly for deliverability, and suppress anyone who hasn't engaged in a while.
Send more often, to fewer people. Most stores under-send. Target smaller, engaged segments rather than blasting your whole list.
If you'd like a hand, you can book a free 30-minute onboarding call and one of us will sit with you on your own store to get your first flows and campaigns set up. No charge, and no obligation to stay.
Our vision, summarised
The direction is set: reviews that work harder for your sales, a trust ecosystem that helps shoppers choose you, and email priced the way it should have been all along. But a direction isn't worth much on its own. What we hope comes through is the pace, something new most weeks, and the fact that all of it started with what merchants told us they needed. That part isn't changing.
Frequently asked questions
What is Judge.me working on next?
Over the next twelve months, the focus is on making reviews work harder for sales: helping your reviews drive traffic (including being readable by AI shopping assistants) and convert it (reviews at decision moments like the cart and checkout), a growing trust ecosystem built around the Trust Badge and the Judge.me review site, and continued development of Judge.me Email.
What is Judge.me Email?
It's Judge.me's email marketing product, recently launched. It comes with pre-built automations covering the key customer-journey moments, campaign and segmentation tools, a template editor, and popups. Pricing is based on emails sent rather than contacts stored: 15,000 emails a month are free on every plan, for good, then 15 cents per thousand.
How is Judge.me Email priced differently from other platforms?
Most platforms charge by the number of contacts in your list, even ones you never email. Judge.me Email charges only for the emails you send, and your subscriber list stays in Shopify rather than in our database.
What is the Judge.me review site?
It's a space, in development, that brings store and product reviews together, going a level deeper on products than existing review sites. The aim is a two-sided system where shoppers build a profile from the reviews they write and merchants can reach them with relevant offers, making your reviews discoverable beyond your own store page.
