How Jeffers Pet built a 20,000-review engine with Judge.me

"We did more reviews in one week than we had, like, the entire previous year combined. And we just looked at that as an incredible gift."

— Cody Stapleton, CEO, Jeffers Pet

The Challenge

After 50 years in business, Jeffers Pet had a feedback problem — not because customers didn't care, but because the tools didn't work.

Jeffers Pet is one of the oldest names in animal health retail: an Alabama-based company that has spent five decades supplying supplements, medications, and equipment for dogs, cats, horses, cattle, and livestock across the United States. When CEO Cody Stapleton joined four years ago, his mandate was clear — transform a legacy direct-mail catalog business into a modern D2C brand. That meant Shopify. And it meant finally solving reviews.

On their previous platform, VTEX, Jeffers was running on the platform's native review functionality. It wasn't built for review collection at scale and had no meaningful integrations with the wider Shopify ecosystem. 

The results showed: one or two reviews a day, across a catalog of 16,000 products. In a category where customers make purchasing decisions on behalf of animals who can't communicate their needs, that thin layer of social proof was costing Jeffers trust at every touchpoint.

The Solution

In their first week on Judge.me, Jeffers collected more reviews than they had in the entire previous year. Then they built a system to run review operations at the pace of a 16,000-SKU business.

Collecting at Scale — With the Right Products First

Running review collection across 16,000 products requires more than switching on an email sequence. It requires sequencing logic.

Jeffers uses Judge.me's automated review request emails with a deliberate prioritization rule: requests are directed first toward the products with the fewest reviews. This ensures that newer items — and especially Jeffers-manufactured products, where the brand has the most to gain from first-party social proof — build review coverage faster than established lines that already have traction.

The timing is calibrated carefully, too. The team runs a 6-day post-fulfilment trigger with a 5-day follow-up. After some customer feedback that the cadence felt like too much, Jeffers scaled it back to protect the relationship. Getting volume matters; so does not wearing out your best customers.

What the experience taught Cody is something useful for any merchant in the category: animal health customers don't need an incentive to review. "The customers who want to send reviews want to do it anyway." In a space where owners are emotionally invested in the wellbeing of their animals, the motivation to share what works is intrinsic.

Moderation as a Customer Service Channel

Most merchants auto-publish reviews. Jeffers doesn't.

Every submission is manually reviewed before it goes live. A dedicated customer service representative goes through incoming reviews each day. The ecommerce manager reviews them. Cody reviews them himself. For Jeffers, the Reviews Dashboard is a direct line to the voice of the customer — and that line is too valuable to put on autopilot.

When a negative review comes in, the first action is an offline outreach — a call or email to the customer, made before anyone decides whether to publish. The goal is to resolve the issue while displaying the feedback.

Those reviews are accompanied by a public reply that acknowledges the issue, reiterates usage guidance, and offers to make it right. 

"We want to be authentic," Cody said. "If it's about the product and it's a product review and they're not thrilled with it, my stance is that we have to publish that." 

A considered public response to a critical review is visible to every prospective customer reading it — and that visibility is one of the most effective trust-building tools available.

Extending Social Proof Across Every Channel

Jeffers operates across multiple touchpoints, and reviews move with the business.

On TikTok Shop — where non-best-selling products have found unexpected new audiences through the platform's creator economy — Jeffers has activated TikTok Shop review sync, ensuring verified social proof is already in place by the time a creator-driven discovery moment becomes a purchase decision.

Google Business Profile sync pulls store-level reviews into Judge.me automatically, consolidating trust signals for customers who first find Jeffers through search.

Reviews also travel offline. Jeffers features customer feedback in their direct-mail catalog — still a meaningful touchpoint for a significant portion of their legacy customer base — and integrates reviews into email campaigns. For a brand whose enterprise customers have relationships stretching back decades, a familiar product review in print carries weight that a star rating on a screen doesn't replicate.

What They Use with Judge.me

Judge.me features

• Automated review request emails

• Review request priority scheduling (fewest reviews first)

• Review Widget

• TikTok Shop review sync

• Reviews Dashboard (manual moderation workflow)

• Public reply to reviews

• Google Business Profile sync

  
  

What's Next

• AI-powered review translation. Jeffers serves a significant Spanish-speaking customer base — bilingual staff handles three to four Spanish-language calls daily — but fewer than 1% of reviews currently come in Spanish. Enabling AI-powered review translation in the Review Widget will allow Spanish-browsing customers to read reviews in their preferred language, lowering the final barrier to purchase for a segment Jeffers has deliberately invested in serving.

• Language sorting. Paired with translation, language sorting will surface any Spanish-language reviews first for visitors browsing the Spanish version of the site — making the review experience feel native rather than adapted, and giving Spanish-speaking customers the same confidence that English-speaking customers already enjoy.

• Media reminder email. Cody wants to build a visual review library on his product pages — inspired by the UGC he sees converting on TikTok. The media reminder email automatically follows up with customers who submitted a text-only review and prompts them to add a photo or video. For a catalog full of animals, equipment, and visible health results, it's the most direct path to the photo and video reviews that bring Jeffers' products to life.

• QR code review collection. With Shopify POS launching across Jeffers' physical stores, QR codes embedded in receipts and placed at checkout will extend review collection to in-store customers — a segment currently leaving no trace in the review system. It will close the loop between Jeffers' offline and online social proof operations, and ensure every purchase has a path back into the review pipeline.