**ETA: per the discussion below, Google may suppress ratings that contain HTML formatting, so it's better to use plain text to indicate your response to a review, such as:

=====================
Response from Example.com:
=====================

Original post (to be ignored) is below.
***********

Hi, our store at www.ClogHog.com just implemented the Ratings and Reviews feature in our cart.

Our paid third-party review service gives us the ability to add comments and suggestions after selected reviews, but we assumed we'd lack this capability with our cart hosted reviews.

However, it turns out that you can add comments and suggestions to the bottom of any review by editing the review, adding some simple HTML to the end.

For example, adding this HTML:

<strong>Response from Clog Hog:</strong><br /> <em>Richard, please contact us for assistance and we'll be glad to suggest some workarounds for passing the nozzle through drain elbows if they're at least 2" ID.</em>

Gives this appearance on the Reviews page:



In the past it's been very helpful to add suggestions or to let others know how you helped the customer solve a problem mentioned in a review.

It's also been a good idea to keep the format of your comments consistent (say, by always using the same boldface title) and different from the customer's text (say, by italicizing your comments).

- Paul D.

Thanks. good idea!!

I've only just seen this.
That's an excellent idea/tip Paul thanks.
I'll advise my clients to do the same.



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We recently attempted to add a seller comment to a customer rating as described in this post, and found that the HTML formatting elements no longer work, and appear as plain text.

Was there a change to the ECT code that eliminated our ability to enter HTML formatting in the seller comments?

And, is there any workaround, other than to go through all past seller comments and remove those HTML elements?

Yes we noticed the same. All the HTML comments we have left in the past are now showing the HTML code with the text.

For years we used to do this exact thing, but then we found that when we started to feed our reviews to google, they rejected the html, so we stopped adding html to comments.

Instead, we just add two line breaks and something like

***Admin Response - This and That and so on.



This serves the same purpose but keeps other problems with using html in the reviews at bay.
I'm not sure if Vince has some reason for removing html there, or if it will be restored, but personally, I suggest to avoid the html.

Thanks,
David

Thanks David.

Great suggestion as usual, Dave. Thanks for that.

Hi,

I believe adding this to your includes.php deals with this:

$allowhtmlinreviews=TRUE;

However, I prefer David’s solution, particularly as google is more likely to be happy with it.

Steve

quote:

---

I'm not sure if Vince has some reason for removing html there

---

This was just a security thing so store owners didn't end up with HTML in the comments without being aware of it.

Vince

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