Connecting Bazaarvoice Reviews

If Bazaarvoice handles your product reviews, Renable can fetch them through Bazaarvoice's API and use the best quotes and star ratings in your ads. You need one thing: an API key for Bazaarvoice's Conversations API.

Step 1: create the API key in Bazaarvoice#

The key must be for the Conversations API, which is the API Renable reads reviews through. In the Bazaarvoice Portal, go to Settings → API (under Developer), click Request API key, choose Conversations API, and fill in the request form. The new key stays pending until your company's Bazaarvoice Technical Administrator approves it. If you don't see the API settings, API access may not be enabled for your account — ask your Bazaarvoice representative. Bazaarvoice's developer guide walks through the steps: API key management.

Renable only reads reviews — the key never needs write permissions.

Step 2: connect in Renable#

On the catalog's page, open the review-feed settings, choose Bazaarvoice as the source, and paste the API key into its field. Or simply ask Aimée on the catalog page ("connect our Bazaarvoice reviews") and paste the key into the chat — she saves the connection for you.

Either way, Renable validates the connection against Bazaarvoice's API before saving, and tells you if the key doesn't work — so you never end up with a silently broken review source.

A Bazaarvoice API key identifies your Bazaarvoice account, so entering a different key and publishing counts as a new review source: the catalog's current reviews, and any approvals made on them, are removed and the reviews are imported again from the new key. See Changing or removing the review source.

Matching reviews to products#

Bazaarvoice reviews are matched to your products by product identifiers (Product ID, Item group ID, Brand+MPN, or GTIN, tried in that order). If your Bazaarvoice export lines up with one of your feed's custom_label fields instead, choose that field under Match reviews to products using. See Connecting a review feed for details.

Good to know#

• When you connect Bazaarvoice, Renable starts fetching the reviews of every product in the catalog right away. A large catalog takes a while, so review counts can keep climbing for some time after connecting.
• After that, Renable checks a slice of the catalog every hour, so each product's reviews are checked once a week. A new product is checked when it first appears in your product feed.
• Renable imports all of a product's reviews, newest first. Bazaarvoice's terms don't allow reading past the first 10,100 reviews of a product, so for a product with more than that, Renable keeps the newest 10,100.
• Bazaarvoice doesn't report removed reviews; a removed review simply stops appearing in the product's review list. So when a review Renable imported is gone from its product's whole list — deleted, rejected in moderation, or removed at the reviewer's request — Renable removes it too, and the products that quoted it get new review quotes. One weekly check missing a review isn't enough: it's removed once two weekly checks in a row have missed it, so within about two weeks. That way a review Bazaarvoice also shows under another of your products, or a list that comes back empty for a day, doesn't cost you the review or its approval. A check that couldn't read a product's whole list (an error, or more than 10,100 reviews) removes nothing for that product.
• Reviews that had already disappeared from Bazaarvoice before Renable started checking for removals, and reviews of products Renable no longer checks, aren't picked up yet: they stay until the review source is changed or removed.