How to Migrate Product Reviews from Etsy to Shopify Without Losing Star Ratings

You've decided to leave Etsy. Products, images, and your customer list are all on the checklist, and somewhere near the bottom sits the item most sellers underestimate. Reviews. Working out how to migrate product reviews from Etsy to Shopify matters far more than the tidy CSV makes it look, because star ratings are the part that reliably breaks.

The pattern is always the same. A seller exports what they can, drops it into a Shopify review app, and ends up with a wall of text blocks showing no stars, no photos, and dates that all read as today. The words survived. The trust signal, the rich snippet, and the conversion lift did not.

This guide covers the export routes that genuinely exist (including one Etsy quietly hands you), the field mapping that keeps ratings attached, and the schema check that decides whether Google shows your stars. If your catalog isn't across yet, start with the full Etsy to Shopify product migration walkthrough and come back once your listings are live.

Why Do Star Ratings Get Lost When You Migrate Product Reviews From Etsy to Shopify?

Ratings get lost during field mapping, not during export. The star value sits in a separate column from the review text, and most DIY imports either skip that column, mislabel it, or hand the destination app a format it silently rejects.

Three failure modes account for nearly every "my reviews imported but the stars are gone" complaint.

First is the unmapped rating column. Review apps expect an integer from 1 to 5 in a named field. If your spreadsheet header says "stars" and the importer is hunting for "rating," you get review text with a default value or no value at all.

Second is rating-only reviews. Plenty of Etsy buyers leave five stars and zero words, and Judge.me's import documentation states plainly that a review body is required, so those rows won't import. On an established shop, silent five-star ratings can be a large slice of the average you're trying to preserve.

Third is aggregation. Even when individual ratings land correctly, your theme has to read them and output an average as structured data. That's a separate system from the review list itself, and it's the one that quietly kills your Google stars. The same trap catches merchants moving from other marketplaces, which is why the general review import process for Amazon and AliExpress follows an almost identical sequence of checks.

Does Etsy's API Actually Let You Export Review Data?

Yes, and this is where most migration guides are simply wrong. The Etsy Open API v3 includes review endpoints (getReviewsByShop and getReviewsByListing), and Etsy separately lets you download your own reviews from shop settings without writing a line of code.

The no-code route is the one almost nobody mentions. Open Shop Manager, go to Settings, then Options, then the Download Data tab, and choose the option to download your reviews. Etsy's help documentation confirms the reviews arrive as a JSON file, and that download requests expire after two weeks if you leave them sitting.

JSON isn't a CSV, so you have to flatten it before any review app will accept it. Google Sheets, a JSON-to-CSV converter, or a short script all work fine. That conversion step is precisely where impatient sellers drop the rating field.

The API route suits larger catalogs. It needs a registered Etsy app and an API key, and per Etsy's API reference the review endpoints return a maximum of 100 records per request, so a long review history needs offset pagination. Read the Etsy API Terms of Use before you build anything on top of it.

Scraping is the third option and by far the flimsiest. As Scrape.do's technical teardown of Etsy scraping documents, Etsy's internal deep_dive_reviews GraphQL endpoint stopped returning review HTML and now serves an empty loading placeholder, which broke a whole generation of scraper scripts. Anything built on storefront parsing inherits that fragility.

What's the Difference Between Manual CSV Import and Using a Review Importer App?

Manual CSV gives you total control over field mapping and costs nothing beyond your time. An importer app handles extraction, media hosting, and mapping for you, which matters most when a meaningful share of your reviews carry photos or video.

Go manual when:

• You have fewer than about 500 reviews
• Most reviews are text-only
• Your Shopify product handles or SKUs match your Etsy listings cleanly
• You want to inspect every row before it goes live

Use an importer app when:

• Photo and video reviews make up a real portion of your social proof
• You're moving thousands of reviews across hundreds of listings
• You'd rather not host review images yourself
• You're importing from more than one marketplace at once

Visual reviews are where manual imports fall over. Judge.me's spreadsheet import handles text and images but cannot import video at all, and Loox caps custom-file imports at five photos per review in JPG or PNG only. That's a genuine loss if your best Etsy reviews are photo-led.

WiseReviews - Reviews Importer exists specifically for that gap, pulling photo and video reviews with their ratings attached from Etsy and other marketplaces, with a free tier so you can test the mapping on a handful of products first. Worth a look if visual reviews are doing the heavy lifting in your store.

The same trade-off shows up on every marketplace migration. Our breakdown of importing reviews from Shopee to Shopify walks through the manual and app paths side by side if you want a second worked example.

How Do You Map Etsy Review Fields (Rating, Text, Photos, Reviewer Name) to Shopify Correctly?

Map the overall star rating, review body, reviewer name, original date, and image URLs, and deliberately leave the verification and email fields empty. Getting the date and the verification flag wrong is what makes imported reviews look fake to shoppers.

One detail catches people out. According to Etsy's seller documentation, buyers can rate Item Quality, Shipping, and Seller Customer Service separately, but only the overall star rating is publicly visible. Import the overall rating. Don't average the sub-ratings, or your Shopify numbers won't match what shoppers saw on Etsy.

Here's the mapping that works:

1. Product match: match on SKU where you kept SKUs, otherwise product handle. Never match on title alone, since Etsy titles are usually keyword-stuffed and won't survive the move.
2. rating: integer 1 to 5, from the overall star rating only.
3. body: the written note. Required by Judge.me, so rating-only reviews need a decision (skip them, or add a short neutral line).
4. reviewer_name: Judge.me caps this at 100 characters and defaults blank entries to "Anonymous," which is a perfectly honest option.
5. email: leave blank. Never invent addresses to fake verification.
6. created_at: use the original Etsy review date. This is the single most important field for authenticity.
7. picture_urls: publicly reachable image URLs, comma separated. Confirm each one loads in a private browser window first.
8. verified: leave false. Judge.me won't mark imported reviews as verified anyway, because the import doesn't supply order data meeting its standard.

Timestamps deserve special attention. A store that launched last month with 400 reviews all dated last month reads as obviously manufactured. Preserve the real dates and the history tells the truth about your years on Etsy. If you're also bringing across buyer records, our guide to exporting your Etsy customer list to Shopify covers the matching logic in more depth.

How Do You Make Sure Your Imported Ratings Show Up in Google Rich Snippets?

Your review app has to output valid aggregateRating structured data on each product page, and the numbers in that markup must match the numbers rendered on the page. Import the reviews and skip this step, and you'll have stars on your site with none in search results.

Google's product snippet documentation requires a name plus at least one of review, aggregateRating, or offers. The review snippet guidelines then require aggregateRating to carry a ratingValue along with reviewCount or ratingCount, and bestRating and worstRating if you use a scale other than 1 to 5.

Two Shopify-specific problems come up constantly. Themes sometimes emit their own Product schema alongside the review app's, producing duplicate or conflicting aggregateRating blocks that Google ignores. And a "missing field aggregateRating" notice in Search Console shows up as a warning rather than an error, so it's easy to scroll past for months.

Run every migrated product template through Google's Rich Results Test before you consider the job finished. There's more on the ranking side of this in our piece on how product reviews affect Shopify SEO.

The payoff is measurable. Uberall's analysis of 64,000 business locations found that a 0.1 increase in star rating lifted conversion by around 25%. That study looked at local listings rather than product pages, but the direction is consistent with ecommerce data: Fera's research puts products with 11 to 30 reviews at roughly 68% higher conversion than products with none.

One counterintuitive finding worth knowing before you panic about a stray three-star review. The Northwestern Spiegel study covered by MarketingSherpa found purchase probability peaks in the mid-fours and actually dips at a perfect five, because shoppers get suspicious. Import your imperfect reviews. They're doing work.

What Should You Do About Reviews Left on Etsy After You Migrate (Ongoing Sync vs. One-Time Import)?

Do a one-time verified snapshot, set a hard cutover date, and build all new review collection on Shopify. Then run one catch-up import roughly 100 days after your final Etsy order, because that's when the tail runs dry.

That 100-day figure isn't arbitrary. Etsy gives buyers 100 days from confirmed or estimated delivery to leave a review, and they can edit the rating any number of times inside that window. So your Etsy review flow has a known, finite expiry after your last shipment, which makes the second import easy to schedule.

Now the opinion. Treat any app promising automatic ongoing Etsy sync with real suspicion. Etsy's API access is gated behind app registration and approval, so a consumer-grade "one-click continuous sync" is usually parsing the public storefront behind the scenes, and storefront parsing breaks the moment Etsy adjusts its page layout.

Beyond the technical fragility, chasing live sync means you're still optimizing for a platform you're actively trying to leave. Etsy finished 2025 with 5.6 million active sellers, down 1.5% year over year, and active buyers down 3.4% to 86.5 million. Build your review engine where your business is going.

Freshness also argues for collecting new reviews rather than perpetually mirroring old ones. PowerReviews, surveying just over 9,000 US shoppers, found that 64% are more likely to buy a product with fewer but more recent reviews than one with a higher volume of older ones. Your imported Etsy history establishes credibility. Your Shopify review requests keep it current, and our guide on using reviews to lift Shopify conversion rates covers how to get that flow running quickly.

While you're setting the cutover date, sort your traffic too. Redirecting Etsy traffic to Shopify without losing rankings is a separate job with its own timeline, and doing both in the same week keeps your migration window short.

Is It Legal to Move Your Own Etsy Store Reviews to Shopify?

Yes. These are reviews of your products, left in your shop, and Etsy provides you a native export specifically so you can take that data with you. There's no ambiguity about your right to hold and reuse it.

Three rules keep you clean on the display side.

Attribute the origin. Add a small label such as "Originally left on Etsy" to imported reviews. It's honest, it explains the dates, and shoppers generally read it as evidence you've been trading for years rather than as a red flag.

Don't fabricate anything. Google's review snippet guidelines prohibit fake reviews and undisclosed incentivized reviews in both your page content and your structured data, and breaching a structured data guideline can attract a manual action that strips your star eligibility. Moving genuine reviews between your own storefronts is not what that rule targets.

Attach reviews to the right product. If you consolidated three Etsy variations into one Shopify product, the reviews follow. If you split a listing, don't duplicate the same review across all the children to inflate counts. That crosses from migration into misrepresentation, and it's the one thing here that could actually get you in trouble.

None of this is legal advice, and if you're operating at scale in a regulated category, have your counsel glance at your review disclosures.

How Do You Verify the Migration Worked (Auditing Your Imported Ratings)?

Check product pages, collection pages, and structured data separately, because they fail independently. Ratings that render perfectly on a product page frequently show nothing on collection grids, and that's the check almost every guide skips.

Work through this list once the import completes:

• Reconcile the counts. Compare the total in your review app against the row count in your source file. A gap usually means rating-only rows were rejected.
• Spot-check ten product pages. Confirm stars render, the average matches, dates look historical, and photos load.
• Check collection pages. Star badges on grid items are a separate theme setting in most review apps and are frequently left switched off.
• Run Google's Rich Results Test on at least one product per template. You want a valid aggregateRating with ratingValue and reviewCount present.
• Confirm the numbers match. If your page shows 4.6 from 128 reviews, your markup must say exactly that. Mismatches are a guideline violation, not a rounding quibble.
• Test on mobile. Review widgets that look fine on desktop sometimes collapse or lazy-load out of view on phones.
• Watch Search Console. Open the Product snippets report a week or two later and look for new warnings. Star snippets typically appear within one to four weeks of a re-crawl.

If the audit turns up widespread schema problems, the culprit is usually the review app rather than the import file. Our comparison of Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo and Okendo breaks down how each handles structured data and bulk imports, which is worth reading before you commit rather than after.

Reviews are one line item in a larger move, and the sequencing matters: products first, then reviews, then redirects. If you're still choosing tooling for the whole project, our roundup of the best Shopify migration apps ranks the options by what they actually transfer. Export your Etsy reviews before you touch anything else, though. Close that shop with the data still on Etsy's servers and it's gone for good.