With FastComments you can collect ratings, or ratings with an accompanying review. These ratings can be reported internally or displayed publicly using our widgets, for example to show customer review breakdowns by product. Learn more about the features of FastComments Ratings & Reviews and how to set it up below.
Features 
The Ratings & Reviews components, part of the FastComments Feedback module, has the following features worth highlighting:
- Two different layouts for questions - a vertical one and a side-by-side layout (the latter shown at bottom of this page).
- A summary widget you can place on your site.
- Coming Soon in January 2024: AI based review summaries and tags.
- Overall and over-time aggregations in the reporting dashboard.
- An API to integrate with for saving, fetching, and aggregating feedback.
- The ability to customize questions and sub questions per domain or per page without changing code.
Who Gets It
All FastComments packages can use the Feedback module, which includes Ratings & Reviews.
Pricing
Pricing is based on comment pricing; that is, you are billed for ratings & reviews the same as comments—depending on your package.
You are billed (on Flex) or limited (on fixed plans) based on the following:
- The number of reviews you have in your account (same as Comment pricing).
- Summary widget usage:
- Each page load uses 1 API credit for each question plus sub-question if the aggregation is cached, and twice that if not.
- So if you have a main question and three sub-questions, most of the time you are billed 4 credits each page load, and sometimes when the results need to be recalculated you are billed 8 credits.
- API usage (credit usage for each API call included in the respective docs).
When results are aggregated, either via the API or via the summary widgets, you are also billed.
Choose a Display Type
The first thing when setting up is deciding how your questions will display. On this page at the bottom we are using the recommended display type, which is the Side-by-Side layout for ratings and sub-ratings. The other layout, which is more for page reactions and not reviews, is a vertical layout used on other documentation pages.
Define Your Questions
FastComments supports a few question types:
- NPS
- Slider
- Star
- Up/Down Thumbs
Questions are created in the Questions Dashboard.
Each question should have the following defined:
- A good Internal Name.
- Used when reporting and listing questions in the admin dashboards.
- A Reporting Order.
- Used when reporting and listing questions in the admin dashboards.
- Question Text.
- This is shown to users.
- Summary Label.
- This is shown to users who interact with summary widgets.
Other questions will have configuration specific for that type. For example, the Star question allows you to define the number of stars, the slider allows you to define the min/max, and so on.
Sub Questions
At the bottom of this page you see a large star rating question, and then some small ones. The small ones are sub ratings. After you set up all your questions you can go back to editing your top level question and select which ones are sub questions.
Sub questions can be configured to show along with each review, show in the summary widgets, or only be exposed internally via the Widget Configuration (shown next).
How Configuration Works
Most of FastComments is customized via the Customize UI. This includes Ratings & Reviews.
Once you add questions, they won't be used anywhere yet.
To use them, create or edit a customization rule and enable the Enable Ratings or Other Questions option. This will show a few other options:
- Style
- Vertical or Side-by-Side
- When to Save?
- Should we save the feedback as the user answers questions, or at once at the end when they submit their review?
- Ask Sub Questions
- Whether to show the defined sub questions.
- Questions Required?
- Whether all the questions are required.
- Show Answers on Comments?
- Whether to show the rating or rating & sub ratings with each review.
- Question to Show?
- The top level question you want to show. Only one is supported today.
This configuration is to cater to a couple main use cases (page reactions and also ratings & reviews) as it can be used for both and also simple surveys.
The reason we use the Customization UI is that decoupling this configuration from the questions themselves allows you to define different questions for different sites or different pages by customizing the widget configuration which allows you to select either all sites/pages, or a specific domain and page.
The Summary Widget
Below is the Vanilla JS code for installing the Summary Widget. The React library also includes this widget.
Run 
The widget will automatically find the questions to display in the summary based on the corresponding widget configuration for that page/site.
If you need the widget in one of our other libraries that doesn't include it, file a support ticket so we know to add it.
Viewing Ratings
Once you define questions, the admin dashboard will show a navigation item for Feedback Analytics.
The following roles can access the feedback analytics:
- Super Admin
- Account Owner
- Comment Moderator Admin
Each question shows an Over Time trend, an Overall Breakdown, and the entire report can be sliced by Day, Month, or Year. You are not billed for viewing the results.
Integrating via the API
There are APIs for interacting with all the feedback-related resources:
Summary Demo
Here is a small demo of the summary widget:
Caching
Note that the summaries are cached for 30 seconds, or five minutes if there is a large number of reviews. Because of this, your review may not appear immediately in the summary, but this allows us to reduce the cost of serving the summary widget.
We hope you found the Ratings & Reviews documentation comprehensive and that it's easy to set up and use. If you think we missed anything in the documentation, let us know below!