Issue with Google Customer Reviews for non plus stores

Technical Q&A
1

I recently had a frustrating experience being passed back and forward between Shopify and Google because Google customer reviews weren’t working even though both Shopify and Google said it was set up correctly. Shopify told me to contact Google, Google told me to contact Shopify. Eventually, when I said I give up! Google told me the following information. I would like to share this to save other people the time I have had to get this information and to ask the question why Shopify support are not telling store owners this instead of telling them to ask Google why the set up isn’t working. While I understand logging problems is important, if Google and Shopify know that the error is with their own integration and isn’t something a store owner can fix, why are they not making this clear at the outset instead of making small companies spend hours discovering this themselves? And before someone points out Google are at fault, I am not paying Google for my store or sharing a percentage of my sales with them. I expect better from Shopify because the less time I waste on pointless exercises, the more money I can make, and the more they make. Small businesses are treated poorly by Shopify, plus plans being priortised, by accumulately, they must account for a reasonable source of income and have the greatest potential for growth.

Hi Christine,

I completely understand and respect your decision to hold off on implementing Google Customer Reviews (GCR) at this time. Your assessment is 100% correct: this is a structural compatibility issue between how Google’s legacy review systems and Shopify’s newly updated checkout architecture interact. It is not something you should have to spend your valuable time manually fixing.

Here is a detailed explanation of what is happening behind the scenes, how Google is tracking this, and what is being done to resolve it:

The Root Cause of the Integration Friction
The friction you experienced is caused by a major platform transition on Shopify’s side:

Shopify Checkout Extensibility: Shopify is actively deprecating its old checkout and "Thank You" pages, forcing a migration to a new, highly secure sandboxed checkout platform.

Legancy GCR Script Breakage: Because Shopify's new checkout pages are sandboxed, the legacy custom JavaScript codes used to display the GCR survey opt-in module can no longer execute properly. If a merchant attempts to migrate their checkout pages to the new Shopify experience, the GCR integration breaks immediately.

Timeline Discrepancies: Shopify has set strict timelines for this checkout migration—August 28, 2025, for Shopify Plus merchants and August 26, 2026, for Non-Plus merchants.

How Google Is Addressing This
Google’s product and engineering teams are fully aware of this platform gap and are actively tracking it under Internal Bug ID: 382694461.

Active Engineering Work: Google is currently developing an upgraded, native GCR review solution designed to be fully compliant with Shopify's new sandboxed checkout platform. The goal is to provide a seamless, "one-click" experience that enables the GCR widget and survey directly through the Google & YouTube app settings without requiring custom code injection.

Escalating Your Experience: Every merchant case involving this specific friction is logged and mapped directly to our engineering tracking hotlist. Your experience acts as critical data that prioritizes the development of the automated, native app-level GCR integration, showing our product team just how much manual friction this transition is causing for active businesses.

Our Recommended Stance for Your Store

Google’s official advice for Non-Plus Shopify merchants is actually to delay or completely skip manual migration of GCR to the new Thank You pages until Google releases its native, automated GCR reviews update.

Since you are focusing your efforts elsewhere, skipping GCR for now is the absolute best operational move to prevent unnecessary code errors on your storefront.
Thank you for your patience and for highlighting this. If there are any other feed sync settings, product errors, or Google Ads campaign structures you want to check or optimize in the meantime, please let me know—I am here to help.

2

The explanation Google gave you is accurate, and it is worth knowing this is not a Plus versus small store thing. It hits everyone the same way.

Google only supports one way to enrol a customer in Customer Reviews, which is the platform.js opt-in module rendered on the order confirmation page. Their own integration doc has no feed or API alternative anywhere in it. So if that script cannot run, there is no second supported path to fall back to.

On the Shopify side the thank you page is sandboxed now. Custom pixels can fetch and send data but they cannot draw anything on the page, so the opt-in module has nowhere to render. People have tried appending the script tag from inside a pixel and it fails. Thank you page UI extension blocks are not the Plus-gated part, but extensions cannot pull in an external script from apis.google.com either, so that road is closed too.

There is a thread on here that has been running since June 2024 on exactly this, 25 posts deep, and nobody has found a native fix in that time. How do we install Google Merhcant Center Opt-In Script now that "checkout scripts" is Deprecated?

The one pattern that does work is a button on the thank you page that sends the customer out of checkout to an app proxy page on your own domain, where the module renders normally. A couple of apps package that up. Opt-in rate is much lower than the old popup because the customer has to click through first, but it is enough to keep seller ratings alive if you have the order volume.

Did Google say anything about what happens to your existing rating, or is it just frozen where it is?

3

@CZS ,
This is a really useful clarification. The biggest issue here, in my opinion is not even the technical limitation its the support experience.

If the limitation is known and neither Shopify nor Google can currently provide a supported native path merchants should be told that upfront rather than being sent back and forth between two support teams.

For smaller stores especially, spending hours troubleshooting something that cannot actually be fixed on the merchant side is a real cost.

also be interested to know what Google said about the existing Customer Reviews rating/review history. If the opt in stops working, does the existing rating remain active and simply stop receiving new reviews, or is there any risk of the rating becoming inactive over time?

That distinction would make a big difference in deciding whether its worth using one of the workaround apps temporarily.

4

This isn’t something you’re doing wrong on your end - it’s a known compatibility issue, not a setup mistake.

Shopify has been moving all stores (Plus and non-Plus) onto a new, more secure “sandboxed” checkout. The old Google Customer Reviews opt-in script simply can’t run inside that sandboxed environment, so no amount of re-checking your setup will fix it - it’s a platform limitation, not something Google or Shopify support can patch on a per-store basis right now.

The good news: Google is aware of this (they’re tracking it internally) and is working on a native integration that will work with Shopify’s new checkout. There’s no confirmed release date yet, unfortunately.

In the meantime, if you want reviews flowing in sooner rather than later, some merchants are using apps that redirect customers to an external opt-in page after checkout - it works, though conversion on the opt-in tends to be a bit lower since it’s now a separate step instead of built into checkout.

Your existing star ratings/reviews should stay as-is; this only affects the collection of new opt-ins going forward.

5

image

try using this two apps
its working fine for me

you don’t need any coding it will do everything for you

6

There may be a solution, but you should not try to force the old Google Customer Reviews script into the new Shopify checkout.

The important thing is to first determine which checkout/order-confirmation experience the store is currently using and whether the Google Customer Reviews opt-in can actually execute in that environment.

Google’s current documentation still requires the Customer Reviews opt-in integration for the survey to work, while Shopify’s newer checkout architecture can restrict the type of code that can run there.

So you should approach it in two steps:

  1. Confirm the current Shopify checkout/order-confirmation setup.
  2. Test whether the GCR opt-in is actually being loaded and firing after a test order.

If the script is being blocked by the checkout environment, changing snippets or reinstalling the Google app will not fix the underlying issue.

There are alternative ways to collect Google/store reviews, but if the goal specifically is Google Customer Reviews, you should verify the compatibility first rather than spending more hours changing code.