The Best Time to Send a Review Request (It Depends on the Product)

When should I send a review request?

Send it once the customer has actually used the thing, not when the courier marks it delivered. Delivery is the event your store can see; first meaningful use is the event that produces an opinion worth writing down. The gap between the two is where most badly timed requests fall: a parcel sits in a hallway for three days, the email fires on arrival, and the customer has nothing to say yet.

The practical rule is to anchor the send to delivery plus an estimate of time-to-first-use for that category, then add one reminder for the people who meant to reply and did not.

Why is delivery the wrong trigger?

Because delivery measures logistics, not experience. A review written before the product has been used is either empty ("arrived quickly, looks nice") or about the packaging, which tells future buyers almost nothing. The whole value of a review is that it reports use, so the ask has to wait for use to happen.

The error runs both ways. Fire too early and you collect thin reviews and train customers to ignore you. Fire too late and the memory has gone cold, the response rate drops, and the detail blurs. The window you want sits just after the first real interaction, while the impression is fresh and specific.

How does timing change by product type?

Time-to-first-use varies widely by category, so a single global delay is a compromise that fits nothing. A protein powder is opened the day it lands; a mattress is judged over weeks; a winter coat may sit in a wardrobe until the weather turns. Map each category to delivery plus its own time-to-first-use, and the same email starts converting differently.

Use this as a starting table, then correct it against your own data once you have enough sends to see a pattern.

• Consumables (food, supplements, skincare): delivery plus two to four days, since first use is near immediate.
• Apparel and footwear: delivery plus five to seven days, allowing time to wear it or decide to return it.
• Electronics and appliances: delivery plus seven to fourteen days, long enough to set up and live with it.
• Considered or durable purchases (furniture, mattresses, tools): delivery plus two to four weeks, when a real verdict exists.

What about reminders and second sends?

Plan for one reminder from the start, because a large share of people who never reply to the first email will reply to a second. Reminders recover a meaningful share of non-responders, which makes the reminder one of the cheapest gains available in review collection. The first email is the opener, not the whole campaign.

Keep the reminder light and send it three to five days after the first, shifted later for slow-use categories. One reminder is worth sending; a third is usually nagging, and nagging costs you the unsubscribe you did not need to spend.

How do I find the right window for my own store?

Start from the category table, then let returns and repeat-purchase timing correct it. Your return window tells you when customers form a verdict on fit and quality; your reorder interval tells you when a consumable runs out. Both are better signals than a guess, and you already have the data.

Segment by product, not by one store-wide delay. A homeware brand selling both candles and dining tables should not send both requests on day three. Splitting the schedule by category is the highest-leverage change most stores can make to the timing of the ask.

• Read your median time-to-return as the lower bound for apparel and anything fit-dependent.
• Read your median reorder interval as the use-up point for consumables.
• Watch where five-star and one-star reviews cluster in days-since-delivery, then send just before that peak.

Does the channel or time of day matter?

Less than the day-offset, but it is not nothing. The day relative to first use is the dominant lever; hour of day and channel are second-order. Sending in the recipient's local mid-morning or early evening tends to beat the middle of the night, and matching the channel the customer actually checks beats defaulting to email for everyone.

Do not over-tune the small levers before you have fixed the big one. A perfectly timed nine a.m. email that arrives before the customer has used the product still asks a question they cannot answer.

What happens to the reviews after you collect them?

Good timing gets you specific, recent reviews, and specificity is exactly what makes a review useful later. A well-timed review reports a real moment of use, which is the kind of sentence both shoppers and answer engines lean on. Timing is the collection half of the job.

The other half is making those reviews count beyond your own product page. Most review apps were built for the on-page shopper and stop there; getting your existing reviews readable, corroborated, and cited in search and AI is the gap BetterReviews is built to close. Collect them at the right moment, then make sure they are quotable where buyers now look.