Lipscore offers a broad choice of out-of-box widgets that can easily be added to your page to display ratings, reviews and testimonials both for your products, services, as well as questions and answers. You may consider creating your own widgets for a number of reasons, and of course, this is an acceptable solution, but in this article we would like to explain the benefits of using our widgets vs creating custom-made widgets and fetching data via API, so that you can make an informed choice.

Lipscore default widgets can be customized in CSS

If the widgets design is the reason why you are considering to create your own widgets and fetch data via API, please note that the design of our widgets can be freely edited in CSS and adjusted to your website design. Before you decide to develop custom widgets, we suggest that you consult your frontend developer to see if the design you are aiming for can be achieved by CSS styling. Styling your widgets in CSS will be much less time consuming than developing them from scratch and fetching data via API. The customization in CSS can be done in your website stylesheets or in your Lipscore account Widgets > Global Settings > Theme Settings

See code snippets of our widgets with previews: Widgets library

See examples of widgets customized in CSS in this article: Customization of the Lipscore widgets

Important functions encoded in the Lipscore widgets

1. Rating widget (lipscore-rating) and Review list widget (lipscore-review-list) contain Schema.org markup for Google Organic rich snippets

Rating widget and Review list inject Schema.org markup into your product page code. This means that Google can easily read information about the number of ratings and reviews your product collected, as well as the average score, and other values populated in the widget’s code. If these widgets are not implemented on the product page, you need to make sure to prepare Schema.org markup based on our data yourself. Note: An option could be to implement our widgets and hide them using CSS in the Lipscore account (Widgets > Global Settings > Theme Settings).

2. Rating widget updates the last_viewed_at date in our database

There are at least 2 reasons why this is important:

• The XML feed with reviews generated in the Lipscore account for uploading into Google Merchant Center (to show stars and reviews in Google Shopping ads) only contains products that have been viewed at least once within the past 60 days. Those products whose last_viewed_at date is older are excluded from the feed. If the Rating widget is not implemented, Lipscore never gets the time stamp updated and the feed remains empty.
• Lipscore Analytics results are based on active products – which, again, we define as products that have been viewed in the past 60 days. The data in Analytics won’t be available, unless the Rating widget is implemented on the page (as mentioned earlier, can be implemented but hidden)

To make sure your products are updated with the last_viewed_at date, we recommend implementing our widgets and hide them using CSS in the Lipscore account (Widgets > Global Settings > Theme Settings).

Feature-specific elements of the widgets

Depending on what features are activated in your Lipscore account, widgets will behave in a specific way or display selected additional info/indications. Here are some examples of functions that will not automatically work for custom-made widgets, unless developed with these in mind:

• Blocking products – this function is meant for excluding some products / product categories from invitations and removing widgets from these products’ pages. While the excluding from invitations may work, your custom widgets won’t disappear automatically from the blocked products’ pages when the function is used and they will need to be removed manually or the behavior will beed to be specified in the page code.
• Stealth mode – making selected widgets or all widgets hidden from your page with a few clicks in the Lipscore account.
• Hiding widgets if the number of votes is less than X – allows collecting the reviews in the background while keeping widgets hidden until a certain number of ratings is collected
• Variant name on review list, indication of syndication, indication of translation, product attributes – unless these items are included in your custom-made widgets and data about these is fetched, they will not appear automatically on your widgets when the settings are activated.

Automatic widgets updates

When we discover that some functionality of Lipscore can work faster, look and serve the end user better, this update will be automatically applied to our widgets. When custom widgets are used, some updates will require an update in your custom widgets code, which will always require envolvement of a developer.

Of course, we understand that sometimes custom-made widgets are the preference and will assist your developers with documentation or advice whenever needed. Should you have any more questions regarding our widgets, do not hesitate to reach out to our Support.