Important Update About Review & Social-Proof Sections

We’ve got a small change to share, and we’d rather tell you about it ourselves than have you stumble across it later. It’s about our review and social-proof sections — and the good news is that for most of you, there’s nothing you need to do. 

What's changing

We’re removing the following review and social-proof sections from the Smind Sections library:

• Review, Google Review, and Trustpilot Review
• Testimonial
• Live Visitors, Social Proof and Star Rating product block
• Review, star-rating, and social-proof blocks inside the Video and Image Hero sections

Going forward, these sections won’t be available to add to new stores.

Why it's changing

Shoppers trust review counts, ratings, visitor numbers, and testimonials to represent real customer activity — and that trust is what makes social proof so powerful.

Shopify’s Partner Program policies are designed to protect that trust and don’t allow apps to provide content that could misrepresent real customer activity when it is manually entered rather than pulled from verified data.

According to Part C, Section 2.3 of Shopify’s Partner Program Agreement:

Developers will not develop or distribute the Application or Theme in any way in furtherance of criminal, fraudulent, or other unlawful activity, or otherwise violate the Shopify Acceptable Use Policy.

Since these Smind sections allow this information to be entered manually, they fall under that policy. So we’ve made the decision to retire these sections from the library and focus on what Smind does best: easily and quickly build your Shopify store without any design and coding skills!

What this means for you

This is the important part: if one of these sections is already being used on your store, nothing changes. You don’t need to remove it, replace it, or make any changes. Your existing sections will continue working as they do today.

The only difference is that these sections will no longer be available to add from the Smind library going forward. Everything else you love about Smind continues to work exactly as before. We’re not making any changes to the rest of your theme or sections.

Showing verified reviews

This is completely optional, but if you'd like your ratings and reviews to be backed by verified customer data, we recommend using a dedicated review app, such as:

• Judge.me Product Reviews App
• Loox - Product Reviews App
• Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty
• Yotpo: Product Reviews App
• Stamped Reviews & Loyalty

These apps are built to collect reviews and ratings from real customers, helping you keep your social proof authentic and backed by real data.

We're here to help

Have questions, or need a hand with a section or your store setup down the road?

Just start a live chat in the app or email us at phuonghv@shinecommerce.co - a real person from our team will be happy to help.

Thanks for being part of the Smind family, and for helping us keep Smind an app that merchants can trust.