How to show your reviews without a website

Plenty of people who sell things have no website and do not want one. They sell on a marketplace, a platform, a storefront somebody else runs, or straight out of their messages. The reviews they have earned are scattered across those places, or trapped inside a platform that shows them to buyers on that platform only.

You do not need a website to fix that. You need one page and one link.

The problem with reviews that live on a platform

Reviews on a marketplace belong to the marketplace. They show up when somebody is already on the marketplace, looking at your listing, and nowhere else. If you leave, they stay behind. If the platform changes its rules, or suspends you, or shuts a category, so do the reviews. Three years of buyers saying nice things can vanish because a policy changed.

Reviews sent to you in messages are worse. They are real, but nobody can see them except you, and a screenshot of a DM is the least trusted thing on the internet.

What a review page is

A review page is a single address that holds what your customers have said, with their names and the dates, and a link for the next customer to add theirs. It is not a website in the sense of a homepage, an about page, a shop and a blog. It is one page that does one job.

That job is to be the link you give somebody who asks "is this person legit?"

Where the link goes

Put it in the same places you already put your other links:

• The link field in your marketplace or platform profile.
• Your bio, or your link list if you use one.
• The pinned post on the account where you sell.
• The note in the package, if you ship physical things.
• The message you send when a sale is done.

Once the link is there, it works without you. A buyer who wants to check you out finds the page, reads what other buyers wrote, and decides.

What belongs on the page

Reviews, in the customer's own words, with a name or handle and a date. That is all it needs. What people said carries the page; ratings and badges do not. A wall of five-star ratings with no words tells a stranger nothing, and everybody has learned to skim past it. Three sentences from a real buyer about what they ordered and how it arrived are worth more than fifty stars.

A short line about what you do, so the reviews make sense to somebody who arrived cold. Your name or handle, the same one you use where you sell, so the reader can tell it is you.

A way for the reader to leave one. This is the part a screenshot can never do, and it is why the page keeps growing without you copying things into it.

What to skip

A long about section. The reviews are the about section.

Star ratings. They compress a real opinion into a number and make the page look like every other page.

Reviews you wrote, or reviews from friends who did not buy anything. People can tell, and one fake one poisons the ten real ones next to it.

Anything that takes you an evening to set up. If making the page is a project, you will not finish it, and the reviews stay in your messages.

How to fill it the first time

Send the link to the last five people who bought from you and were pleased, with one question. The guide on how to write a review request has the wording, but the core is: ask something specific, like "what did you order and did it arrive looking like the photos?" One question gets an answer. "Leave a review" gets ignored.

If somebody already wrote something nice in a message, ask if they would put it on the page. Most will, and it takes them a minute because the words already exist.

Keeping it going

Add the line to whatever you send when an order is done. "If you are happy with it, a sentence here helps me more than you would think: [link]." The ask goes out on its own after that, and the page fills up one order at a time.

When something goes wrong and a buyer writes it up, the guide on what to do about a bad review covers what to do. The short version is to reply once, calmly, and let it sit. A page with one honest complaint and a fair reply reads as more trustworthy than a page with none.

A page like this on TheyRave

TheyRave gives you the page at your own address, with a link that opens one box for a buyer to type into. What they write lands on the page with their name and the date. You can pick the colors and the font, pin the one you like best, and put the address anywhere. It is free to start, and there is nothing to build.