How do I use the activation date for scheduled review invites?

With the eTrusted review platform from Trusted Shops, you can send review invites completely automated and at the perfect time. With the option to submit an activation date for your scheduled review invites, you can control the timing of your review invites even more precisely and thus adapt them to different use cases.

This article explains how the activation date works, what use cases there are, and how you can submit such a date.

How does the activation date work?

Automated review invites are triggered by an event you determine (e.g., a checkout in your online shop). You determine the period of time that passes between the event and the review invite dispatch. Therefore, the review invite is not sent immediately, but only after this period has elapsed. By default, it is set to 7 days. However, you can adjust it in the eTrusted Control Centre.

You do not yet automatically invite your customers to submit a review? Learn more here:
- How to send invites to my customers automatically?
- What is the optimal time for a review invite?

By additionally submitting an activation date to Trusted Shops, you can postpone the start of the period of time you have set. In this case, the period of time until the invite is sent only begins after the submitted date has been reached.

Submitting an activation date is useful if you do not want to link the invite dispatch to the determined event. For example, this could be the case in these use cases:

• A booked experience, such as a concert, should be reviewed. Tickets are often booked many months prior to the event. Therefore, a review written at the time of booking often does not yet make sense.
• Reviewing the purchase of a product with longer delivery times (e.g. furniture or custom-made products). In this case, a review only makes sense after your customers have received the product.
• A product is to be reviewed that is currently not in stock and therefore has a deviating delivery time.
• The purchase of a download or other immediately usable product is to be reviewed.

In this illustration, you can see how the automated dispatch of your invites behaves with and without a transmitted activation date of sending delay:

The illustration shows the following sequence:

1. You transmit an event to eTrusted that is triggered by a transaction on the customer side, such as reaching the thank you page (CHECKOUT).
2. We will check if you submit an activation date.
   
   • If NO, the review invite will be scheduled immediately and will be sent after the set time period (e.g., after 7 days).
   • If YES, we move on to the next check.
3. We check whether you have enabled the submission of an activation date in the eTrusted Control Centre.
   
   • If NO, the review invite will be scheduled immediately and will be sent after the set time period (e.g., after 7 days).
   • If YES, the review invite will be scheduled for the date submitted.
4. eTrusted waits for the transmitted date to be reached.
5. As soon as the submitted date is reached, the set period for your automated invite dispatch will begin (e.g., 7 days).
6. The review invite is sent after the determined period has elapsed.

How do I set the activation date?

You already transmit estimated delivery dates to us?
You have been using My Trusted Shops for review management and already submit estimated delivery dates? Then please take a look at our instructions in this article:
Will my invite settings be adopted from My Trusted Shops?

To benefit from the flexibility of the activation date, two steps are necessary:

1. Set up submission of the activation date
2. Activate activation date

Setting up submission of the activation date

There are three options for transmitting the activation date of sending delay - depending on your use of our products. You can set up the date via your shop software plugin, via your manual integration of the Trustbadge or via the eTrusted API.

	The setup via shop software plugin: Many of our shop software plugins allow you to set up the sending delay activation date. If you have integrated your Trusted Shops products via a plugin, please first check the appropriate integration instructions to see if your plugin supports the setup. Selection of the appropiate integration instructions
	The setup via your manual Trustbadge integration: If your plugin does not support the setup or if you have integrated your Trustbadge manually, you can do the setup in the Trustbadge code. The Parameter im Trustbadge-Code, where the sending delay activation date can be defined as a value is the following line of code: <span id="tsCheckoutOrderEstDeliveryDate">2021-01-01</span> Find this line of code in the code of your manual trustbadge integration. Instead of the date, insert a variable that provides the desired date from your systems.
	The setup via Application Programming Interface (API): If you have programming skills, the setup via API is available. You can read how the setup is done in the chapter "Events" in our Developer Center. In the developer documentation and in the code, you will find the parameter for the activation date of sending delay under the short name "estimatedDeliveryDate": Developer Center: eTrusted APIs

Activating activation date

1. Log in to the eTrusted Control Centre.
   
2. Click on the gear symbol ("Settings") in the main navigation area (). Then click on "Channel Settings" ().
3. Select the channel () that you want to set up an automated invite sending for.
4. Open the "Optimise review collection" tab (). Then, open the "Service Reviews" tab ().
5. Check off "Apply trigger date" ().
6. Click on "Save" ().

You have now successfully activated the activation date.

What happens if the activation date is active but no date is submitted?

It is not a problem if you do not want to submit an activation date for all events. For each individual event, as described above, our system checks whether a date has been submitted or not, and whether or not this date should be considered. Thus, if you have activated the function and do not submit a date, the review invite will be sent, as usual, after the specified period has elapsed.

More interesting articles in our Help Centre:
- How to effectively collect reviews?
- How do widgets look like on my website?