Excluding products from review requests

Not everything in an order is worth a review. A welcome packet, a free gift tossed in at checkout, a sample sachet, a brochure that your platform tracks as a product — asking a customer to rate these makes the email look automated, and the reviews you get back are noise.

Exclusions let you mark those products once. Evident then leaves them out of every review request from that point on.

Where it lives

Emails → Exclusions. Search your catalogue by name, SKU or platform product id, click Exclude on a product, and it joins the list. Click Include again to take it back out. Changes apply immediately; there is nothing to save.

The list only shows products you have excluded, so it starts empty.

What an exclusion does

When a review request comes due, Evident walks the order’s line items and drops any excluded product before it decides what to ask about:

• Some products excluded — the email goes out and asks only about the rest. The customer never sees the excluded item.
• Every product excluded — no email is sent. The order shows as Skipped in Orders, with the reason Every product is excluded from review requests, so you can tell a deliberate skip from a failure.
• Follow-ups respect the same list. A reminder never asks about a product the first email did not.

Exclusions apply at send time, so they cover orders that were already scheduled when you set them. They do not recall an email that has already gone out.

If you hand off to Klaviyo, Omnisend or Mailchimp

The same filter runs before the event fires. The products array your flow receives contains only the products Evident would have asked about, and an order made entirely of excluded products fires no event at all. You do not need to repeat the exclusion in your flow.

What to exclude

Good candidates, taken from real stores:

• Welcome packets, onboarding kits and information inserts that your platform ships as a line item.
• Anything named FREE GIFT or Promo — the customer did not choose it, and a review of it is not a purchase decision for anyone else.
• Sample packets and travel sizes given away with a full-size product.
• Gift wrap, gift messages, packaging and shipping protection sold as products.

Leave alone anything a customer chose and paid for, even if it is small. A single-serve sachet someone bought on purpose is a real product with a real opinion behind it.

What it is not

An exclusion changes who gets asked. It does not hide the product on your storefront, remove reviews it already has, or stop a customer from reviewing it from the widget. Reviews it already has are moderated like any other; see Moderating reviews.

It is also separate from suppressions, which stop a customer being emailed regardless of what they bought. Suppressions live under Emails → Suppressions; see Review request emails.