Glossary · Reviews & analysis
What is an actionable review?
An actionable review is one the seller should answer: the customer has an unresolved problem, asks a question, or is owed something such as a replacement. SellerSort estimates the probability that each review needs a reply and counts those at 0.5 or above.
What this comes down to
- Actionable means “needs a reply”, not “negative”.
- A positive review with a question is actionable; a resolved complaint may not be.
- The flag is a probability, counted at 0.5 and above.
- It turns a review pile into a reply queue.
Actionable is not the same as negative
“Love it — does it come in a larger size?” is positive and needs an answer. “Broke, but support replaced it the same day” is negative and needs nothing. Treating negative as the reply queue misses the first and wastes time on the second.
The Review Analyzer asks the question directly for every review and reports the count next to the urgent count, so the two jobs — fix and answer — stay separate.
Why the threshold is 0.5
The flag is a yes/no probability, and a review is counted as needing a reply at 0.5 or above. The cut-off was checked against a small hand-labelled set of reviews: it was the strictest setting that still caught every review marked as needing a reply, and lowering it caught no more. It leans towards catching every customer who is waiting, at the cost of flagging a few who are not.
Turning the flag into a reply queue
Sort the flagged reviews by severity, highest first: a customer with a broken item and an unanswered question goes before a customer asking about sizes. Reply to the individual, and if the same question keeps coming up, answer it once on the product page too. The prioritisation guide puts the two queues — fix and answer — side by side.
Questions
Does SellerSort reply to reviews?
No. It labels which reviews need a reply and why. Replying stays with you.
Can I use my own cut-off?
Yes. The CSV export includes needs_response_probability for every review, so you can filter at a stricter or looser threshold without running the analysis again.
Read next
- Review severityA score from 1 to 5 of how serious the problem in a review is; SellerSort counts reviews at severity 4 or above as urgent.
- Review sentiment analysisClassifying each customer review as positive, neutral, negative or mixed, so the tone of thousands of reviews can be counted rather than read.
- How to prioritise negative reviews by severityNot every one-star review is urgent. Rank complaints by severity and how often they recur, so the fix list starts with what actually hurts.
- How to analyze thousands of customer reviews without reading them allTurning a pile of free-text reviews into counts you can act on: topics, severity, and the difference between a loud complaint and a common one.