Reviews and Questions
Moderating reviews, answering questions, and deciding how much to publish.
Catalog, Reviews and Catalog, Product Q&A. Both are customer writing that appears on your product pages, and both arrive needing a decision from you.
Reviews
A review carries a rating out of five, a title, a body, and whether the reviewer actually bought the thing.
Verified purchase is the column worth sorting on. A review from somebody who bought the product is worth more to a shopper than one from somebody who did not, and the badge says so on the page.
Moderation
New reviews arrive pending and are invisible until approved. That is the right default: it means nothing appears on your shop that you have not read.
The cost is that reviews stop appearing if nobody checks. Put it in a weekly routine rather than relying on noticing.
Do not only publish the good ones
A product with nothing but five star reviews reads as curated, and shoppers discount it accordingly. A handful of three and four star reviews makes the five star ones believable. Reject what is abusive or irrelevant, not what is unflattering.
Replying
You can respond to a review, and the response appears beneath it. A short, specific reply to a critical review is read by far more people than the review itself, and is usually the best advertising on the page.
Reply to the complaint, not to the reviewer. "We have changed the packaging since this order" is useful. Arguing is not.
Product Questions
Catalog, Product Q&A is where shoppers ask something about a product before buying. A question and its answer appear on the product page once you answer it.
These are worth answering quickly for a reason beyond the person asking: the answer is on the page for everyone afterwards, and the questions people ask are a list of what your product descriptions are missing.
If the same question keeps coming up, the real fix is to put the answer in the description.
Switching Them Off
Both can be turned off under Settings, Store Features, which hides them from the shop and from the admin.
A shop with very few products and no traffic is often better off without reviews, because one review on one product looks worse than none. Switch them on when you have enough orders to expect a flow.
Where They Show Up
Reviews feed the star rating on listing tiles and product pages, and shoppers can filter by rating where your theme supports it.
That makes an unmoderated queue more expensive than it looks: an unapproved review is not counting towards any of it.