Postlude

Postlude — Review Recovery for WooCommerce.

A shopper who has just written “it arrived damaged” has told the store about a

problem and, usually, nobody has asked them about it. Postlude reads what the

review says against rules the store writes itself, and where a review

describes a problem one of those rules looks for, it shows that shopper a short

note beside their review offering to put them in touch with the store. The

shopper writes a message; the store gets an email and a screen listing every

request that came in.

Postlude ships no rules. Each rule is a short name, which only the store sees,

and a description of what the reviewer says, such as “The reviewer says the

card arrived creased or in worse condition than listed”. A store can hold up to

16 rules. For each rule the store writes the offer the shopper sees, the

button’s label, and whether the button opens a request form (with the store’s

own instructions at the top of it) or goes to a web or email address. An offer

is a remedy, never an incentive, and it may never be conditional on removing,

changing or withholding a review.

That is the whole of it. Postlude is a service-recovery tool, not a review

tool.

What Postlude does not do

Postlude never edits, hides, filters, delays, intercepts or deletes a review,

and it never asks a shopper to change or withdraw one. The Frequently Asked

Questions below say exactly what it does write.

Nothing here promises anything about your ratings. What it offers is a way to

hear from an unhappy customer while there is still something you can do for

them.

External services

Postlude is an interface to an external service, and it cannot work without

one. This section describes that service in full.

Nothing is sent before you enable Postlude

Installing and activating the plugin contacts no external server at all. No

registration, no telemetry, no update check, no remote fonts or assets — the

admin screens and the storefront make no outbound request whatsoever while the

plugin is installed and not yet enabled.

The first request Postlude ever makes is the registration below, and it is made

by your own press of the “Accept the agreement and enable Postlude” button on

the Setup tab (WooCommerce → Postlude, which opens Setup until Postlude is

switched on), after you have read the disclosures printed above that button.

Until you press it, nothing about your store or your shoppers has left the

site.

That tab asks for a business name and a contact email, and pressing the

button records your acceptance of the Terms of Use published at

team/terms and of the data processing agreement

team/dpa, together with the version

date of each. The record is kept in your own site’s database. Have those two details to hand

before you enable, and read the agreement and the screen’s disclosures before

you press it. When a new version of the agreement is published, the Setup

tab asks you to accept it; your earlier acceptance is kept.

Which service, and what it is for

team.

The service acts as a processor on your instructions. It reads the review text

and answers with which of the rules you have switched on the text matches, and

how confident it is. It returns no prose. The only wording of yours that

reaches the underlying model is the description of each of your rules, sent

with the review text as the question that rule asks. The rule’s name is not

sent to the model. There is no other way to send the model a question, an

instruction or a prompt through this plugin.

The service is operated by Red Phoenix Team OÜ, the makers of this plugin.

ai, in the

United States. The current list of sub-processors is the one in the data

team/dpa.

Where the data is processed

Postlude processes the review text in the European Union, and passes it to the

ai, in the United States, which acts as

a sub-processor. So the text leaves the EU. This is the same statement the Setup

tab makes inside your admin, and it is the statement to reconcile with your

own privacy policy and your own transfer arrangements.

What is sent, and when

Postlude makes five kinds of request, and no others.

1. Registering your store — first when you press Enable.

Carries your store’s domain, the business name and contact email you type into

the enable form, a plan field that always reads starter (the service, not

the plugin, decides your plan), the word woocommerce as the platform, your site’s language and the plugin’s version.

This is what lets the service issue your store a site key and prove the domain

is yours. It carries nothing about any shopper and no review text. The same

request is sent again on the two other buttons that need it: “Check verification

again”, which re-reads whether your domain has been verified, and “Replace the

site key”, which issues your store a new key and stops the old one working. It

is also sent, with your existing key, when you accept a new version of the

agreement; that re-reads the registration and issues no new key.

2. Analysing one review — when a review is analysed.

Carries the review text, scrubbed and truncated as described below; a reference

to the review inside your own store of the form wp-comment-123; the ids of

the rules you have switched on; and the product title where the review has a

product. The request also has a language field and a submitted-at field, and

Postlude leaves both of them empty.

3. Analysing your existing reviews in batches — beginning when you press Enable.

The same per-review content as above, sent for several reviews at a time, over

the approved product reviews your store already had. This pass is started by the

same press of Enable that registers the store — it is not a separate decision

you make later — and it then works through your back catalogue in the

background, over as many requests as the backlog takes. It is the largest amount

of review text Postlude ever sends, so it is worth reading the two sections

below before you enable.

That first pass sends only reviews Postlude has not analysed yet. Afterwards,

the History tab (WooCommerce → Postlude, then History) offers two ways to run

it again. “Analyse reviews not yet analysed” does the same: reviews already analysed are skipped, are not

charged again, and keep their verdicts. “Re-judge all reviews” sends every

approved review again, analysed or not, to be judged under the rules and match

breadths set now; the screen states how many reviews that is, and each review

sent uses one analysis from your store’s monthly allowance, including

reviews already analysed. A re-judge replaces the earlier verdicts, stops a

rule you have since switched off from tagging the review, and leaves a tag you

marked as wrong marked. A re-judge that stops and is started again begins from

the first review and is charged again for every review it sends. Because a

re-judged review is stamped with the time it was re-judged, the dashboard’s

figures for a period count the reviews re-judged in it, including ones first

analysed in an earlier period.

4. Sending your rules — when you save them, and before analysing when needed.

Carries the name and description of every rule you have written, switched on

or off, and an internal id for each. It carries no offer text, button label,

link address or form instructions, nothing about any shopper and no review

text. It is sent after you save your rules whenever the set has changed since

it was last sent, and again before an analysis if the last send failed; while

it fails, no review is analysed. The service stores the names and descriptions

for your store, deletes a rule when a saved set leaves it out, and deletes all

of them when your store’s registration is deleted. When a review is analysed

against a rule, the service sends that rule’s description to the model vendor

with the review text; the rule’s name is never sent to the model vendor. Do not

put personal data, such as a customer’s name, email address or order number,

in a rule’s name or description.

After you edit a rule’s description, reviews it judged under the earlier

wording keep their verdicts and are marked on the reviews screen as judged

under earlier wording, with a link to “Re-judge all reviews”, which is charged

as described above. Renaming a rule marks nothing.

5. Reporting a wrong tag — when you press “Wrong tag”.

Carries the rule the tag belongs to and the model version that answered, and

nothing about the review or the reviewer.

What is never sent

No reviewer name, display name or author identifier. No reviewer email address.

No reviewer IP address. No WordPress user id, customer id or account

identifier. No order data of any kind — no order id, line items, SKUs, prices,

totals, purchase dates, shipping or billing details. No star rating or numeric

evaluation of the review. The service rejects a request carrying any of these

outright, by key name, rather than accepting it and discarding the value.

The message a shopper types into the request form, together with the name and

any order reference they give, is not sent to the analysis service. It is

stored in your own WordPress database and emailed to you.

What is removed from the review text first, and what is not

Before the text is sent, Postlude tries to remove email addresses, phone

numbers, order numbers and IP addresses from it. This is best effort and it is

not a guarantee. The known gaps:

• It cannot remove names. A review reading “I am Sam Shopper and my kettle broke” is sent with the name in it.

• It cannot remove a user id, or an order number belonging to some other order.

• It matches an order number introduced by English prose (“order number 100234”), written with a hash (“#100234”), or carrying a short letter prefix on a long or multi-part number (“WC-100234”, “ORD-2024-001”), and it replaces any bare run of seven or more digits. A number in none of those shapes stays — “Bestellnummer 4821” is sent as written.

• Some phone shapes are missed, “020 7123 4567” among them.

• Anything the reviewer wrote that is not matched is sent exactly as they wrote it.

At most 1,000 characters of the scrubbed text are sent. That is a ceiling on

what leaves, not a window onto the start of the review: scrubbing runs first and

shortens the text as it replaces things, so wording past the shopper’s 1,000th

character can still be inside what is sent.

The accurate summary is “only review text, with obvious identifiers removed”.

It is not “no personal data is transferred”, and Postlude does not claim that.

Usage counters

The service counts how many analyses your store has used against its allowance.

Those counters are held against a site key issued to your store, and the key

resolves back to your store, so they are pseudonymous rather than anonymous.

They carry no review text and no shopper details.

Analysis draws on one monthly allowance per store, set by the store’s plan:

• Starter (free): 10 analyses a month.

• Growth (€5 a month + VAT): 100 analyses a month.

• Scale (€20 a month + VAT): 1,000 analyses a month.

Every store starts on Starter. The allowance is shown on the Setup tab

(WooCommerce → Postlude, then Setup) and renews at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of

each month.

New reviews, the pass over your existing reviews, every later run of it and

every re-judge all draw on that same allowance, so a history run can use the

whole month’s allowance.

When it is used up, Postlude stops analysing new reviews until the allowance

renews, and it stops quietly: a shopper is shown no offer and the review is

stored with no analysis, so the reviews screen shows it as “Not analysed”

rather than as a review in which nothing was found. A history run that

reaches it stops too, and the History tab reports it as a completed run rather

than an error; it does not resume by itself, and you can run it again once the

allowance renews on the 1st.

No review is changed either way.

Plans and payment

Prices are in euros and exclude VAT, which is added at checkout. Starter is free and needs no payment. Growth (€5 a month)

and Scale (€20 a month) are bought on Stripe’s hosted payment page, through

Stripe Managed Payments; Link, by Stripe, is the merchant of record for the

sale.

The Setup tab shows a link to that page for each paid plan and, on a paid

plan, a “Manage subscription” link to Link. The service supplies these links

in its registration responses and the plugin stores them in the

postlude_billing option. The upgrade links are Stripe Payment Links

com) carrying your store’s site id, so the service knows which

store paid. Showing them makes no request; only clicking one takes your own

browser to Stripe or Link. The plugin never contacts Stripe or Link and never

sends them anything about your store or your shoppers. Your payment details go

to Stripe, not to your store and not to Postlude. Stripe’s terms and privacy

com/privacy. Link’s:

com/privacy.

Stripe tells the Postlude service when a payment is confirmed, and the service

moves your store to the new plan. Your store learns of the change the next

time it reads its registration from the service; the “Check plan status”

button on the Setup tab does that on demand.

Plans are sold under the Terms of Use at

team/terms.

The service’s terms and privacy policy

team/terms

team/privacy

team/dpa

What shoppers are told

The notice beside the request form reads: “The store may use an automated

service to read review text. Your name, email address and order details are not

sent with it, and email addresses, phone numbers and order numbers found in the

text are removed first; anything else you write in the review is sent as you

”