# Why use Cardless Reviews alongside your Google reviews Your Google listing already works. People find you, some of them leave reviews, and the star average sits there doing its job. So it is fair to ask what a second thing is for. Cardless Reviews does not replace Google, and we would not want it to. Your reviews live on Google. Customers find you on Google. Google is where every person who taps your card gets sent. What we watch is the part Google never sees: the few minutes between a customer paying at your counter and a review existing at all. ## What Google tells you Google Business Profile is good at what happened after a review was published. It shows your reviews, your average, and how people found you in Search and Maps. Useful. Also made entirely of outcomes. ## What Google cannot tell you Google does not know the card on your billing counter was tapped 922 times last month. It does not know that 647 of those people picked a rating, and that only 418 carried on to your review page. It does not know your reception stand does six times the work of the sticker on table 4. None of that happens on Google, so Google cannot see any of it. Here is one month, described both ways. | | Google shows | Cardless Reviews shows | | --- | --- | --- | | People who opened your review point | nothing | 1,482 | | People who picked a rating | nothing | 924 | | People who went on to Google | nothing | 603 | | People who told you something privately | nothing | 87 | | Reviews published on Google | 41 | nothing | Google's column is not wrong. It is the last line of a longer story, and the lines above it are the ones you can change this week. ## Five things Google has no way to offer ### Which card or stand people actually use Every review point you make gets counted on its own. A stand at reception, a card at the counter, a sticker on a table, a code printed on a delivery bill. | Placement | Scans | Ratings | Google review clicks | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Reception stand | 1,842 | 1,203 | 783 | | Billing counter | 922 | 647 | 418 | | Table 4 | 312 | 198 | 127 | | Delivery card | 208 | 121 | 74 | Google gives you one number for the whole business. This tells you where the next stand goes, and which one has stopped earning its place on the counter. ### The two numbers that show where you lose people Scans that became a rating. If people open your page and walk away without tapping a star, the placement is wrong or the moment is. A card handed over with the bill behaves nothing like one glued to a table. Ratings that opened Google. If people rate you five and stop there, you are losing them on the trip to Google, not on the service. Two different problems with two different fixes. From behind the counter they look identical. ### Ratings from people who never wrote anything Every rating counts, whether or not the customer goes any further. So your Cardless average comes from everyone who tapped a star, and your Google average comes from the smaller group who chose to write in public. When those two drift apart, that is information. A Cardless average sliding while Google holds steady usually means something changed on your floor weeks before it reaches your public rating. ### A private line for the customer who is not happy You pick the rating that sends someone to Google on their own. Below it, the customer gets asked what could have been better, and that comes to you instead of going public. Those messages land in an inbox. Each one carries a status of new, in progress or resolved, and the dashboard counts how many still need attention. Nobody has to leave a name or a number to send one. We keep private feedback for six months and then delete it, and the form says so before anyone types. Google's version of this conversation is a one star review you read about on Monday. ### You hear about a bad rating while the customer is still standing there The alert goes out by email the moment a low rating is picked, even if the customer writes nothing after it. WhatsApp alerts exist too, and we are switching them on account by account rather than for everyone at once. A manager who walks over and fixes it in two minutes beats any dashboard ever built. This is the feature that pays for itself, and Google cannot offer it at any price, because Google only finds out once the problem is public. ## Two more things worth knowing Your cards point at us, never at Google. Change premises, change listings, or fix a broken link, and you edit one field. Nothing gets reprinted, and nothing you have already handed out stops working. Your customers have nothing to consent to. We record which review point was opened, which rating was picked, and whether Google was opened. No IP address, no browser fingerprint, no advertising cookie, nothing that names a person. This is not a tracking script bolted to your counter. ## What we will not claim We count Google review clicks. Not reviews. Nobody outside Google can tell whether a person who opened your review page went on to publish anything. So your dashboard will never say "603 reviews generated", because we would be making that up. If another product shows you that number, ask how it gets verified. We wrote this rule into our product spec before we wrote the dashboard, which is the only reason it survived contact with a marketing page. ## Is sending happy customers to Google allowed? Every customer can reach your Google review page, whatever they rate. The threshold decides who gets taken there automatically. It does not decide who is allowed to go, and the lower rating screens carry a visible link to Google. Google's own rules matter here. As of October 2026, its [contribution policy](https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114) says a business must not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers", and must not offer anything in return for a review. The automatic step is a setting, not a requirement: switch it off and every customer sees the same thank-you screen and chooses for themselves. Review platform policies change, and they differ by trade. Read the rules that apply to your business before you turn the automatic step on. Our guide to [getting more Google reviews](/blog/get-more-google-reviews-india) goes through what Google allows. ## Where this is today The review link is free and open to anyone who signs in. The paid plans, which add the rating page, the private messages and the per-card counts, are on sale at introductory prices that go up when we launch, and whatever you start on is yours for a year. [The pricing page](/pricing) says what each one costs and where it can be bought. The review cards and stands are not on sale yet. What you can do now is print a table stand on one sheet of A4, put it on the counter, and find out how many people pick it up. Our guide to [Google review QR codes](/blog/google-review-qr-code) covers where to put it. The review link works on its own and keeps working whether or not you ever pay us anything. A card that stops when a subscription lapses is a card you cannot hand to anyone. [Make your review link](/dashboard/reviews) · [See how Cardless Reviews works](/reviews) · [See the plans](/pricing) ## Questions ### Do I have to stop using Google reviews? No. Google is where the reviews live and where customers get sent. This sits in front of it. ### Will this get me more Google reviews? It removes the friction. No typing, no hunting for your listing, one tap from your counter to your review page. Whether that turns into more published reviews depends on your customers, and we will not put a number on it we cannot check. ### What happens to my numbers if I stop paying? Your cards keep working and keep sending people to Google. You lose the rating page, the private messages and the per-card counts. What you already collected does not get deleted the day a payment fails. ### How far back can I look? A month on the Review Link tier, a year on Reviews+, no expiry on Reviews Pro. Pro also downloads your feedback as a spreadsheet, or feeds it to your own tools through an API and signed webhooks. ### Can I use this for more than one shop? Yes. Each shop gets its own Google link, its own settings and its own numbers. ### Do my customers need an app? No. Tapping opens a page in the browser they already have. If their phone does not tap, the printed square code opens the same page with the camera.