A labelled one-to-five rating of the order experience — not of your brand, not of your product range, of this specific purchase. It is the survey that moves when you fix something, which makes it the one worth running while you are still fixing things.
Five options, each one named. No unlabelled middle for a buyer to interpret however they like.
They are not two flavours of the same question, and running the wrong one is how a survey ends up ignored.
| CSAT — this order | NPS — the relationship | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | How satisfied are you with this order? | How likely are you to recommend us? |
| Scale | 1–5, every point labelled | 0–10, split into promoters and detractors |
| Moves when | You change something operational — checkout, packaging, a courier, a delivery window | Sentiment about the brand shifts, which is slower and much harder to attribute |
| Best used for | Finding a specific fault while it is still fresh | Tracking a trend over quarters, and spotting who would recommend you |
| Weakness | Almost everybody picks 4 or 5, so the average tells you very little — the tail is where the information is | No detail at all unless you add a written follow-up to it |
A healthy store's CSAT distribution is lopsided: most answers pile into 4 and 5, and the mean sits somewhere around 4.5 and stays there. Watching that number is close to useless, and it is why people conclude CSAT does not tell them anything.
The twelve unhappy people are the survey. Because each rating is stored against the Shopify order, you can open those twelve and ask what they have in common — the same product, the same shipping country, the same week, the same payment method. One shared attribute across a handful of low scores is a fault you can name, and naming it is the entire return on running this.
Publish to both the Thank You page and the Order Status page and the rating is available at two different points in the story: immediately after payment, and again whenever the customer comes back to check where their parcel is. The first reads your storefront and checkout; the second usually reads your fulfilment. Same question, different subject, and worth remembering before you conclude a dip means one thing.
It is a number with no explanation. Five labelled options cannot tell you why someone picked 2, and this template deliberately does not add a text box — one tap is the feature. When you need the reasoning, pair it with NPS and a written why, or run the open-feedback question alongside it and read what turns up. The rest of the library is here.
CSAT if you are trying to improve an operation, NPS if you are trying to track a relationship. A 1–5 rating of this order moves the week you fix your packaging; a recommendation score barely twitches, because it is measuring how someone feels about your brand overall. Stores with a fulfilment problem should reach for this one first.
Because every one of the five has a word on it. Very dissatisfied through Very satisfied means a 3 means the same thing to every person who taps it, while the middle of an unlabelled ten-point scale means whatever each buyer decides it does. Fewer, clearly named options produce a rating you can compare month to month.
Everything up to and including payment — finding the product, the information you gave them, and how checkout felt. Nothing about the parcel, because there isn't one yet. The same survey also sits on the Order Status page, and ratings left there tend to include the wait and the delivery, so the two surfaces answer subtly different questions.
Filter the low ones and look at what their orders have in common. A cluster of 1s and 2s sharing a shipping country, a product or a payment method is a specific operational fault with a specific fix, which is far more useful than an average that drifted a tenth of a point.
Not inside this template — it is one question by design, so it stays a single tap. If you want reasoning attached to a rating, the NPS template with a written follow-up is built for exactly that, and you can run both surveys at once.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish the CSAT template, and filter to the orders that went wrong.
Install free on Shopify