A multiple-choice question can only return answers you already thought of. This one returns the thing you didn't — the request, the complaint, the compliment you never put on a list. It is the least sophisticated template here and reliably among the most useful.
One question, one box, optional. There is nothing else to it, and that is deliberate.
Open text does not chart. On Pro it is grouped into themes with counts, a sentiment split, and quotes word for word.
“The refill pouches are great but I have nothing to put them in. Sell the jar separately?”
“Your size chart is in inches and I am not.”
Every structured question is a guess about what matters, dressed up as a measurement. You choose six options, buyers pick among them, and you get a clean distribution across a list you invented. If the real issue is a seventh thing, the survey will never say so — it will report a tidy result and you will believe it.
An empty box gives up the counts and buys the opposite property: it can return something you did not anticipate. That is worth more than precision when you are early, when you have just changed something, or when a metric moved and nothing explains it. It is also the fastest way to find out that your customers and your marketing are talking about two different products.
Two real costs. First, fewer people answer — typing is work and a tap is not, so expect a thinner response than any multiple-choice template on this site. Second, you cannot chart it. There is no percentage to put on a slide, no trendline, no month-on-month. You get sentences, and sentences have to be read.
Both costs are worth paying while the volume is small. As it grows, the reading is what breaks first — which is what the Pro summary above exists to absorb. Worth being clear about the gate: the answers are collected and stored on both plans and are never metered, the free plan shows you the last 24 hours of them, and the written summaries are Pro only.
The strongest pattern is to run this for a fortnight, find the two or three things that keep coming up, and then ask about those specifically with a question that produces numbers. If shipping cost dominates, go to what almost stopped you. If it is all about whether they will reorder, use the repeat-purchase driver. If you still do not know where your orders come from, that is the attribution question and it should probably have been first. All of them, and the plans, are in the template library and on pricing.
Fewer people than tap a multiple-choice option, and that is the trade. The ones who do are self-selecting for having something specific to say, so a small pile of these is denser with information than a large pile of taps. If you would rather have counts than sentences, ask a question with options instead.
You read it, which is fine at a few a day and stops being fine at fifty. That is the problem the Pro summary exists for: it groups the answers into recurring themes with a count on each, splits sentiment, and quotes real responses so you can check it against the source. On the free plan you read the feed yourself.
It is an excellent one, for the reason that makes it feel unserious: you do not yet know which question to ask. Two weeks of unfiltered answers will tell you what your customers care about, and then you can ask about that specifically with a question that produces numbers.
Real, and checked. Every quote is verified against the stored response before it is shown, so a summary cannot attribute a sentence to a customer who never wrote it. That verification is the reason to trust the themes above it.
No — collection is never capped or metered on either plan, and it never will be. What the free plan limits is how far back you can look: analytics, the response feed and CSV export all show the last 24 hours, and Pro opens the whole history. So a free store can gather thousands of these; it just reads them daily.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish one open question, and find out what you have not been asking about.
Install free on Shopify