We are trying to create a reviews website for car dealers, the idea is to have a profile for each car dealer on the website were people can view the profile see all the car dealer reviews and rating and even submit their own reviews … we want to have the full control to check the reviews before publishing it on the website and also give the car dealer the ability to submit a request to delete a review if it was a false one … so thats the first function … what we are having problem with is the rating system … we want it to be a combination of the car dealer online reviews (ex. google my business) + our own rating which is based on our clients submitions … so the question here is
how to add google my business reviews and rating for every client to their profile.
make the data live so when someone add review on google my business it shows on our website.
how to create an automation so the website can calculate the rating from google my business + our website rating to give a final rating to our visitors.
how can we integrate other platforms like yellowpages and other reviews platform to our website.
eventually the website rating should be based on our rating but since we are starting we want it to be a combination between our rating other platforms otherwise all the car dealers will have 0 rating or an out-dated ratings (if we add the current rating manually)
the problem is i have very low coding experience and i know for sure this projects need alot of coding and integration i just need guidance where to start (maybe steps will be great to follow)
We are building an app to enable the first function you mentioned, which should be live by next month:
To start, we won’t have a feature to also aggregate scores from other platforms (like Google My Business). But my idea would be to use a tool like Octoparse to scrape these 3rd party platforms, structure the data and calculate the scores in Airtable, and use Zapier or Whalesync to import all of the rating data into the Webflow CMS.
There are a number of ways to build this but the simplest is to build an automation where a new GMB review is a trigger. You’ll get the rating, review text, and some more details as well, and can add them into the CMS.
When I do this I track the source as GMB so it’s easy to identify.
Then you can additionally support your own reviews, perhaps a form + Logic to add them to the CMS, and an internal process to verify & approve it.
The most complex part is the running average, because ideally you’d want that to be part of the dealership’s record for easy access. Honestly your best option there is probably an accrual counter.
In your dealership collection, you’d track Ratings Total e.g. 452, Ratings Count e.g. 100, and Ratings Average e.g. 4.5. Any time a new rating comes from GMB, or is approved by admins, that rating gets added to Ratings Total, and Ratings Count is incremented. Ratings Average is then calculated as total/count and rounded to the nearest 0.5 for star rating display.
Ugly but it’s the easiest to implement and the easiest to re-calculate manually if you ever need to reset the numbers.
