Where to put a review stand so people actually use it

A review stand works or fails on two things: where it sits, and when the customer sees it. The hardware is the easy part.

Timing beats placement

The moment to ask is when the customer is most pleased and least busy. For most businesses that is a narrow window: the coffee has just been handed over, the haircut is finished and they like it, the job is done and the van is packed up.

Put the stand where that moment happens. If your best moment is at the chair rather than the counter, the counter is the wrong spot.

By business type

Cafes and takeaway

Next to the pickup point, not the register. At the register people are getting their card out. At pickup they have both hands free for about ten seconds.

Salons, barbers, clinics

At reception where payment happens, angled toward the person sitting or standing, not toward the room. A disc on the desk works better than a stand behind a monitor.

Restaurants and bars

On the table with the bill. A stand that lives permanently on a table gets ignored within a week; one that arrives with the bill does not.

Trades and mobile services

A card handed over at the end, or a tile stuck inside the van door you open at handover. You are not competing with a counter, you are competing with the customer forgetting once you drive away.

Retail

At the counter, but pair it with the staff prompt. Silent retail counters are where these go to die.

The physical details that matter

• Eye line, not bench line. Anything below chest height on a deep counter is out of view.
• Not behind the terminal. The EFTPOS machine is the single most common thing that ends up in front of a stand.
• Light for the QR. Phone cameras need reasonable light. A dim corner kills scanning before it starts.
• Reachable. NFC needs a couple of centimetres. If the customer cannot comfortably get their phone to it across a wide counter, it will not get tapped.
• One per spot. Two tap points side by side halves the chance either gets used.

The part the hardware cannot do

A stand on its own is a polite suggestion. The businesses that get results pair it with one sentence from a person: if you have a second, there is a tap there for a review.

That sentence does more than the stand does. The stand makes the sentence easy to act on, which is the actual job it performs. Anyone telling you the hardware alone fills your listing is selling you something.

One caveat worth repeating: ask everyone the same way. Picking which customers get the prompt based on how happy they seem is against Google policy. More on that in how to ask for reviews without breaking the rules.

Start small

One stand in the right place beats five in the wrong ones. Put one out, watch it for a fortnight, move it if nobody touches it. Then add more where it worked.