How to Respond to Microsoft Store and Edge Add-on Reviews in 2026

To respond to a Microsoft Store review, you go through Partner Center, not an API. Sign in, open Insights, click Reviews under Apps and games, pick the review, and write a reply of up to 1,000 characters — either a public response that shows on your product page or a private one that emails the customer directly. That's the whole path, and it's the reliable one because Microsoft's own documentation flags the Store reviews *API* as not currently in a working state.

That last part trips up teams who go looking for a programmatic reply endpoint and hit a wall. This guide covers the two surfaces most Windows developers need — the Microsoft Store (apps and games) and Microsoft Edge Add-ons (browser extensions) — the exact Partner Center steps for each, the public-versus-private reply that Apple and Google don't offer, and the honest state of Xbox reviews. If you also ship on iOS or Android, the reply craft carries straight over.

In Partner Center, under Insights. There's no separate 'replies' tab and no dedicated review-management app; the response controls live inside the same Reviews report you'd use to read feedback. Here's the click path from a cold start:

There is documentation for one — and this is the gotcha. The Microsoft Store services API includes topics for submitting responses to reviews, but Microsoft's own Learn pages now carry a notice that these APIs are not currently in a working state, and point you to Partner Center to accomplish the same task. So if you planned to wire review replies into a support tool through an official Microsoft endpoint, that path isn't dependable right now.

This matters if you came from the App Store or Google Play world, where both stores expose a documented, automatable reply endpoint (Apple's `customerReviewResponses`, Google's `reviews.reply`). Microsoft's equivalent exists on paper but not in practice, so Store review responses are effectively a manual, in-dashboard job in 2026.

Edge extensions live in a different corner of Partner Center, but the flow rhymes. Open the Microsoft Edge Add-ons program, select your extension, and go to Extension overview → Reviews. From there you can see your average rating, the total number of ratings, every review, and a Reply link on each one. Responses are 1 to 1,000 characters, same ceiling as the Store. Unlike the Store, an Edge reply is editable after you post it, and you can filter the list by star rating and response status to find the ones you haven't answered yet.

One nicety worth knowing: after you post an Edge Add-on reply through Partner Center, it appears on your public extension listing within about 15 to 20 minutes, not instantly. So if you respond and then refresh the store page and see nothing, wait — it's propagating, not lost. The reply feature for Edge extensions is relatively recent (Microsoft rolled it out in 2022), so if you last published years ago and assumed you couldn't answer feedback, you can now.

This is the genuinely distinctive part of the Microsoft Store. On the App Store and Google Play, every developer response is public — there's no private channel baked into the review. Microsoft gives you a choice: when you respond to a Store review, unchecking 'Make this response public' sends your reply straight to the customer by email instead of posting it under the review, provided they gave an email address and haven't opted out of developer responses.

That reply is 312 characters, nowhere near the 1,000 cap, and it names the problem, points to the fix, and opens one clean next step without demanding anything in public. It works as a public post (future installers see the fix shipped) or, if you'd rather chase the build number quietly, as a private email. Same text, your call on the channel.

Short version: they're gone, and you're not missing a setting. Microsoft quietly dropped user ratings and reviews from the Microsoft Store on Xbox around late 2020, when it rolled out a new Store that September, and consoles haven't had a public review section since. So if you publish on Xbox and can't find anywhere to read or respond to reviews, that's expected. Your Windows Store listing for the same title still carries reviews you can answer in Partner Center; the Xbox console surface just doesn't.

It's a useful reminder that 'the Microsoft Store' isn't one uniform place — the PC Store, Edge Add-ons, and the Xbox console each behave differently, and a workflow that assumes they're identical will have gaps. For the equivalent store-by-store breakdown across the mobile platforms, the companion piece is [reply rules for every app store](/blog/reply-rules-for-every-app-store).

The mechanics are easy; the payoff comes from the writing. A good reply measurably moves ratings. When Google introduced recency-weighted ratings at I/O 2019, it reported that responding correlates with an average lift of 0.7 stars, and across 4.5 million reviews Hassan et al. found users who received a response were roughly six times more likely to raise their rating than those who didn't (4.4% vs 0.7%). Microsoft doesn't publish its own numbers, but the behavior driving that lift — a customer who feels heard revisits their score — isn't platform-specific.

So the craft transfers cleanly. Acknowledge the complaint, don't argue, name the fix or the honest 'we're on it,' keep it proportional, and answer in the reviewer's language when they didn't write in yours. That holds whether you're typing into Partner Center, App Store Connect, or Play Console. For the hardest cases, [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews) covers the de-escalation moves, and [does replying to app reviews raise your rating](/blog/does-replying-to-app-reviews-raise-your-rating) unpacks the studies behind that 0.7-star figure.

The Microsoft workflow comes down to three things: respond in Partner Center (not the broken API), use the public-or-private choice deliberately, and remember Xbox and the PC Store aren't the same surface. And if the same team is drowning in Apple and Google reviews on the side, [start free with ReplyArgus](/signup) — no card — and Argus drafts your first App Store and Google Play replies in minutes, in the reviewer's own language, so the only reviews you're hand-typing are the ones Microsoft still makes you.