As we all know, reviews are critical to a product's success on Amazon. Ever since, Amazon removed incentivized reviews, getting reviews has been harder and harder. However, there are some easy sure-fire ways to get Amazon product reviews – some that are completely white-hat, and some not so white-hat.
In this post, we'll discuss the current state of affairs for Amazon product reviews and how to get those critical first reviews.
How to Get Amazon Product Reviews and Ratings
This article will describe how to get Ratings which include both text reviews and simple star ratings of your product. Your overall rating is what contributes to the star rating of a product, which is what we all care about.
In 2020, Amazon transitioned Reviews to Ratings. The difference is that customers can now simply leave a star rating without leaving a text review.
It is far easier for a customer to leave a star rating than a written Amazon product review. The consequence has been that is now easier to get ratings on Amazon. Ratings also tend to skew higher than reviews.
How Amazon Calculates Product Ratings
Ever since Amazon removed incentivized reviews and introduced verified and non-verified reviews, how Amazon calculates a product's rating has become increasingly complex. All ratings and reviews are not weighted equally.
Amazon uses a complex weighted-average algorithm when calculating the average rating of a product. A product with just one five-star review could potentially have a rating of anywhere from 0-5 stars.
Amazon does not reveal the factors considered in this algorithm but it's commonly accepted the following variables are important:
- Review age
- Reviewer profile [number of reviews, the average rating of reviews left, etc.]
- Length of review
- Number of helpful votes
- Verified or non-verified
- Rating vs written review
- Deviation from mean rating
Essentially, a recent long Amazon product review with a number of helpful votes written by a reviewer with a strong reviewer profile will likely show up near the top of your reviews and will also weigh your overall rating more heavily.
Amazon White Hat Review Strategy
Here's a solid white hat review strategy for getting Amazon product reviews and ratings:
1Amazon Vine
In December 2019, Amazon rolled out the Vine program to all sellers.
To use Vine you enroll your product via the Advertising menu within Seller Central. You then give your product away to Vine Voices members [people with a history of providing insightful reviews]. As of October 2021, it will cost $200 per product to enroll. Prior to October 2021, it was free but it's still a bargain compared to the $2500 it used to cost for Vendor Central clients. You can only enroll products with less than 30 reviews.
Vine is a great way to get some early reviews with one caveat: Vine reviews have been known to be more critical than average. 1-3 star reviews are not uncommon. Contrast this with the Early Reviewer program where most reviews typically are 4 or 5 stars.
Our article ‘What is Amazon Vine and How to Use it in 2023‘ provides further information on Amazon Vine that you may find helpful.
2Use the Request a Review Button
As previously mentioned, Amazon rolled out the Request a Review button in 2019. In our testing, we've found this button results in about a 10% to 20% increase in the rate of reviews. Increasing the probability that existing customers leave a review is the most important thing that you can do to increase your number of reviews.
Here are some more details about what orders you can use this button on and what exactly happens when it's pressed:
- Must be used on orders within 4-30 days of an order being delivered
- Product rating requests and seller feedback requests will be sent in the same email
- Message cannot be customized
- Using it does not disallow you from requesting a review separately
You can manually click this button on your Manage Orders page within Seller Central. However, the easiest way by far is to use some tool to automate this such as Jungle Scout's Chrome extension
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We dive deeper into some common questions that businesses may have regarding customer communication in our .
3Use Product Inserts
Product inserts can be useful when reminding customers to leave an Amazon product review although you must be careful not to provide any if/then statements in the insert verbiage, for example, “If you leave us a review then we'll give you a lifetime extended warranty”.
One effective and relatively risk-free way to use inserts is to ask customers to register their product for an extended warranty [or something similar] to get their email. Afterwards, you can enter them in an email auto-responder series to remind them to leave a review.
Amazon sends an ominous email to sellers reminding them not to use inserts to ask for positive reviews. Reminding the customer to leave a review is still OK, you just can't ask them to leave a positive review.
4Product Giveaways and Discounted Products
By using steep discounts, you can get more sales for your products and increase the likelihood of more Amazon product reviews. I price all of our prices with a 25% discount when launching them to get stronger immediate sales.
There are also discount and rebate clubs that push the boundaries of white hat tactics but are still technically TOS compliant as of this writing. RebateKey is one of the most popular of these services. These services often are more aimed at getting sellers full price credit for sales than reviews per se but a high percentage of purchasers do in fact leave reviews.
Related Reading: How to Use Amazon Giveaways to Increase Sales
5Launch New Products to an Email List [VIP Club]
Hopefully, you've been building your off-Amazon email list. If you have an email list, then when you launch new products do not send them links to your website to purchase, instead send them directly to your Amazon product detail page on Amazon. This accomplishes two things:
- You get vital initial sales velocity for your products
- Your email list is more likely to produce satisfied customers who will subsequently leave Amazon product reviews
Sales velocity is critical for Amazon. There are some who believe Amazon also rewards brands that produce sales on Amazon from outside of Amazon.
Second, your email list is likely to be an audience of people who like your product. Subsequently, they'll be more likely to leave positive reviews. You can also get into grey-hat strategies and in your email blast ask customers to email you after purchase and offer them some kind of refund via PayPal. You're not refunding them in return for a review – you're just offering a product discount. Of course, once they email you, you've gotten that critical customer engagement and it's easier to solicit reviews from them.
Here's a 62-Step Checklist on How to Launch a Private Label Product on Amazon.
How to Find Who Left an Amazon Product Review?
At this point, you may be wondering if there's a way to figure out who left you a review for a particular product. Amazon certainly does not make it easy to figure out who left a review. Clever services [often Chrome Extensions] for many years have used advanced techniques [specifically something called a profile ID] to help sellers determine the Order ID of who left a review. Amazon has closed these loopholes. As of now the only way to figure out who left a review is if the customer uses the same name on their product review as they use in their shipping address.
6Request Reviews from Customers Who Have Left Positive Seller Feedback
Most buyers on Amazon don't quite understand the difference between seller feedback and product reviews. Most of us have probably seen Amazon product reviews left in at some point. It is essential to constantly review your seller feedback.
Proactively email all customers who have left positive seller feedback, especially those who left product reviews, and request them to leave product reviews. I even include an attachment like this with my emails explaining how exactly to leave product reviews. Only a small minority of buyers leave any feedback and those who have left seller feedback are more likely to leave product reviews.
7Use Amazon to Contact Critical Reviewers
Up until recently, you were unable to contact customers who left a negative review as it was nearly impossible to find the buyer identity of a critical reviewer. In 2021 though, Amazon rolled out the ability to contact customers who have left a 3-star review or less.
This feature works well to initiate a dialogue with customers who left critical reviews and hopefully make them happy and have them revise their reviews. There are some important notes about this buyer contact feature though:
- Amazon sends critical reviewers a canned message [and you can not send a custom message until the customer responds to the canned message
- You must be Brand Registered
- There is a contingency on the customer revising the review
This tactic won't get you any more reviews, but having customers change or delete negative reviews is arguably more impactful than anything else.
8Great Packaging
In ecommerce, great product packaging leads customers to overlook product flaws and bad packaging makes them find flaws. Your product packaging is the first impression a customer will have of your product and often what customers will leave their review based on. You can see an example of one of the packaging for one of our previous brands below.
If you want to have a 4.5-star or 5-star product you need to spend a little bit more time and effort on your product packaging. This means no poly bags and no plain boxes. Use full-color boxes when possible. Include adequate use manuals [even for the simplest products] and other product inserts that give your product a polished feel.
9Request Amazon Product Reviews from Customers You've Provided Customer Service To
If you engage in a conversation with people and provide great customer service, most people are happy to leave a great review regardless of the product. And I mean real engagement – not some Feedback Genius autoresponder. Engagement can include:
- Questions about a product before a purchase
- Technical support after a purchase
- Returns for a product that is simply no longer needed
- Making an unhappy customer happy
If you have a conversation with a customer and you ask them “can you leave a review?” most customers will happily oblige. The easiest reviews to get are from customers who ask a product question and then order. Check up on them in a week to make sure they got the product. AFTER they respond to your business email confirming they got the product then ask for a review.
Grey & Black Hat Amazon Product Reviews Techniques
No article on getting Amazon product reviews would be complete without speaking about grey and black hat review techniques. I do not endorse these techniques at all [in fact, I would strongly suggest you avoid them altogether] but it's valuable to know what techniques sellers are using to get reviews in today's Amazon world.
1Black Hat Tactic: Friend and Acquaintance Reviews
I suspect most sellers have been guilty of soliciting a review or two from a family member or friend. This is strictly against Amazon's TOS. Amazon is very good at detecting connections between reviewers and sellers [via shared shipping addresses, IP addresses, etc.] so sellers must be careful to avoid having these connections detected by Amazon if using these strategies. If used sparingly, the detection levels from Amazon are low and generally, if Amazon is suspicious of a small number of reviews, they will simply prevent them from being published.
Account Suspension Risk level: Low
2Black Hat Tactic: Facebook Review Groups
On Facebook there exist A LOT of Review Groups where you give away your product to group members and refund them after they've posted a review. Here's an example of one Facebook review group. Search for “review group” on Facebook and you'll see tons more.
This is an explicit exchange of a refund for a review is one of Amazon's most suspendable offenses. Given that the entire exchange takes place off of Amazon it is difficult to track, however, all it takes is one customer messaging you through Amazon asking for their refund to immediately arouse significant suspicion from Amazon.
Account Suspension Risk Level: Medium
3Black Hat Tactic: Using Email Append Services to Target/Contact Customers
Amazon famously does everything possible to keep sellers from accessing customer information. They hide email addresses and phone numbers. Email appending services take Amazon shipping information and match it against Big Data databases to obtain a customer’s email address and/or phone number. Some services claim a 40% success rate but most are well below this.
It's a bad idea to contact these customers directly once you get their email but these services can be used effectively to remarket to customers on Facebook/Google/etc. with minimal chances of being caught from Amazon.
Account Suspension Risk Level: Medium
4Black Hat Tactic: Using Zombie Accounts to Get Fake Reviews [Brushing]
Amazon has a serious issue, especially among Chinese sellers, with fake reviews. This is done on a LARGE scale to accumulate dozens or hundreds of fake reviews. Essentially these services use fake Amazon accounts to purchase a seller's products and then leave fake reviews. The sophistication of these services is mind-blowing. Prices range from $1-3 per review depending on the likelihood of these reviews being detected by Amazon.
Amazon is playing a constant game of whack-a-mole to fight against these fake reviews and they are becoming increasingly better at detecting these fake reviews and suspending sellers permanently who use them. However, you don't need to dig to find a lot of sellers still using fake reviews with impunity.
Account Suspension Risk Level: Very High
5Black Hat Tactic: Bribing Amazon China Employees to Delete Negative Reviews
Amazon also has a serious problem right now with employees accepting bribes from sellers to perform a number of nefarious tasks including deleting negative reviews. I am serious – this happens on a relatively large scale, especially among Chinese sellers. According to price sheets I have viewed from Chinese vendors, Amazon review deletion services charge around $300 per review deletion so it is not cheap.
Account Suspension Risk Level: Extremely High
Review Maintenance: Review Upvoting, Review Removal, etc.
There are a few other things you can do to improve your review profile, some white hat and some black hat.
Review Upvoting
Do you have a terrible 1-star review that is the first review being displayed? While you may not be able to remove it, you can upvote your top reviews to increase their visibility and decrease the visibility of the negative reviews.
Amazon normally displays the most helpful reviews at the top.
You can ask friends and family to upvote [re: mark as Helpful] a top review. There are also services that will upvote reviews for around $0.50-$1.00 per upvote. This is not TOS-compliant but also something Amazon does not appear to be monitored vigilantly.
Even more black hat, in 2019 there are reports that a large number of Abuse reports for a particular review will automatically trigger that review to be removed.
How to Have Negative Amazon Reviews Removed
Believe it or not, Amazon will actually remove negative reviews in certain circumstances.
The easiest reviews to get removed are ones that contain offensive language [swearing, racist terms, etc] or URLs.
However, recently, Amazon is also willing to remove reviews that are entirely fulfillment based for products fulfilled by Amazon. If requesting this type of removal simply open a case within Seller Central, give a link to the review and clearly state the reason that you are requesting removal. Amazon loathes to remove reviews but it's worth trying, even with a low success rate.
There are a number of services now that will automate non-compliant review removal for you, such as uglyfeedback.com, but they're essentially using bots to scan reviews and look for reviews that violate Amazon's terms of service and ask them to remove them.
Conclusion
The landscape for obtaining reviews on Amazon has completely changed in the last year. Launching products has gotten considerably harder but this can actually be a good thing for many sellers as it keeps out a significant portion of the competition.
What is your review strategy for launching a product? Do you have any tactics not mentioned here? Please share in the comments below.
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