Seller’s Manual: How to Get Product Reviews Under Amazon’s Strict Review Policy

Quick question: If you are a consumer and you want to buy a toaster on Amazon, how do you make a purchase decision when faced with hundreds of options? Of course, you can narrow the scope by filtering by price, or perhaps you can filter by a specific brand, and then filter out the four-slice toaster you want. But even after you filter so many products, there are still many products in front of you. At this time, how do you choose?

Maybe you can check out product reviews. According to a recent report, more than 90% of consumers said that product reviews are an important factor influencing their purchasing decisions.

This means that if you are an Amazon seller, before you launch a new product, you should think about how to get a lot of positive reviews.

Therefore, this article will explore some things about Amazon product reviews, including some wrong practices and suggestions for your reference.

First, let’s understand the basic concept: Where do Amazon product reviews come from?

As you know, as long as buyers have purchased products on Amazon, they can comment on them. So, Amazon product reviews naturally come from consumers who have purchased products. (In theory, they should.)

But Amazon has set some rules for buyers to leave reviews. If buyers want to leave a review, they must first open the details page of the purchased product:

Buyers can scroll down to the middle page and click the "Write a customer review" button under the "Review this product" heading on the left side of the page:

Then, a new window will appear, where buyers can rate the product, give stars based on the product’s usage, and write a short review. This is the Amazon review generation process.

If you think getting reviews is easy because buyers can rate your product with just a few clicks, you’d be wrong. The problem is that there is little incentive for customers to review your product. Since sellers are not required to leave product reviews, few people do.

According to the experience of big sellers, only 1-2% of buyers will leave reviews for products. In other words, only 2 out of 100 buyers will bother to leave reviews for products.

As we mentioned above, product reviews are crucial to sellers’ product sales. Simply put, if you fail to gain social proof for your store products, your Amazon store conversion rate will be lower than that of your competitors. That’s why you have to find a way to get good reviews for your products, and fast.

A few years ago, Amazon's review system was not so perfect, and sellers had fewer restrictions on how to give positive reviews to their products. Given the importance of product reviews to sales, some sellers resorted to various tricks, and some even adopted unethical practices.

For example, in the past, there were websites that allowed sellers to provide products to buyers for free in exchange for product reviews. Some sellers bought good reviews from websites such as Fiverr, and some sellers asked their family, relatives and friends to give them a lot of good reviews.

However, in recent years, Amazon has made it a goal to ensure that the product reviews that customers see on the site are trustworthy. In that spirit, Amazon and its regulators have begun to actively combat fake and incentivized reviews.

In the fall of 2016, for example, Amazon banned sellers from offering incentives to buyers in exchange for product reviews, and in recent months there have been reports that Amazon was developing and beginning to implement an algorithm that could track potentially fake reviews.

Even the US government has gotten in on the act. In February 2019, the Federal Trade Commission sued a company that sold weight loss supplements on Amazon after it reportedly bought dozens of fake reviews from third-party sites.

However, Amazon has not completely solved this problem, and some sellers still use fake reviews to increase sales of their products. But Amazon is increasingly cracking down on fake reviews, letting Amazon sellers know that using illegal means to get good reviews is risky. In fact, sellers have better ways to get good reviews that do not violate Amazon's policies.

It turns out that as an Amazon seller, there are strategies you can employ to get product reviews once your products are listed. While these strategies won’t help you generate dozens of reviews overnight, if done correctly, they will increase the frequency with which buyers review your products.

The first strategy is to enhance one's own advantages through discounts.

There are two ways for sellers here: one is to lower the price of the product when listing it on Amazon. It’s simple. If you lower the price, the product conversion rate will increase, so you may get more buyers, and more buyers may leave reviews for your products.

The second, slightly more complicated method is to use Amazon’s Coupons feature. Sellers can set up coupons related to specific products in the Amazon backend. This way, when consumers browse products and see an opportunity to save money, they will buy the products on impulse.

To set up a coupon, open the advertising settings in Amazon Seller Central, and from the drop-down menu, you will see a "Coupons" setting item. If it is the first time to set up, click the "Create a new coupon" button and follow the prompts on the following screen:

After you set up your coupon, within an hour or two it should be visible to buyers, and some buyers may purchase your product after seeing it.

After Amazon implemented a new review policy to crack down on fake reviews, sellers began to complain that it was difficult to get product reviews from buyers. As a result, Amazon launched the Early Reviewer Program.

The basic concept of the Amazon Early Reviewer Program is simple: when a buyer purchases your product, Amazon will give these buyers a small reward (usually about $3) to encourage them to leave a review for your product. The Amazon Early Reviewer Program is specially launched for Amazon's new products, and only products with very few reviews (0-5) can participate in the program.

*Note: If a product wants to participate in the Amazon Early Reviewer Program, it costs $60. And as soon as you receive the first review, you will start to be deducted. In addition, there is no guarantee that the review left by the buyer will be a positive one. The program is designed to encourage buyers to leave reviews, not necessarily positive ones.

It is very simple to participate in the Early Reviewer Program. Open the Amazon Seller Central, find the Advertising option, and you can see the program in the drop-down menu:

On the registration page, enter your SKU (i.e. product listing) and click the “Check Eligibility” button on the right:

Then on the next page, click the “Enroll in Program” button and you’re done.

The third strategy is to leverage your company’s existing customer base. Meaning, if you already have a customer base and you can easily reach them, you can send them new products and ask them to leave a review.

If you have an email list, you can send an email to your audience with a link to your product and ask them to buy your product and leave a review. If you have a lot of fans on Facebook, you can post information about your new product and encourage your fans to buy and leave a review. If you have a lot of convertible traffic on your own brand website, you can redirect the traffic to the Amazon product listing.

But if you are an e-commerce novice who is just starting your business and don’t have an existing customer base, then this strategy may not be suitable for you, but you can still find some companies with buyer resources to cooperate with.

The last method is to follow up with the buyers who purchased your products on Amazon.

If you’ve ever bought something on Amazon, you probably know that sometimes a seller will contact you to let you know about the status of your order, such as when the product is out of stock or the shipment is delayed.

For sellers, there are tools you can use to help you follow up with customers. After customers purchase your products, send them messages to ask if they like your products and encourage them to leave you a review.

You can do this manually, but it is quite cumbersome, so it is recommended that sellers use some Amazon tools to automate this process, including Salesbacker and Feedback Genius. More tools can be found in the .com review management section:

In short, it is very important to collect reviews for your Amazon products. But at the same time, with the implementation of Amazon's new review policy, it has become more challenging for sellers to follow the rules to obtain reviews.

In this article, we provide 4 strategies that we hope will be helpful for sellers in managing reviews. Amazon sellers, which of the above strategies can help you increase Amazon product reviews? Feel free to comment, leave a message and share your experience with us below!

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