In the realm of Amazon, a 5-star rating is the Holy Grail. Yet, you cannot ask for it, you can't even hint at it. This is a powerful message to all entrepreneurs that success does not come from a mere number; it is earned by providing real value to customers.
Amazon's guidelines stand as a beacon of integrity in the vast sea of e-commerce. They serve as a reminder that the best business practices are those that prioritize transparency, impartiality, and the relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction.
This article serves not only as an informative guide but also as a blueprint for maintaining integrity in the cutthroat arena of e-commerce. It is an invitation to all entrepreneurs to take a step back and re-evaluate their business practices - not from the perspective of what is permissible, but from what is honorable.
Tips for effective Amazon sellers
- Provide Great Service: The heart of any successful business is great customer service. Ensure that your customers’ needs are met and exceeded.
- Sell at Good Prices: Be competitive with your pricing. Research your competition and make sure your prices are fair and attractive to potential buyers.
- Provide Value for Money: It’s not just about being the cheapest. Your products should also be of good quality and offer value for the price.
- Be Active in Responding: Timely and active response to customer queries, complaints, and feedback is crucial.
- Personalize Your Responses: Don’t just send out generic responses. Personalize them for each customer to show that you value their opinion.
- Address Negative Reviews: Don’t ignore negative reviews. Instead, use them as an opportunity to improve your service and potentially convert a disgruntled customer into a satisfied one.
- Be Honest in Your Replies: Always be honest with your customers. If you made a mistake, admit it and tell them how you plan to fix it.
- Be Helpful: Provide solutions to your customers’ problems. This will not only improve your relationship with them but also increase the chances of them leaving positive feedback.
- Monitor Your Feedback Score: Keep an eye on your feedback score and take steps to improve it if necessary.
- Encourage Positive Reviews: While you can’t ask for positive reviews, you can certainly encourage them by providing excellent service and following up with customers.
- Learn from Your Reviews: Use the feedback you receive, both positive and negative, to continuously improve your service.
- Maintain a Professional Attitude: Regardless of the situation, always maintain a professional attitude when dealing with customers.
- Show Empathy: Understand and acknowledge the customer’s feelings and frustrations. This can go a long way in resolving issues and turning negative experiences into positive ones.
- Follow Amazon’s Rules: Always abide by Amazon’s rules and regulations to avoid getting into trouble.
- Stay Updated: Stay informed about any changes in Amazon’s policies or market trends to stay competitive.
- Be Consistent: Consistency in providing excellent service is key to getting positive reviews and maintaining a high feedback score.
Turning Negative Amazon Reviews Positive
Amazon Seller Feedback is the metric generated by customers who rate the sellers they bought from in the past. It allows any potential customer to predict the relationship with the seller and their quality if they chose to purchase from them. This metric is important to all sellers since it can affect both the buying decision and Amazon algorithm which decides how and where your products will be presented.
Coupled with Amazon reviews, feedback is among the most important factors what will decide your success, or failure, in the Amazon marketplace.
What does Amazon Seller feedback mean?
Seller feedback is very important both from the customers perspective, since it reflects on your quality and therefore influences their buying decision, and also from Amazon’s perspective where it affects everything from your seller Account health to product placements and locations.
Unlike competition and competitor pricing, the seller feedback is also a factor you can influence relatively easily. You can and should make it a habit to collect as many feedbacks as you can to increase the chances of your listings coming up on top and appear in the Buy box and top of the search page.
What is the importance of seller feedback?
While often buyers are getting the two rating systems confused, the name suggests the difference – a seller feedback is your rating as a seller while a product review is the rating your product received from verified customers.
A seller feedback is a measure of the service you supplied to the customer – how fast did the items arrive, where you are responsive to their requests and claims, and your overall interaction with them. Note: if you are using FBA then some factors (e.g. delivery, shipping) fall under Amazon’s responsibility since they manage the related order.
A Product Review is the measure of how happy, or unsatisfied, is the customer with the product’s quality, value for money and so on.
Each one of your products or ASINs has their own unique product reviews and product star rating. At the same time, all products share the same Seller feedback – your rating as gathered by verified customers.
What is the difference between an Amazon Review and Amazon feedback?
There are many ways you can get seller feedback. Some buyers will rate you on their own, while others need to be asked specifically to give their review.
Waiting for buyers to leave the reviews and feedback is a dangerous practice. Why, you ask? Because your competitors are not simply leaving it be. They are actively pursuing more and more feedbacks and reviews and you are likely to be left behind with much, much less sales and a lingering business.
So, we figured you better approach buyers and ask them for product reviews. Let’s go over the ways to do so.
How do I get seller feedback on Amazon?
First, you have a couple of Amazon programs you can use. They are made to get reviews for new products, but a by product is getting seller feedback as well:
These are nice for new products and when you start out, but the majority of the potential is in the ongoing solicitation process.
Early Reviewer and Amazon Vine Programs:
Here are the methods you can deploy in your day to day seller life to keep the feedbacks flowing.
Another factor you should consider is the amount of work required on your end in each of the above mentioned ways. Some of them require a lot of manual labor. The good news is you can automate such work using dedicated Amazon Seller apps. For example, if you choose to use the Request a Review method, which is the safest and most effective, you can use HighFive – a seller app that will automatically send the requests and follow the settings that you choose.
Product inserts, Buyer-Seller messaging & Request a Review
An important note about Amazon’s guidelines – you are not allowed to influence the product reviews and feedbacks in any way. According to the guidelines you can not ask buyers who are likely to give positive feedback (e.g. family members and friends), also, you can not exclude people who might give negative feedback and you are not allowed to influence the buyer ratings in any way – you can not offer incentives or even suggest that you are looking for a 5 star grade.
Any violation of these guidelines can result in your account getting banned, your products delisted and can even affect your Amazon funds. Learn more on this page. We suggest to play it safe and only use safe ways. Use the HighFive service to automate the Request a Review functionality which is the safest and most effective. If you install HighFive today you are getting it Free for life. Use this link to go the install page.
Always Follow Amazon Guidelines
It is officially forbidden to ask for a positive review or feedback or to influence the rating a buyer gives you in any way. Any such request or interference, might be punished severely if Amazon finds out. We strongly advise against asking or hinting that you are looking for a positive rating.
However, not all hope is lost 😉 You can still increase your chances of getting positive reviews in other ways that will improve your feedback score. The most obvious way is to simply provide a great service. Sell your products at a good price and provide value for money.
Another thing you should do is actively responding to each comment, message and complaint, both private ones you received in the buyer-seller messaging, and on negative reviews. If you reply to comments and message the client in an honest and helpful way you can turn a negative rating to a positive one.
Last and certainly not least, you can time your feedback requests. Different timing may result in indistinct results. As an example, if you sell a product that takes time to enjoy, don’t ask for a feedback immediately, wait a couple of weeks. This can result in much higher seller’s star ratings. While you can hypothesize about the perfect timing for the related order, it is much more powerful to make tests and learn from the results.
You can deploy HighFive to not only automate your requests, but also to designate different request times for different products based on the order date and even make rules per product (e.g. if you sell 10 items you can wait longer than if you sold 1 item, because the buyer probably passed some of the items as gifts). You can also experiment with timing much more easily with HighFive that gives you control over the sending dates.
Can I ask for a positive Amazon seller feedback?
Negative feedback sucks. Seriously. Nothing can bring you down more than an undeserved bad feedback. It can affect your rating, your business, your Amazon accounts’ health and … your mood.
The best way to deal with negative feedback is not to get it in the first place. Do your best to keep your customers happy, respond to their claims and questions and do your best to deliver on time.
If you still got negative feedback while it is hard to negate it and remove feedback, fixing it is still doable. There are a few paths you can take.
The same apply for neutral feedback (3 star). We should always strive to get to 5 stars to beat our competitors to the top.
Another way that works like a Charm is to flood the negative feedback with positive feedback. Make sure to take every chance you get to ask customers to leave feedback and request product reviews after they make an order . That way you can up your 5 stars and positive feedback and dilute unjust low ratings and negative feedback.
How to deal with negative seller feedback?
The number of Amazon seller feedbacks and the average rating matter a lot. It effects a customer’s propensity to buy, your Amazon rating and your listings and their chance to appear in the buy box.
The exact number can not be predetermined since it depends on your industry, competitors, marketplace conditions and goals. As a general rule, try to get the highest rank and more feedback than your top competitors to give you a fair chance of beating them.
How many Amazon Seller feedback should I get?
Since Amazon wants feedback and product reviews to reflect reality as much as possible, they made it illegal to rate yourself and your own products. Any influenced rating can be removed and you, as the seller, might get punished if you do that. We recommend keeping your feedbacks legit and not influence buyers in any way.
Why can’t I leave seller feedback on Amazon?
The best way to ask a buyer to leave seller feedback is to let Amazon do it. Seriously. Use the Request a Review functionality so Amazon get an email delivered to your client with the exact wording that will pass their guidelines, so you are safe. See the previous questions for more details. This can up your feedback score with zero risk.
What is the right way to ask for seller feedback?
Amazon sellers must know their seller feedback and try to improve it all the time, by getting more and better ratings. To view your seller feedback go to the Feedback manager in Amazon’s seller central.
In Seller central, click “Performance” and search for and click “Feedback” you will then see your Feedback star rating and many timeframes (e.g. 30 days, 90 days, 12 months and lifetime).
When you start using HighFive you will get timely reports that will show you your feedback and product marks so you can easily keep track, see progress and gain insights. This is a professional seller app you can get for free to up your game and start selling more.
Where can an Amazon seller locate their seller feedback?
Of course, whenever buyers leave product reviews and feedback sellers are advised to reply. Especially make sure you reply to negative reviews and comments that detail what went wrong for them. This shows potential customers you are trustworthy, increase their chance of buying, plays in your favor from Amazon’s perspective and can even offset negative ratings. Make it a habit to search and respond to such comments daily and resolve issues as they arise.
Should I reply and answer seller feedback a buyer left for me?
This one is super important. Amazon constantly monitors and take into account seller feedback. More than that, Amazon treats feedback differently based on the time it was left, hence recent feedback is more valuable than old feedback.
Does Amazon monitor seller feedback?
Optimizing asking for reviews and feedback from your customers depends on various aspects. The nature of your product, the customer experience. You can try to assess the time it takes your customer to enjoy the product after the order and “get it” and ask then, but a safer way is to simply start testing. For each of your products try to ask after a different amount of dates after the delivery date and see when works best for you. For some products it might be a week after the delivery date and for other after 90 days. It all depends on the particular product.
What are the best practices when asking for a seller feedback?
We’ve gone through many of the Do’s and Do not’s of requesting customers to leave reviews and leave feedback. Here’s a quick summary:
What should I avoid and do when requesting Amazon feedback?
You can now get HighFive Free for life. Use the link to go to the install page and you can automatically manage your review and feedback requests from each customer, get data and analytics and run experiments.
