Negative Amazon reviews can be disheartening to sellers, be off-putting to buyers and can damage your Amazon SEO progress. In short, letting negative reviews take over your storefront can be extremely damaging to your business.
Luckily, we’ve got four proven methods for reducing, dealing with and promoting positive reviews that will keep you and your Amazon business on track. An Amazon agency who specialise in turning sellers into brands and vendors can provide more strategies if you’re still coming unstuck.
DO Avoid Negative Reviews with a Customer Centric Approach to Content
Your customers are researchers. They compare and contrast similar products until they’re confident they’ve found a reliable seller (even if that means a cheaper competitor loses out to you).
Building a customer centric content resource, either via a brand page or on individual product FAQs, will go a long way. By customer centric, we mean:
- Addressing the concerns they are likely to have, in advance of purchase
- Troubleshooting common problems with your products to avoid confusion
- Signposting your customer support details, e.g. email address or phone number to reassure that in the event of an issue, you can resolve it before they resort to negative feedback
Keep your brand tone consistent throughout, as customers deal with “sellers” very differently to how they deal with brands. Their expectations of how they’ll be dealt with also varies, so remain polite and professional throughout.
DO Reply to Negative Reviews quickly, have the facts at your disposal
If you do get a negative review, you need to address it quickly. Do not become standoffish. Do try and help. Remain civil, and ask the person to contact you so you can resolve the issue. Make sure you make them feel important.
If your orders are fulfilled by Amazon, and the customer’s issue is Amazon’s fault, then Amazon should fix the problem and will, quite often then allow you to remove the negative review.
Offer to work with the customer to resolve their issue, and be apologetic towards the way they feel. Remain polite but do not accept untruths and if communication has broken down, be prepared to state the facts in your response.
DO Dilute Negative Reviews by Pursuing Positive Ones
If you’re doing things right but still getting negative reviews, then encouraging and pursuing positive reviews is a viable strategy to help demonstrate that you brand is customer focused.
Positive reviews can be gained a number of ways, the easiest is to use the request a review button in the order backend. Once a product has been delivered, the button appears.
Pressing it a day or two after this triggers Amazon sending the customer an email directly asking for a review. At this point, the customer is still “riding the high” that receiving a new product delivers, and has probably yet to find any issues with it. This means it’s the ideal time to press them for a review, as it’s most likely going to be positive.
DO If Volume Sales Aren’t There, Enrol in a Reviewer Programme
Because the chance of a negative review is much, much greater than a positive one. Low volume sales can sometimes result in a high percentage of negative reviews – if any at all.
Amazon offer two reviewer programmes that help re-balance the chances of positive reviews, whilst remaining impartial and fair. The first is Amazon Vine, which sees professional reviewers receive your product (supplied by you at your own cost). These reviewers then provide an accurate, detailed review which Amazon trusts and displays prominently. There’s no certainty that you’ll get positive reviews, but it certainly increases the chances if you provide a good product and service.
In addition, Amazon’s Early Reviewer programme gives products less than five reviews a chance to gain some, again at the cost of you providing product for free. This programme isn’t necessarily at the same “quality” as Vine, but is a good jump start for those products that maybe haven’t attracted many (or any) sales yet.
DON’T try and manipulate reviews or break Amazon’s Rules
If you try and manipulate the review system using “Black Hat” or unethical methods then you’ll soon fall foul of Amazon and stand to lose what is probably the biggest e-commerce channel you’ll ever have access to.
Methods for manipulating the system are numerous and range from sellers paying customers to leave positive reviews, or setting up fake orders and not sending empty packaging out to random addresses. No matter what, Amazon will catch up with you, so it’s not even worth exploring these methods.
