Getting product reviews on Amazon can result in a significant boost in sales, but it can be tough to get the ball rolling. 72% of shoppers do not buy products before reading review sites. If you can find more Amazon comments, then that means you will get a bigger sale as well!
In this post, we’ll share some tips and tricks for getting more reviews for your products on Amazon. By following these tips, you can give your sales a nice boost and get a leg up on the competition.
Why are Amazon reviews important?
Other than just being a metric to boost the listing’s SEO ranking, positive Amazon product reviews directly influence the purchasing decisions of other buyers. According to a study by the Spiegel Research Centre, 95% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase. The conversion rate also exponentially increases with the number of positive reviews for that product. How massive is this difference? A customer is 270% more likely to buy a product with 5 reviews than a product with zero reviews.
Clearly, Amazon product reviews play a massive role in the customer decision-making process. This is because product reviews are one of the best forms of social proof. From a psychological perspective, most consumers will look to the experiences of other customers to validate their decision. Nobody loves buyer’s remorse. The best way to prevent remorse is to ensure that others who have purchased the product are happy with it! A good review can often push on-the-fence buyers into a purchase.
This is even true in the case of regular brick & mortar stores. Many consumers today check for reviews online before purchasing a product from their local retail store. Word-of-mouth assurances often work better than any marketing strategy that a brand can employ.
This means that the quality of reviews is paramount. Getting a lot of reviews won’t necessarily translate to more sales unless those reviews are positive. This is why Amazon looks at the quality of reviews rather than just the volume. Quality reviews increase the relevance of your product and will help it rank higher in Amazon’s search results.
What is the Amazon reviewer rank?
The Amazon Reviewer Ranking system compares user reviews against competitors in layman’s terms. The rankings are compiled based on the feedback of new visitors to your Amazon profile. Amazon puts a button that allows users to check yes or no to the question, “was this review helpful to you”? This helps Amazon provide a ranking to the seller’s profile.
How is Amazon reviewer rank calculated?
Amazon considers three factors to determine the reviewer ranking system.
How many reviews have the user submitted?
How many “yes” votes does that review have from other users?
How recent is the review?
Amazon tabulates these factors automatically, and a reviewer ranking is established. It is essential to clarify that as an Amazon seller, you don’t directly benefit from – nor can you directly impact or influence higher Amazon Reviewer Rankings. However, you can send satisfied customers to Amazon to leave direct customer feedback – which can help to improve their Reviewer Ranking. Amazon does reward positive reviewers with higher rankings with shopping perks.
How Amazon Customer Ratings and Reviews Helps your Business?
There is no denying that word of mouth advertising offers a business the best return on marketing investment. When previous customers sell your business for you – through the simple act of sharing their customer experience via an Amazon.com review, it provides you with multiple benefits that can directly impact your bottom-line profits.
First – It Nudges Customers "On the Fence" to Buy
Did you know that nearly 73 percent of customers shopping online indicate that positive reviews from previous shoppers provide them with confidence to make a purchase? Many online shoppers are cautious about buying a product due to questions about the seller or other factors. Positive reviews help convince shoppers that they are making an intelligent investment.
Second – Improves Consumer Confidence
There are two general concerns of most online shoppers in 2023. First, is the transaction secure, and second, is the product of a high quality or a cheap knock-off? When your Amazon profile is filled with genuine reviews by verified previous customers, it helps customers curious about the quality of your products feel more confident about clicking the buy now button.
Third – Convinces Shoppers to Choose You Over Competitors
In today’s competitive marketplace on Amazon.com – with many sellers offering similar products in many instances, every business needs to find creative ways to improve its profile, product descriptions, and other elements on its profile. Having more high-quality product reviews from real customers is by far the most impactful way of separating you from the competition.
How to Get Reviews on Amazon: 13 Tips
The way to get more reviews on Amazon won’t be easy. There are several practices that Amazon has explicitly banned, including the generally accepted Seller’s Conduct Codes. This means that you must not simply follow Amazon’s policies but also act in a fair and honest manner as a whole.
Finding balance between strategies that actually generate fewer comments and stay on top of Amazon may not be easy. But every business and product can have different advantages and disadvantages for different people. Basically, our plan is to try laterally to find a way to generate more positive reviews for your product at Amazon.
Here’s a solid white hat review strategy for getting Amazon product reviews and ratings.
1. Sign up for the Vine program
Current review policies have more to say about violations than they do about acceptable ways to get reviews on Amazon. But there is one long-running and completely safe way of getting reviews, and that is the Amazon Vine program. It used to only be available to vendors, and had a hefty price tag.
But after a federal investigation in 2019, Vine was also made available to sellers who sign up for Brand Registry. To use this, sellers need to give away products to Amazon’s reviewers. Of course, there is no guarantee of getting positive reviews.
Participating reviewers are known as Vine Voices. These are experienced and vetted Amazon users with no prior record of review bias. They review products for free and keep them, and instead of the “Verified Purchase” badge, their reviews come with a “Vine Voice” marker.
Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program, which provided up to 5 reviews for $60, was closed in April 2021, but the Vine scheme is similar. The major difference is that the Early Reviewer Program did not require sellers to give products away.
2. Use the Amazon.com Request a Review Button
In 2019, Amazon added a Request a Review button that allowed sellers to contact buyers via a private message. This was shown to increase online reviews by about 15 percent – when the seller would submit to all previous shoppers.
Here are the specifics that you need to consider before enacting this strategy.
Users must request the review within 30-days of the order being delivered.
The button request will ask buyers to submit a written and product rating review at the same time.
You can’t customize the messages – it’s an Amazon template only.
You can use this button in conjunction with other review requests sent to customers.
3. Utilize Product Inserts
An easy way to get reviews on Amazon is to use product inserts. However, there are several things to keep in mind if you use this strategy:
You can ask for reviews, but always stay neutral. Asking people to give a five-star review, or even showing a five-star image, is against Amazon’s guidelines.
Tell people to join your email list and follow you on social media. As mentioned above, this will help you get more reviews and also help you for future product launches.
Furthermore, give helpful information about your product and make sure people find a way to contact you if an issue comes up.
It would be best to take advantage of this strategy because it costs you almost no money, and you will see more results over a longer period.
4: Use ManyChat to Engage With Previous Customers
If you’re not using ManyChat to help increase your Amazon sales you should be now. The full details of how to set up your ManyChat bot are beyond the scope of this article but you can do it within a few minutes. A sample flow would like the following:
You can use an append service to target previous customers or use an existing audience you have set up (if you don’t use either of these two things you’ll basically be employing a spray and pray approach).
5. Product Giveaways and Discounted Products
By using steep discounts, you can get more sales for your products and increase the likelihood of more 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.
6. Launch New Products to an Email List (VIP Club)
Every smart business owner understands the value of data collection with previous customers. One of the best ways to take advantage of retaining your Amazon shoppers contact information is to create exclusive products available for those customers for early purchases.
Here is how you can use this strategy for increasing reviews.
Create an email list of previous customers who have provided feedback previously.
When you launch a new product, before advertising it, create an email blast to those who previously left a review – and offer them a promotional code for a discount on the new product.
Ask them for a review after the purchase of the new product in the email blast.
7: Request Reviews from Customers Who Have Left Positive Seller Feedback
A lot of customers give feedback about products in the Seller Feedback section of your seller profile. You can ask these customers to leave their feedback on the product listing as well.
You’ll want to check your Seller Feedback regularly to look for any cases like this. It’s important to reach out soon after the customer leaves feedback, so the experience is fresh in their mind.
If you find anything that fits as a product review, reach out to the customer, thank them, and kindly ask if they can write the same thing as an Amazon product review. It is totally fine to send mails and request your customers to write reviews for you.
Obviously, you only want to do this for positive reviews and feedback.
(If you find a negative review in your seller feedback, you can get Amazon to remove it by reaching out. They’ll be pretty quick to delete anything that’s meant to be a product review).
Summary: many customers mistakenly leave product reviews in the Seller Feedback section. You can reach out to these customers to kindly ask them to copy and paste this as a product review.
8. Mitigate negative reviews
You can mitigate poor reviews of your products proactively by ensuring that your product is top-notch and worthy of a commendable review. Reactively, you can address any customer service issues that may arise.
Sometimes going the extra mile to resolve a negative shopping experience can produce a positive result. Case in point – if a customer has left a 2-star rating about the product or buying experience, Amazon gives you the ability to contact them via a private message to ask them if there is anything you can do to fix the issue.
Customers typically leave a lower star-rating based on the shopping or delivery experience. If they received a damaged product but didn’t take time to contact you to replace it – the customer is likely to place the negative review anyways. By being proactive and trying to resolve the issue for them – they are just as likely to change or remove that lower star rating – and replace it with a positive one.
9. Enroll in the Amazon Early Reviewer Program
2021 follow up: the Early Reviewer program has been retired by Amazon, and is closing completely from April 2021. We’ll leave the text below to give you an idea of what this program is, however it is unfortunately no longer an option to get reviews.
The Amazon Early Reviewer program is a service set up by Amazon to help new products get their first reviews.
How it works: if you have Brand Registry, you can enroll products that don’t have any reviews yet, for $60 per product.
Amazon will contact buyers of your product and ask them to leave feedback, with an incentive of a small Amazon gift card (worth a few dollars) if they write a review.
Any reviews you get through this program will have a small badge saying “Early Reviewer Rewards”.
Amazon will keep looking for reviewers for up to 12 months, or until your product gets 5 reviews from the program (whichever comes first).
Keep in mind that you can’t influence whether it’s a good review not. You could get 5 reviews through the program, and all of them bad. So be sure you have a good product (see point #1) before you enroll in this program.
Summary: use the Early Reviewer program for new products to get your first few reviews.
10. Request 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.
11. Use an automated review solicitation tool
You’ll find review solicitation applications on our list of Amazon Selling Tools & Services. Some are standalone apps and some are browser extensions. They can help time your requests so that they’re likely to go out ahead of Amazon’s automated emails.
But since they outmaneuver Amazon and might get review request buttons to come through faster, they can be seen as review manipulation. So, use review solicitation tools with care to comply with policies. Don’t be tempted to use them selectively, by cherry-picking orders that you think are more likely to lead to a positive review. That is specifically against Amazon’s policies.
12. Tell buyers that reviews only need a star rating
As of September 2019, buyers can leave a star rating for a product without adding any comments. This new “one-touch” type of rating is included in the total displayed under the product’s title, and also in the ratings distribution table at the top of the reviews section.
A new “one-tap” rating, on a mobile device.
This new and easier way to leave ratings should encourage more Amazon buyers to leave reviews, and may work in favor of sellers.
To help educate buyers, include a diagram on your product insert or packing slip. Show them that they only need to click a rating, and don’t need to write a lengthy review. Don’t fall foul of Amazon’s policies by drawing too much attention to positive ratings, but recognize the power of suggestion that comes from illustrating what to do.
There is a downside to the new one-touch ratings. When you scroll through and read all the reviews for a product, you won’t see these ratings and won’t know why a buyer left a low rating. It may have been down to the delivery rather than the product itself, for example, which would normally be grounds for removal. But without seeing what the customer had to say, there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
13. Improve Your Branding
The final strategy for improving Amazon product reviews is to dive deep into your overall marketing and advertising strategy. Many customers will formulate an opinion based on optics – or the appearance of your branding on packaging, your website, and other forms of advertising. In many cases, a customer will leave a low-star review based on receiving a cheap cardboard box with your items contained.
If you’re serious about improving your online reviews on Amazon – consider making improvements to your packaging. Consider custom-printed boxes, high-quality inserts or padding, or even personalized packing tape. These minor enhancements make a positive impact on customers and may stimulate improved product written reviews.
Grey & Black Hat Amazon Product Review Techniques
No article on getting Amazon 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.
1. 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
2. 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 explicit exchange of a refund for a review is one of Amazon’s most suspendable offense. 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
3. 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
4. Using Zombie Accounts to Get Fake Reviews (Brushing)
Amazon has a serious issue, especially amongst 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. This sophistication of these services is mind blowing. Prices range from $1-3 per review depending on the likelihood of these reviews to be 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
5. 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 amongst 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
The risks of using black-hat tactics
Amazon operates a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to review manipulation. So expect to have your account and listing suspended permanently, to be banned for life, and to have your funds frozen. In very serious cases, Amazon may also resort to legal action and public shaming.
From time to time, Amazon will have a purge of suspicious reviews and helpful votes, so don’t assume that a fake review has been accepted just because action is not taken immediately. When there is a purge, the deleted reviews cannot be restored. Honest reviews and helpful votes may become victims as well, and the customer’s reviewer ranking will decline.
Amazon will also consider litigation against those who abuse the reviews system. Amazon sued over 1,000 sellers and reviewers in the year leading up to the incentivized reviews ban in October 2016. Since then, it has entered into arbitration with many sellers.
But it’s not just Amazon who can sue for biased reviews. The FTC brought its first successful case against an Amazon seller who bought fake reviews in 2019.
The key takeaway is this: sellers trying to get more reviews on Amazon have the option to comply with policies or to ignore them. But the choice between right and wrong is a moot point. The consequences of violating review policies are dire.
FAQs
How long does it take for an Amazon review to post?
Most Amazon customer reviews are published within 72 business hours. The review process requires Amazon’s algorithms to check reviews for harsh language, hate speech, and other violations of their terms of service. Sometimes reviews can take longer to publish depending on variables outside of the control of Amazon (such as volume or requests).
Do you get an Amazon rating without reviews?
Amazon makes it easy for customers to leave feedback. The easiest is to seek a rating of the product or buying experience. This is referred to as an Amazon Rating. Essentially, the customer with an Amazon account will rate their experience on a scale between 1 and 5-star reviews. If they wish to leave additional feedback, they can leave a written product review. This type of review is more beneficial – as they are ranked higher by future customers and will eventually rank higher on your service pages.
How to get book reviews on Amazon?
If you’re an author and looking to get book reviews on Amazon, consider multiple options. The first and easiest method is to ask family and friends who have read your book to publish a written review. You can also consider adding a small notation on the book itself (such as the back cover) or an insert requesting an Amazon.com review from those who ordered and read your books. Driving traffic to your Amazon listing via social media is another way of increasing book reviews – especially by offering incentives or giveaways for branded merchandise.
What's a Good Sales to Review Rate?
Amazon product reviews average between 1 to 22%. For each 100 sales you’ll get one or two reviews. A typical ratio of 1% to 12% seems small. Many sellers complain about having difficulty generating good reviews but in fact they’re below the average. You could generate more than average reviews. Amazon does not offer a good method to get feedback. If you use this strategy, your sales/review ratio should be 5%, with average sales around 20 reviews per review. Anything that appears inconvenient to Amazon will cause problems for you (even when you have not broken any regulations).
How do I get verified reviews on Amazon?
Amazon lists certain items as verification purchases. In order for a reviewer to receive product, there are several things: payment of reviews. Offer incentives in review. Review the product for yourself. Ask friends who have reviewed your business. We are aiming to receive unbiased feedback only. The company also offers a great discount.
Why am I not getting reviews on Amazon?
The struggle to build early reviews for new products is a problem for Amazon sellers. Reviews that don’t come on are usually because of three reasons. Amazon’s policies violate a number or many policies that prohibit the use of a particular product or a certain type. Usually this doesn’t happen since a review can typically take between one and three days and in rare cases up to one week. April 21, 2020.
In Conclusion
To summarize what you’ve learned, here’re the most important things:
Positive reviews have a great impact on your business.
There’s no magic trick to get more reviews on Amazon.
You’ve to sell a great product and you’ve to sell A LOT to get more reviews.
You can implement strategies to increase your chances for positive reviews.
Remember: a few extra sales garnered by using a black hat tactic isn’t worth putting your entire seller account in jeopardy.
