Do you know that 88% of customers avoid a brand because of a bad review? As an Amazon seller, you can always remove bad customer reviews but be prepared for one big risk: possible permanent withdrawal of your selling privileges on Amazon and withholding of funds.
Now, we don’t want to scare you with this caveat. The purpose of this article is to help you understand Amazon’s policies regarding review removal so that you can remove customer feedback legally and effectively, without getting into any trouble.
Amazon has a zero-tolerance policy toward any customer review violations, which includes removing feedback by bribing or threatening customers. Any attempts to manipulate or illegally remove customer reviews can warrant severe actions from Amazon.
So how do you remove feedback while abiding by Amazon’s policies? Read on to explore two ways you can use to remove negative product reviews from your account. We also share some tips to help you avoid negative feedback in the future.
Can Amazon Sellers Remove Product Reviews?
As a general rule, Amazon doesn’t remove product reviews even if they are unwarranted or the problem has been resolved. However, there are certain situations in which Amazon will remove or strike-through reviews. We’ll discuss these situations later in the article. But first, let’s discuss why it’s important to remove reviews.
Customer reviews play a vital role in how customers perceive your brand or product and, therefore, impact your sales and profits. Customer feedback also affects your seller metrics, which are critical if you’re eyeing the elusive Buy Box.
The Buy Box is the white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page, where consumers can add products to their shopping cart. Amazon calculates your average feedback rating based on the reviews received over the last 12 months. Having a feedback rating of over 95% increases your chances of getting a share of the valuable Buy Box real estate.
Now, let’s answer another important question.
If your Amazon store receives hundreds of reviews each month, how do you track which reviews to keep and which to remove?
This is where Shulex’s Review Analyzer can help. It leverages complex NLP, AI, MLOps, and analytics to help you analyze customer reviews by scrapping them and labelling them according to different dimensions such as sentiments, pricing, product functionality, use cases, and more.
Once you quickly export all of your reviews into a spreadsheet, you can easily see how positive or negative your product reviews are, understand the driving force behind the star ratings, and observe key trends in user feedback about pricing, comparisons to competitors, and more. Not only that, but it also helps you make better, faster decisions about your products based on your consumers’ own words.
Removing Amazon Product Reviews: Tried & Tested Ways
Let’s be honest. Nobody likes to get negative reviews on their eCommerce store. Receiving negative feedback on your Amazon seller account can affect your sales, revenues, and Buy Box percentage. Fret not! Here are two ways to get negative feedback removed in most cases.
1. Contacting Amazon to Remove Reviews
One of the simplest ways you can remove product reviews is by contacting Amazon. However, bear in mind that Amazon will only remove feedback in these instances:
· The customer has used obscene words or profanity in their review.
· The review mentions any seller-specific, personally identifiable information, such as their email addresses, full names, or contact numbers.
· The user has reviewed the product in the feedback comment instead of reviewing the service. However, if the feedback contains both a product review and comments about a seller’s service, Amazon doesn’t remove it.
When Amazon removes customer feedback, you will see its impact removed from your feedback rating and, in turn, your Order Defect Rate (ODR).
To request review removal, open a new support case in Amazon Seller Central. Select Account Settings > Orders > Customer feedback problems. Send a message explaining why you think the review should be removed. Provide some details but keep it concise.
2. Contacting a Customer to Remove Reviews
Customers themselves can also remove negative reviews retrospectively. However, you need to follow Amazon’s policies when requesting customers to remove a negative review. This means you cannot offer them a full refund in exchange for removing the feedback. Doing so will put you at the risk of account suspension.
You can contact the customer and try to resolve the issue they faced. For instance, if an order arrived late, you can say sorry and offer a partial refund or a full refund for shipping costs only. If a user responds to your message, you can respectfully ask them to remove their negative review. Keep in mind that you cannot connect the refund to the review removal.
In any case, never pressure consumers into removing product reviews. As mentioned earlier, manipulating reviews, harassing the customer, and quid-pro-quo agreements all violate Amazon’s rules.
Here’s another important thing that you should know: Customers have 90 days from their purchase date to leave a review. However, once posted, reviews must be removed by Amazon or the customer within 60 days of the posting date. After 60 days, reviews can no longer be removed.
How to Prevent Negative Product Reviews
Believe it or not, consumers don’t really want to leave negative feedback. They want excellent service, a quality product, and reliable delivery. So when they give negative comments, the most common complaints are about poor service (52%), product issues (31.4%), and company policies (16.6%).
How can you avoid negative reviews? Here are some tips to help you.
· Provide better, more realistic product descriptions and images in your listings.
· Make sure you deliver your products on time and respond to consumers in a timely fashion.
· Never exaggerate or overpromise, especially when deciding on the condition of a product.
· Always be open to apologizing even if the problem is not a shortcoming or mistake on your part.
· Be transparent about your company policies. Remember authenticity and transparency go a long way when it comes to customer relations.
Get the Most Out of Your Amazon Product Reviews
Negative reviews aren’t the end of the world but having just a few negative comments removed can really help to give your feedback rating and sales a boost. However, this is only possible if you take the right route and avoid violating Amazon’s policies.
We hope that all these tips and Shulex’s powerful features will help you steer clear of bad feedback so that you can focus on growing and scaling your Amazon business. Good luck!