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Bad reviews – the bane of every Amazon seller’s existence. Unavoidable, damaging, and sometimes malicious in nature, negative reviews can have more of an impact on your downturn than you think. Unless you’re an already established Amazon seller with a few hundred reviews, receiving 1-3 stars can cripple your business.
Too many negative reviews leads to customers feeling less confident in your product coupled with a sharp decline in sales. According to a recent survey, star ratings rank as the most important review factor, followed by legitimacy, recency, sentiment, and quality. If you’re a small-time Amazon seller, knowing how to prevent and remove bad reviews can significantly increase your chances of success.
And that’s exactly what we plan on sharing with our readers today – how to remove bad reviews on Amazon in 2022.
Does it sound like a plan? Let’s get to it! 😎
A bad review is, well, bad—it’s not rocket science. However, on an eCommerce platform like Amazon, the consequences of an average 1 to 3.5-star product rating go far beyond your brand image. It also puts your relationship with Amazon at risk, which does not take lightly to underperforming sellers. Failing to adapt to the situation could lead to a suspension of seller privileges or worse, your seller central account.
Earning more buyer trust is directly proportional to an increase in positive reviews. Not only that, but it’s also how Amazon establishes its most trustworthy and reliable sellers within a particular niche and rewards them accordingly through a Buy Box.
Whoever wins the Buy Box has their product marketed to customers over other sellers with the same or similar products. Amazon takes into account a few factors when deciding who to give the Buy Box to, including the product price, fulfillment method, and most importantly, average seller rating.
All in all, gaining extra visibility and traction depends a lot on having plenty of positive reviews!
The Order Defect Rate (ODR) is one metric used to determine seller performance and according to Amazon, “a key measure of your ability to provide a good customer experience”. An order is deemed to be defective if it results in a credit chargeback claim, an A-Z Guarantee claim that is not dealt with, or negative feedback.
Amazon requests sellers to maintain their ODR below 1% or risk account deactivation.
What’s better than successfully removing a negative review from your product listing? Not receiving one to begin with! Of course, negative feedback is inevitable. But if you can limit the inflow of 1-3 star reviews, it will make life a hell of a lot easier. Here are a few time-tested techniques which—if implemented correctly—can give customers little to complain about:
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of offering a high-quality product that exceeds buyers’ expectations. Too often do sellers focus on enhancing brand image through the use of premium EBC content and product listing features—which is perfectly fine. However, if the perceived product quality doesn’t match with the product itself, customers are sure to share their experiences via bad reviews.
Case in point: Resources spent on manufacturing quality products mitigates the risk of negative reviews.
Other preventive measures include creating accurate product details to not mislead buyers. Making bold claims or listing product features that don’t exist is a sure-shot way of angering customers.
Also, if you have opted for self-fulfillment, extra attention needs to be given to the seller performance. This includes factors such as packaging, customer service, and delivery timing, all of which affect your account health.
Over time, Amazon has restricted the number of ways sellers can get bad reviews removed. Since it’s no longer possible to reply to negative reviews, sellers have no choice but to contact Amazon directly in hopes of securing a removal. But that’s easier said than done.
For a bad review to be removed by Amazon, it must violate one of its many community guideline policies. Mass-reporting bad reviews on baseless grounds will ruin your reputation with Amazon and make it harder for them to take your complaints seriously.
The good news is that review guidelines don’t just exist for sellers. Amazon makes it a point to ensure that both buyers and sellers are protected from any sort of harassment, intimidation, or the use of underhanded tactics. The following are all valid grounds for review removal.
For FBA sellers, if a bad review is related to the product shipping, condition, or delivery, it can be easily removed as all of these are Amazon’s responsibilities.
Note: Getting rid of a bad review also eliminates its negative impact on your overall product rating.
If a review matches one of the above-mentioned policy violations, then getting it removed is a straightforward task. There are two ways you can go about removing a negative review, and both involve escalating the issue to Amazon. The simpler method involves clicking on the “Report abuse” option found beneath every review.
If you’ve had little success when using the “Report abuse” option, you can get in touch with Amazon’s customer support via email and explain the problem. It pays to remain up-to-date with the review and community guidelines. It allows sellers to effectively get their point across by underlining how the buyer has violated certain policies and deserves to have the review removed.
Also, we suggest including important details like the product ASIN, the reviewer’s name, the date and time at which the review was posted, and a link to the review itself.
And once again, don’t even try to overuse this option to bulk report every bad review you’ve ever received. Sometimes, as hard as it is to believe, a bad review can be a blessing in disguise which conveniently brings us to the next segment of this blog.
It’s hard to believe that there’s a positive side to receiving negative reviews on Amazon. Yet, despite the level of effort that goes into crafting the perfect product, there is always room for improvement. It’s up to you whether you let a bad review demotivate you or take it as constructive criticism.
Of course, we all know those people, the ones that comment just to let their anger out without offering meaningful feedback. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from treating negative reviews as an opportunity to improve upon your offerings by making a few amendments here and there.
That said, taking the positive out of a bad review still seems to be a bit of a paradox. As a seller, you’re interested in knowing how you can improve your product, but at the same time, you aren’t too keen on receiving feedback that hurts your standing with Amazon. But what if we told you there is a tool out there that lets you address both problems simultaneously?
Enter ZonGuru—a holistic FBA seller toolkit capable of resolving review-related issues for the modern FBA seller. Out of the 16 available features, the two most worthy of mentioning here are:
The Love-Hate product research tool does more than just identify ideal product niches. It analyzes thousands of reviews from top sellers and commonly used phrases from 1-5 star reviews. It then displays the information in a word cloud, letting sellers know why buyers are leaving behind negative reviews as well as the product features they admire and appreciate.
In a way, the Love-Hate tool tells sellers preemptively of specific product flaws that would incur negative reviews and allows them to resolve such issues well before their listings become active!
With the negatives out of the way, let’s move onto perhaps the best-kept secret FBA tool/feature available to sellers right now: the Review Automator.
The Review Automator is the latest exciting feature to ZonGuru’s seller toolkit. This tool sends requests for reviews to customers. The messages are standardized and asks for both product reviews and seller feedback only after the customer has received the product. So, around 5-30 days after the order delivery date.
All it takes is the switch of a button, and that’s it. From that point on, the Review Automator will send review requests for eligible orders placed 30-40 days prior to activation.
Here’s a rundown of the Review Automator:
The tool is functional across Amazon US, EU, and AU marketplaces. Review requests are sent via Amazon’s official review request system making it the safest method of requesting reviews on Amazon. Sellers can also keep tabs on the number of review requests sent and received, purchase dates, order IDs, and the order and request status.
Note: Add your products to ZonGuru’s Product Pulse tool to track the number of reviews received over time.
Let’s cap off our blog by answering a few commonly asked questions related to bad reviews on Amazon.
The only way to get a negative review removed is by contacting Amazon. And quite frankly, the firm will only think about taking action if the review in question breaches one of its communication guidelines. Contact Amazon through your Seller Central account and let them know of the review along with Order ID, reviewer name/pseudonym, the date and time of posting, and a link to the review.
It’s not possible to ask a customer to remove a negative review anymore. The best you can do is to get in touch with Amazon’s customer support team and ask them to remove a review provided it violates one of Amazon’s communication guidelines. Even if you can somehow contract the buyer directly, we would advise not to ask them to remove negative reviews as this can land you in some serious trouble.
There are two cases in which Amazon will remove negative feedback:
In both of these cases, get in touch with Amazon and they will be quick to take action.
No, unfortunately, you can’t respond to bad Amazon Reviews. Amazon recently announced a new change in its Buyer-Seller communication policy whereby sellers can no longer respond to negative reviews.
With Amazon’s communication policy only getting tighter, the Review Automator tool will prove invaluable to keeping those negative reviews at bay..
Based on the amount of effort it takes to remove bad reviews on Amazon, prevention is definitely better than cure. However, this is easier said than done. Stay on top of key insights at every stage of FBA selling starting from the product idea generation right up to post-launch performance monitoring. With this in mind, ZonGuru’s toolkit should be your most powerful ally.
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