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Do you know that customers are likely to spend over 30% more on businesses that garner great customer reviews?
Then, one survey says that almost one in five online shoppers consider product reviews they read online as trustworthy as personal recommendations.
Many similar stats underline the same thing i.e. customer reviews matter and lie at the center of the success of e-commerce ventures. The same goes for when you sell on Amazon.
93% of Amazon customers factor in customer reviews while checking out a product. Moreover, one in four customers only trusts reviews coming from verified purchases.
Therefore, as an Amazon seller, your priority should be to get as many verified purchase reviews as possible.
What actually is an Amazon verified purchase review, why such reviews are important, and how not to get them— you will find answers to all these questions in this post.
If you go through the review section of any listing (product page), you will find some reviews with a “Verified Purchase” badge/label beneath the date the customer has left that review.
Amazon essentially vouches for the authenticity of any customer review with this badge. In other words, Amazon conveys to other customers that they can trust a particular review without any apprehension. It suggests that the customer has left this review without any bias and hasn’t been influenced and swayed by the seller in any way.
As discussed in the introduction, customer reviews play a vital role in driving up/down the sales for any online business. Due to the extraordinary importance of online reviews, businesses and sellers try to get favorable reviews by any means.
Unfortunately, this pursuit of garnering positive customer reviews has also paved the way for unethical practices. For instance, many businesses/sellers offer outrageous discounts to get favorable reviews from customers. This practice is nothing short of buying reviews.
Moreover, many businesses/sellers use different applications and third-party services to get fake reviews for their services and products. Businesses and brands practicing these unprincipled methods have dented the customers’ trust in online reviews.
In this context, Amazon wants to ensure that there should be no foul play regarding customer reviews on its platform. The e-commerce giant wants its consumers to skim through the review section and make their minds up without hesitation and doubt.
So, how and what makes a customer review on an Amazon product page a verified purchase review? These are certain conditions that sellers and buyers need to fulfill to make any review a verified purchase review.
A customer can buy the identical product from anywhere else and then leave a review on its Amazon listing. However, such a review won’t get the verified purchase badge. Amazon only gives a review this tag if the reviewer has bought the product through its platform.
Many businesses use deep discounts to incentivize customers and get favorable reviews from them. Amazon wants to dissuade this practice and therefore doesn’t assign a verified purchase badge to all those reviews where the reviewer has gotten the product at a very steep discount.
Amazon hasn’t mentioned what percentage it considers "deep discount." However, seasoned sellers believe that Amazon doesn’t verify a review if it has come from a sale that has a discount of more than 20%.
Let's say a customer buys a product on Amazon without any deep discount and leaves an honest review on the relevant product page. However, suppose the customer has left the review by writing it directly on the product page instead of following the link from the customer order page from their buyer account. In that case, it won't be featured as a verified purchase review.
Taking care of this particular requirement is essential because that’s how Amazon verifies the purchase and the price/discount at which the reviewer has bought the given product.
In the review section of any product page, you will see reviews with or without verified purchase badges. In other words, all the reviews without that badge are those where Amazon couldn’t verify the product purchase by the reviewer. It is important to mention here that not having the verified purchase tag doesn't mean a review is fake or paid.
You can find many honest and authentic reviews with full details and pictures sharing the experience of using a product without a verified badge. Therefore, Amazon considers those reviews “valuable” as well even if they are not marked as verified purchases.
Amazon doesn’t provide a review the verified badge if:
This snapshot can give you a better sense of Amazon verified vs. unverified purchase reviews.
Verified Purchase Review
Unverified Purchase Review
Going by the above discussion, it is pretty clear that you have to tread very carefully in getting verified purchase reviews. If you don’t adhere to Amazon’s selling policies and seller code of conduct to get customer reviews, you can get temporarily or permanently banned from selling on the platform.
The good news is you can get verified purchase reviews without violating any Amazon command.
Let’s see how you can get more verified purchase reviews on your listing while playing fair and square.
First, you can use a “Request a Review” feature that Amazon provides you in your Seller Central account. Even though Amazon asks for customer reviews on your behalf, you can use this feature as a reminder if a customer hasn’t left a review and you keenly want it on a particular order.
Amazon doesn’t encourage sellers to use buyer-seller messaging or emails to ask for reviews. However, if you are confident enough about your product and positive customer experience, you can use those channels to ask customers for a review.
Whenever writing a request message to ask for reviews, make sure your language aligns with Amazon's terms and services for sellers. In other words, you can't ask customers to only talk about good things about your product. Instead, always ask for an honest review and underline how those genuine reviews help you learn and improve your products.
There is little motivation for customers to leave a review on a product, particularly when they don’t have any complaints. So to all those customers, you must reach out while emphasizing how leaving a review won’t take more than a couple of minutes.
While emphasizing the swiftness of it, make it easy for them to leave a review. For example, share the link in your message or guide customers on how they can do that from their customer order page.
Last but not least, consistently deliver in line with customers' expectations. If you succeed in delivering what you've promised customers, positive verified reviews will eventually pour in.
There are certain ways that Amazon deems illegal to get reviews from customers.
Telling customers that they can earn coupons and discounts on future orders for leaving a 5-star review is illegitimate, as per Amazon's playbook.
Asking customers for only positive reviews (praises) is also against Amazon guidelines. Similarly, you can’t press a customer to change or remove their reviews on your listings.
If you ask friends or family or 'hire' people to buy your products and leave positive reviews, it won’t be considered fair play. Such reviews are also against the spirit of the game and don’t promote a level playing field.
Nonetheless, many sellers use this scheme to garner positive word of mouth for their products since Amazon can’t identify and single out such reviews. For the record, we don’t condone such black hat tactics to get positive reviews at all.
By now, it is quite clear that all customer reviews on Amazon are not equal. The ones with verified purchases matter more than the regular reviews. Why is that so? Let’s find out.
Like any other digital e-commerce platform, fake reviews are also running rampant on Amazon. Many sellers buy dozens of fake 5-star reviews to balance negative reviews or to give credence to their relatively new and untested products.
However, customers are now savvy enough to not just trust any customer review on product pages. Instead, most of them only pay attention to the ones that bear the verified badge. Therefore, among the two listings with similar products, the one with more verified purchase reviews will witness better click-through rates and conversions.
Reviews play an integral role in how Amazon algorithms rank a product for given keywords/queries. However, Amazon doesn’t treat all customer reviews equally. The helpfulness votes, the customer history, the age of the review, and especially its verified badge make one review more important than the other.
Therefore, a listing with more verified purchase reviews will stay ahead on Amazon search pages for the relevant keywords compared to a competing product with fewer verified reviews.
Many customers like to vet a seller before buying anything from them. They do that by looking at customer ratings of their products and verified purchase reviews. For that matter, a seller maintaining a good aggregate of verified purchase reviews on all their products will certainly appear more trustworthy and suitable to do business with.
Before we wrap up this article, let’s answer some more questions regarding Amazon verified purchase reviews.
Any buyer buying a product through Amazon without getting a humungous discount can leave a review that will eventually get a verified purchase tag from Amazon.
As far as product rankings are concerned, verified purchase reviews are always good. Nonetheless, a verified review can have positive and negative connotations.
There is only one path to get a positive/good verified purchase review i.e. deliver the customer a product in line with their expectations and remind them to leave a review on your product page.
Amazon verified purchase reviews have been playing a vital role in determining customer choices. On one hand, good reviews persuade customers to invest in a product. On the other, bad ones inform customers about the downsides of a product. On top of that, they also influence the ranking of a product on Amazon SERPs.
All in all, they are crucial for sales, and thus every seller should strive to accumulate as many verified purchase reviews on their products as possible.
Sellers can garner more verified reviews by sending requests to customers. However, manually submitting a request to every customer for every listing while ensuring the product has already been delivered and used by them can turn into an arduous chore. Therefore, many sellers entirely bypass that important post-sales task and subsequently get fewer reviews.
ZonGuru has crafted a solution for busy sellers so that they don't have to reach out to every customer manually—the Review Automator. This application sends a review request to every customer without needing your input.
Also, it factors in the “time” while sending those requests. For instance, the Automator only sends a review request to those customers who have received the order and haven’t lodged any complaint or requested a return. This diligence ensures that your review requests are only knocking on the doors of satisfied customers.
Furthermore, the request emails/applications are fully compliant with Amazon’s terms of services. This means you won’t be penalized for any of the request reviews sent through our automated system.
By deploying this reminder automation, you will certainly get more positive verified purchase reviews than the scenario where you don’t have that setup.
You can start the 7-day free trial of our Review Automator right now!
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