Episode 46: Amazon Policy Change for Reviews
Today we are talking about the new policy change from Amazon that impacts product reviews. Amazon announced that they will no longer accept reviews from people who have received the product for free or at a discount.
For many people who sell on Amazon, the “pay to play” type model was widely used. While we think it’s a good move for Amazon, we acknowledge that it will greatly impact sellers who use Amazon.
Today’s topics:
- Possible ways the new policy may or may not affect those who used incentivized reviews in the past
- How this change may impact our strategies
- Our plans and new product launch strategies going forward
- Ways we plan to get reviews under the new guidelines
- What this policy change means for white label sellers and those just getting started with Amazon
- How other policies have made doing business on Amazon more difficult
- The importance of finding other methods besides Amazon to get buyers to your website
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Resources:
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I read in various groups that Amazon are in the process of removing all previously obtained incentivized reviews! Having never used those services i am delighted as it creates a level playing field.
The next thing to figure out is if they are going to take a look at flash sales/blast services. They did say a while ago that they were cracking down on BSR manipulation. At the time i thought this meant the use of old fashioned Super URLs but in light of the review update, the whole use of coupons, blasts etc in trying to rank or maintain BSR comes under the spotlight.
I would be very interested in you take on this.
Great episode guys. Personally I would love to see Amazon remove the reviews that were left by those who were given deep discounts or free product. I think that would be a great next step. As an Amazon seller and someone who purchases a lot of items from Amazon I have become very jaded about the reviews and feel that they can not be trusted, which makes it difficult to make a buying decision. It is great that they are no longer allowing it and I hope the next step is to remove all reviews that were left by those who were given a discount.
yes great episode. We use a very simple strategy to launch products. Have an email list of loyal customers.(it is very easy to create a list of 500-1000 loyal customers) When you launch a new product that has a market value of $30 set the product price to $30 and the sale price to $10. Email your list saying that your product will be at $10 for the first 100 orders after this it will be back to $30. Follow up with your list a week or so later asking them to leave a review or contact you if they have any issues with the product. There is no way to cheat the system. It is very important to reward loyal customers. This rewards the customer and launches your new product without creating a culture of customers that expect your product fpr free or almost free.
I love this policy move by Amazon and have been bugging them forever to get rid of reviews in which the customer received the product free or at a highly discounted price. I don’t sell products on Amazon, but I do buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. My first two criteria for deciding whether or not I want to look at a product page is how many reviews it has and how many stars it has. The amount of time I’ve spent looking at products and starting to read reviews only to find out that every single review is from someone who got it for free and rated it 5 stars is crazy. I’ve emailed Amazon more times than I can count over the years asking them to get rid of pay to play reviews or at least have an option to hide them. At least they do now have a “see all verified purchase reviews” option which goes a good ways to allow me to get to the real reviews. I’ll bet you if I looked at 1,000 “received for free” reviews 998 of them would be 5 stars and the other 2 would be 4 stars. Let’s face it, people like to get free stuff. If they give honest reviews they’re afraid manufacturers won’t be interested in giving them more free stuff if they don’t give great reviews. Let’s face it, if a product is good then buyers will rate it good. If it’s bad then let the product die and have the manufacturer improve it. Giving fake good reviews will only perpetuate the life of a bad product.