Product reviews are essential to the shopping experience on Amazon, whether you’re a buyer or a seller. Sellers use reviews as social proof that their products are useful and worth buying, while buyers use reviews to understand the pros and cons of products so they can make informed purchase decisions.
Whichever side of the fence you’re on, you’re subject to Amazon’s product review guidelines to ensure that reviews are always trustworthy and reliable. By understanding these guidelines, you’ll have an easier time writing reviews that are relevant and helpful to the Amazon community.
Eligibility Requirements to Write Amazon Reviews
Amazon has a relatively lax requirement for review-writing eligibility. All customers who have spent a minimum of $50 on Amazon in the last 12 months can submit product reviews. As long as you meet that requirement, you can write reviews for any product on Amazon, even ones you didn’t buy on the site.
Verified vs Unverified Amazon Verified Reviews
However, not all reviews are written equally. If you write a review for something you bought on Amazon, that’s considered a verified review, which holds more weight since Amazon can confirm that you bought the product on its site. If you write a review for a product you haven’t bought on Amazon, that’s considered an unverified review, which doesn’t hold as much weight but can still provide useful insights.
You can write as many verified reviews as you want. However, you can only post up to five unverified reviews weekly.
How Amazon Identifies Good and Bad Reviews
Amazon filters reviews through three primary methods. The first method involves AI-assisted pattern analysis to identify keywords, unusual review frequency, repetitive text, and other manipulated review red flags.
Next, Amazon filters reviews by identifying its verified purchase badge. Simply being a verified review adds credibility because it signifies that the customer actually bought the product on Amazon.
Lastly, Amazon employs human moderators to examine reviews manually. If your Amazon review takes a long time to get posted, it may be because Amazon needs to assign human reviewers to ensure your review isn’t breaching any guidelines.
Amazon also examines a review’s helpfulness through its upvotes and downvotes. If the community considers the review helpful, it’s more likely to be credible, while reviews are less likely to be thought as credible if the community downvotes a review en masse.
What’s Not Allowed In Amazon Product Reviews?
To keep Amazon product reviews trustworthy and reliable, there are prohibited topics and content that shouldn’t be written in reviews. Let’s take a look at what you can’t include in Amazon reviews:
- Feedback about sellers, orders, or shipping: Feedback about anything other than the product should be included in seller feedback, not the product review itself.
- Comments about the product pricing or availability that don’t apply to everyone: It’s okay to comment about the product’s value, like saying, “This product is very good for a 20-dollar blender.” However, you can’t say something like, “This is $5 cheaper than in my local store,” because it’s based on individual experience and isn’t relevant for everyone.
- Reviews written in unsupported languages: On the American version of Amazon.com, only English and Spanish-language reviews are allowed.
- Profanity, harassment, and hateful language: Rude language, profanities, threats, harassment, and other hurtful language are strictly banned from Amazon product reviews.
- External links and promotional content: Amazon doesn’t allow people to place links to other sites and reviews written as promotional content.
- Bribed reviews: Reviews written with monetary compensation is considered a manipulated review, which isn’t allowed on Amazon.
If your review contains any of the above things, there’s a good chance that your review may not be approved by Amazon.
What You Can’t Do As a Seller
Amazon’s review guidelines ensure that submitted customer reviews are genuine and not manipulated. So, if you’re an Amazon seller, you need to follow rules to ensure customers submit reviews that accurately reflect their experiences with the product.
Here are some things that you can’t do as an Amazon seller in regards to customer product reviews:
- Asking close associates (friends, family, employees) to review your products.
- Offering financial rewards in exchange for a review.
- Explicitly asking for positive reviews from customers.
The above actions are examples of what can be considered review manipulation, and are prohibited by Amazon’s guidelines.
What Happens If You Violate Amazon Review Guidelines?
Generally, your review will be removed if you violate Amazon review guidelines. In some cases, your access to Amazon’s community features may also be limited, such as being banned from writing reviews.
If you’re a seller and you’re caught manipulating reviews or performing other acts that break review rules, Amazon may remove the relevant reviews or delist the related products. In harsher cases, you may also get your Amazon account banned.
Additionally, acts of review manipulation that violate state and federal laws can result in legal action and penalties, landing you in further hot water. With these consequences, manipulating reviews and violating guidelines are always more trouble than they’re worth.
Reporting Review Guideline Violations
While Amazon has an advanced review moderation system in place to catch review policy violations, some may still slip through the cracks. Amazon sellers can manually scan their reviews or use an Amazon review checker to see if any negative reviews are suspicious. If you find a review that you think violates the guidelines, you can click the “Report” link on the review.
Buyers, on the other hand, should be wary if somebody approaches you to write, edit, or delete a review with the promise of compensation. This also constitutes review manipulation, and you can report it through Amazon’s Report Review Compensation form.
Conclusion
Amazon has review guidelines in place to ensure reviews stay trustworthy and reliable for both sellers and buyers. Things such as irrelevant content, harmful language, and private information are banned in Amazon customer reviews, and including them may result in removal. Additionally, review manipulation is highly frowned upon, and sellers who do so may be subject to account suspensions, penalties, and even legal consequences.
As a seller, you want legitimate Amazon customer reviews, good or bad, to properly illustrate your product to potential customers. However, fake and abusive reviews may tarnish that image by making your products look bad. Fortunately, TraceFuse can report those abusive reviews for removal on your behalf. We can get them off of your product listings within days, so contact us today for more details!
