Negative reviews on Amazon can be a considerable source of stress for sellers. Not only are they hard to respond to or delete, but their presence on product listings causes shoppers to shy away from buying, heavily affecting sales and brand reputation.
Therefore, it’s critical to grasp the process and actions you can take to reply, delete, and avoid these reviews from occurring in the future.
Through the guidelines in this post that teach you to pay careful attention to detail, execute in-house strategies, and seek the help of professionals who remove negative reviews, you’ll soon learn that bad reviews on Amazon don’t have to mean disaster for your business.
Table Of Contents
What Are Negative Reviews On Amazon
Negative reviews on Amazon are customer feedback expressing dissatisfaction over your products or seller services. They are in the form of comments, one-star or two-star ratings, or both.
Negative reviews can further be categorized as constructive criticism, unfair complaints (usually fall under non-compliant reviews), and fake reviews.
Constructive Criticisms
Constructive criticisms are considered honest reviews of your customers without violating Amazon’s community guidelines. While still painful to receive, they are the ones that provide insights into your customers’ buying experience, helping you determine what areas of your business need improvement.
Among the types of bad reviews, these are the ones that Amazon can’t remove. Your chances of removing them lie in the hands of your customers when you’ve dealt with their complaints, as they are the authors of the reviews.
Pro Tip: Even if you’ve been successful in dealing with a negative review, never ask your customer to edit or delete their negative review. It is prohibited under Amazon’s ToS.
Unfair Complaints
Unfair complaints are reviews that are damaging to your brand. They are mostly derogatory and take out the focus from the shoppers’ true insights about your products or service. Hence, Amazon considers them non-compliant reviews because of the community guidelines violations.
To describe, these reviews would include:
- foul language and profanity
- personal attack and harassment
- bogus allegations
- hate speech
- personal data
- promotional links to competitor listings
And more.
Fake Reviews
Fake reviews are another type of negative reviews that harm your brand. But unlike unfair complaints written by customers, fake reviews are the workings of bad sellers who are your competitors and people behind sock puppet accounts.
Fake reviews are widespread on Amazon; about 42% of reviews on the platform are. It affects honest sellers by pulling down their overall seller rating, affecting their listings’ organic visibility and, eventually, their click-through rates.
Fake reviews are characterized by:
- templated content that doesn’t have any context
- using unnecessary characters on the content
- generic tone
- content written in broken English
- overly positive or overly negative content
Key Takeaway: Negative Amazon ratings can affect all marketplace users, so recognizing the three fundamental kinds – constructive feedback, unjust grievances, and phony reviews – is essential. Fake reviews are especially tricky as they often appear authentic at first glance; however, there are sure signs that should alert you to take action against them immediately.
How Negative Review Impacts Your Amazon Business
Negative reviews can cause grave damage to your business. Its impact depends mainly on how often they show up on your listings relative to the positive reviews, and how badly customers describe your product or service.
But as a seller, you should pay attention even to just one negative review because it can significantly affect your listing algorithm, pulling it down from search results and losing visibility. However, even as shoppers find your products, it won’t be long before they bounce off the page and buy from your competitor.
It doesn’t stop there; the impact could spiral down, eventually affecting your seller reputation on Amazon and losing privileges if you don’t improve the health of your account.
Amazon could reprimand you in any (or all) of these ways:
- They can suspend your listings.
- They may withhold any cash receivables owed to you.
- Because of a high Order Defect Rate (above 1%), you lose eligibility for the Buy Box.
- They would terminate your account and not allow you to sell again on the platform.
Additionally, offsetting the effect of just one critical review might be even harder for you. For your listings to regain traction and undo the damage of a negative review, on average, you would at least need five positive reviews. It sounds like a lot of work unless you offer a product that merits instantaneous positive reviews.
How To Respond To Negative Reviews
To help you act quickly when bad reviews show up on your listings, use review management tools. They have features that alerts you when you receive new reviews, enabling you to contact the customer directly and report a review to Amazon.
But even without these savvy tools, you can still manually respond to bad reviews. However, there is a corresponding approach to dealing with a negative review depending on what type it is.
Tackling Constructive Reviews
The honest negative reviews are best dealt directly with a customer, either by commenting on their review or if you’re brand-registered, you can utilize the seller-buyer messaging service.
During this touchpoint, avoid being defensive; your only goal is to acknowledge the customer complaints and apologize. If the small investment is worth gaining back your customer’s loyalty, then offer a full refund.
This gesture shows them your sincerity in providing customer satisfaction. And if everything goes well, they could even edit or delete their negative reviews without you asking for it.
Reportng Non-compliant and Fake Reviews
If you’re certain that a review is fake or violates Amazon’s community guidelines, then report it immediately and file a case for its removal. You can watch out for the violations for both product reviews and seller feedback and then take the necessary steps to report them to Amazon.
Help make Amazon act quickly and make an educated decision by providing them with additional data that supports your claim.Â
Get Help From a Negative Review Removal Professionals
Frankly, it is hard to remove a negative review. Amazon takes time to study the cases filed on them, aside from working in the background to monitor negative reviews so they can delete them once spotted. It is pretty much a bandwidth issue.
It’s no wonder thousands of sellers have reported only a 1% success rate in requesting Amazon for a review removal. They do not have the time and resources to go back and forth with their cases, so they surrender with helplessness as the critical reviews remain on their listings.
Yet, this doesn’t have to be your situation anymore. Commissioning tech-enabled negative review removal professionals is your best bet in removing critical reviews for good.Â
They completely take out the burden of review management from your hands. Using their proprietary, time-tested methodology, they scour your ASINs and look for critical reviews with a high probability of removal. They also file the cases on Amazon on your behalf with the ability to escalate them until the reviews are removed.
With a partner like this, you can proceed with your business operation confidently, knowing that your listing cleanup is in the hands of professionals with years of experience in this complex job.
Tips For Preventing Negative Reviews
The best way to prevent negative reviews is to make your Amazon business customer-centric. Focus on their needs, the solutions they seek, and the buying experience they expect.
Offer high-quality products that can sell themselves, and when shoppers buy, they can’t wait but rave about them. That’s why it is also crucial to take advantage of the insights your customers share in their reviews; they serve as your best guide on where and how to improve your business.
Start with a clear and accurate product description that lets your buyers know everything they need to know about the product, avoiding unnecessary inquiries. Also, include all the disclaimers and money-back guarantees to set their expectations.
When it comes to your service, be responsive and patient with their inquiries. Avoid using templated responses that aren’t helpful to the inquiries and only cause your shoppers to bounce off your listing.
Excellent service also extends to your order fulfillment. Have a systematic process for quality control, order dispatch, and timely delivery as these are all parts of the customer’s buying experience. When shoppers complain, quickly deal with them to solve the matter and show your commitment to customer satisfaction.Â
Key Takeaway:Â It is more costly for sellers to use their resources to deal with and remove negative reviews than to build a solid business process to enhance customer experience, thereby preventing their occurrence.
FAQs: Overcoming Negative Reviews On Amazon
Does Amazon Suppress Bad Reviews?
Amazon doesn’t suppress all bad reviews, but is stringent only on the ones that violate their community guidelines. When a buyer writes a review and it contains prohibited languages and other markers that indicate its non-compliance, then Amazon will delete it before it gets posted.
Why Does Amazon Put Negative Reviews At The Top?
Amazon has a system that determines which among the reviews you received will be helpful to prospective shoppers. They base the decision to place a review at the top based on how recent the review is, its relevance to the product, and how many negative (or positive) reviews you got.
Are Amazon Negative Reviews Real?
Sadly, fake reviews are now widespread on Amazon. This is concerning because buyers become easy prey of scam sellers offering products with poor standards. Likewise, the proliferation of fake reviews taints the brand of Amazon as a safe marketplace to shop and do business.
But the good news is that Amazon is adapting AI to scan fake reviews and are doing initiatives to crack down peddlers of fake reviews for the safety of all its users.
In Summary
Overcoming negative reviews on Amazon is not as challenging as one may think, especially when you have the right review management systems in place. Keep in mind that avoidance of negative reviews starts by being customer-centric.
Providing the best buying experience is a surefire way to gain praise and word-of-mouth advertising, and far less costly than the resources you would use to remove a negative review.
Looking for experts to manage the most complex aspects of selling on Amazon?
Contact TraceFuse today
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