Reviews on Amazon are important, as they are generally very important in any online shopping scenario.

The fact that we can’t look at an item with our own eyes, or pick it up before we buy it, makes any bit of information from someone that had an actual experience with the product, very relevant. So, if you are looking to learn how to make money on Amazon, you can’t afford to not learn everything you can about how reviews work on the platform, and how to go about getting shoppers to leave reviews on your listing.

Before we get into that, you should know that Amazon takes reviews extremely seriously, and that there are strict rules that sellers must follow when it comes to asking their customers for reviews. The most important ones being:

• You can’t ask for a review and offer any sort of compensation in return, be it financial compensation or a discount.
• You can’t ask for a positive review; you can only ask for an honest one. Also, you can’t even suggest or lead customers to make it a positive one.
• You can’t ask your friends and/or family to leave a review, as Amazon apparently has a way of figuring this out.
• You can’t exchange reviews with other sellers, meaning that you can’t “strike a deal” with another seller to review each other’s items as mutual favors.

Amazon has made extraordinary efforts in order to make sure that the reviews people leave are genuine, since there were many shady ways of doing so in the past. There was an event in mid-2018 which many sellers call the “review apocalypse,” which resulted in the majority of Amazon’s top 10,000 reviewers being banned from the platform. Also, hundreds of thousands of unverified reviews were deleted overnight.

Unverified vs verified reviews

An unverified review is one that was left by a customer that made the purchase of the product under some kind of a discount or deal. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there were any shady dealings in the review being made. However, the unverified review won’t have the “verified purchase” tag, like we see below:

Since deals and coupons are very much a common, legitimate practice, it makes absolute sense that a customer making a purchase through a deal, would review it. However, in the interest of full transparency, Amazon has decided to put in a caveat to simply differentiate between the two.The unverified reviews add up to your total review count and overall rating. The only difference is that unverified reviews don’t positively affect your organic ranking and your seller score, as much as verified ones do.

Now that you understand the rules, let’s get into how you can go about asking customers for reviews, in a fully-legitimate way:

The Amazon early reviewer program

Amazon has its own program to help sellers get those first handful of reviews. How it works is that they will ask customers that have already purchased your item, to leave honest reviews in exchange for a $1-$3 Amazon gift card. The program costs $60, and Amazon guarantees that you will get 1 to 5 reviews. Amazon doesn’t charge you up front; they charge you after you get your first review, or after a whole year passes from enrolling in the program.

Keep in mind, Amazon doesn’t help you get more sales, they will merely contact the customers you get on your own, and only if they meet their reviewer criteria. This means that they have “no history of abusive or dishonest reviews.” You can find the Early Reviewer program under your Advertising tab. The interface is very straightforward, and it should take you a minute to apply if you have products that meet the criteria.

Asking for reviews yourself

There is a way to ask for reviews yourself using the Amazon seller central system. You can do this manually, or you can use some sort of automated email software. The way you can do this is by going through your orders and clicking on the customer name, and then clicking on “contact buyer,” and then selecting “other” from the menu:

Obviously, there are rules when it comes to this as well, apart from the general rules we’ve discussed before. You can’t put in any external links or e-mail addresses. You can leave Amazon links, like a link back to the product page to leave a review. Of course, it’s a huge hassle to do this manually, which is why many sellers tend to use automated email software. You can also attach a file to provide some additional value to your customers, and promote your brand a little bit.

There are numerous services like these, specifically made for customer communication on Amazon, through the seller central. These depend on how many markets you are selling on, as well as how many products you have, etc.

You can also set up these campaigns with several timed messages based around different timings like the order being shipped out, or being received etc. You have a lot of options to play around with, and you can experiment and split tests, depending on the software you use.

Let Amazon do it for you

Taking everything we’ve gone through so far- Amazon being so strict with their review policy, as well as restricting ways of contacting customers and closely monitoring it- it was only a matter of time before they did something to allow sellers a proper way to actually abide by the rules. So basically, Amazon said, “You know what, I’ll do this myself.” So now, you can simply have an email sent to each one of your customers, asking them to leave a review from your orders, by simply clicking on the new “request review button.”If you open any of your orders, you will be able to see this button in the very top right corner:

WIth just a few clicks, Amazon will send a very generic email to the customer asking for their review. This is actually pretty great. The main difference between an e-mail sent by you as a seller as opposed to Amazon, is that a customer can opt out of being contacted by a seller, which is something many customers do, but they can’t opt out of being contacted by Amazon. Also, it only takes a few clicks, and you get to actually ask for a review under the banner of Amazon’s legitimacy. The only issue is that you have to do this by hand, and it can only be done on orders that are between 5 and 30 days old.

In conclusion, Amazon has been taking reviews very seriously, and has cracked down on any form of illegitimate review-obtaining practices. Overall, this has led to a much more level playing field, and now new sellers have a chance of growing their sales without having to spend thousands of dollars on reviews and giveaways. Also, due to the crackdown, it’s much more common to see products with 0 reviews, and people are more accustomed to buying them. On top of that, Amazon has made it easy to ask for reviews through their system, without risking a breach of any of the rules. Basically, it’s now all up to you and how good your product is. Good luck sellers!