Have you ever heard the phrase, “Live by the sword, die by the sword?” As a seller on Amazon, customer reviews can be your best friends or worst enemies. According to Qualtrics data, 93% of consumers agree that reading online reviews influences their buying decisions. If your product pages on Amazon have poor reviews, you can bet they will adversely affect your sales. Read on as the experts from Click Fluency discuss how to handle negative reviews on Amazon.
How Does a Bad Amazon Review Impact Your Business?
As a seller on Amazon, you already face numerous challenges and obstacles to success. Trying to navigate the world’s largest eCommerce platform and stand out from the crowd in an increasingly competitive and oversaturated marketplace is no small feat. The most prominent factors influencing your success include product quality, description accuracy, customer service, and how to incorporate best practices for Amazon listings.
However, even if your business meets or exceeds those qualities, it’s impossible to please everyone. Inevitably, some customers will be unhappy or have a poor buying experience, even if it’s through no fault of your own. These dissatisfied buyers usually leave one- or two-star reviews on your product pages and a small paragraph detailing the issues they experienced.
While having a bad review here and there on your Amazon page may not sound like a big deal, trust us when we say it matters more than you may realize. It impacts your business in several ways:
- Dissuades potential customers from purchasing your product
- Increases your brand’s order defect rate (ODRs over 1% result in account deactivation)
- Lowers your product visibility on Amazon’s platform
- Harms your brand’s reputation, trust, and credibility
- Limits your growth as a business
- Negatively influences loyal customers
- Cuts into your conversions, sales, and profits
- Increases the chance of losing your “Buy Box”
So, what should you do when you see a dismissive review from an unhappy customer? We’ll explain how to handle negative reviews on Amazon and why taking a proactive approach is your best bet.
Mastering the Art of Damage Control From Bad Reviews: 4 Tips To Help You Proactively Manage Your Reputation
Let’s get right down to it. As industry experts in advertising and Amazon eCommerce, we know all the best tips and advice for sellers trying to solidify their place on the gigantic platform. Read on as we give you four of our most important tips for reputation management and limiting the damage to your business after receiving poor reviews on Amazon.
1. Monitor Negative and Positive Reviews From Customers Regularly via Seller Central
How can you limit the fallout from negative Amazon reviews if you’re not putting in the time and effort to monitor your product pages? Tracking positive and negative reviews is a critical task for sellers. Plus, by keeping current with consumer feedback, you gain valuable insights regarding your business and can identify problems quickly, allowing you to fix them before they cause even more damage.
To monitor customer reviews, you can use a third-party review tracking tool or visit the “Customer Reviews” page on Seller Central. Then, when you receive poor feedback, you can offer the unhappy customer either support or compensation for their negative experience.
Here’s how you can get started:
- Navigate to Seller Central, then click the “Brands” tab to access the “Customer Reviews” page.
- Select a filter (i.e., star rating, time period, brands) to quickly categorize and browse the reviews.
- Verified reviews from real, legitimate customers will show the “Contact Buyer” button.
- Communicate with the dissatisfied customer to learn more details and information regarding their purchasing experience and why they left the review. Alternatively, you can offer them a courtesy refund.
- Amazon will send an automated email to the customer asking for their permission to communicate with you.
- Click on the “Customer Messages” page in the Seller Central dashboard to view and reply to messages.
2. Investigate Negative Reviews To Verify Their Authenticity
The world wide web is full of trolls and business competitors who are all too willing to leave false negative reviews on your product pages. Whether they do it for fun, to hurt your sales, or because they simply have nothing better to do, almost every Amazon seller has to deal with unverified bad reviews.
If you discover fake or illegitimate reviews on a product listing, you should immediately report the problem to Amazon. Company representatives will remedy the situation by removing the feedback.
3. Leave a Public Reply With a Genuine and Professional Tone
One of the best ways to control the damage from a bad Amazon review is by publicly addressing the customer’s concern. Ideally, you should do this for every unhappy customer who leaves negative feedback.
No matter what, remain professional and polite, even if the customer is rude. For example, you could say, “I’m sorry to hear you had a poor experience. We value your business and would like to offer [discount code, refund, etc.] to make it right.”
4. Contact Amazon and Request a Removal
As a seller, you can contact Amazon and ask them to remove a negative review from your product page. As per Amazon’s community guidelines, the company will remove the bad review if it meets the following standards:
- Promotes a competing product
- Lacks an explanation for the poor review
- Contains foul language
If it qualifies, you can flag the review and request removal from Amazon by clicking the “Report Abuse” button and explaining why it fits the criteria.
Let the Experts at Click Fluency Drive Growth and Success for Your Amazon Store
Are you interested in learning more about handling negative reviews on Amazon and developing effective marketing strategies? If so, we invite you to read our tips on increasing your Amazon listing traffic on the Click Fluency blog. Or, you can reach out to our team in person by scheduling a call via our convenient contact form, and we’ll be in touch shortly.
We look forward to hearing from you!