New and effective ways to directly communicate with customers often come up in our conversations with Amazon sellers. The most common reason why is because of the importance of Amazon reviews. Sellers are always looking for ways to gain reviews and for ways to work with a buyer who didn’t have a great experience (and, of course, to help get any poor reviews taken down).
Some communication with the buyer might also be needed to complete the order. Sometimes there needs to be clarity over a customized product or clarification needed with the shipping address. We will be diving into ways that sellers can reach out to buyers directly to request product reviews and seller feedback.
Requesting a Product Review
As most sellers on Amazon have learned, relying on automated messages from Amazon isn’t always enough to get buyers to add reviews. Unfortunately for sellers, a good portion of buyers don’t have an interest in leaving reviews even if they love the product. A lot of people need that extra nudge or reminder, and sellers need to commit to putting in the work to get those extra reviews.
Amazon recommends using their Request A Review tool (instead of the Buyer-Seller Messaging tool that we will cover later) if you want to send out a reminder about a certain order. This tool can be found on the Orders Details page and will ask for seller feedback in addition to a product review.
To clear up potential confusion, seller feedback is where any thoughts the buyer has about the shopping experience that isn’t directly related to the product can go. Product reviews are often mistaken by buyers as the place for all thoughts to go. As someone who still likes an old-fashioned DVD, I’ve seen many people post their long reviews about specific actors’ performances in the product review area on Amazon.
Buyer-Seller Messages
Suppose you need to communicate with a buyer about customer service issues or you need additional information from them to complete an order. In that case, the Buyer-Seller Messaging service is the tool that can help. You can get to this tool on the Manage Orders page under Orders by clicking the buyer’s name.
All communication with this tool is with encrypted emails to protect the privacy of buyers and sellers. The email address will be a 35-character alias. To give you an idea, the example that Amazon provides is [email protected]. I’ll reiterate that the purpose of this tool is to work with buyers to complete an order and/or work through customer service issues. This isn’t a tool to send out marketing information.
Suppose you need to send a critical message to get information to complete an order as soon as possible. In that case, you can enter “[Important]” in the subject line of the email after filling out the template, for example, “[Important] Need additional information.” That email will go through to the buyer even if they have blocked communication with sellers on Amazon. If you were to use this feature in a situation where information wasn’t needed to complete an order, Amazon could take down your account. If you want to allow buyers to message you, you can enable it in the Messaging section of Notification Preferences in the settings menu.
Amazon doesn’t always make it easy when it comes to communicating with buyers, and everyone who sells on Amazon knows the importance of reviews, especially early on. Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to get a few more reviews, and you can do that with the Request A Review tool. If you need to communicate with a client for customer service situations, especially if you need additional information to complete an order, then you should use Buyer-Seller Messages.
Sometimes it feels like everything is a little harder than it needs to be selling on Amazon, but you won’t regret that extra effort, especially if it improves the customer experience and gets you some extra positive reviews along the way.
