Amazon uses buyer feedback, the star rating Amazon customers give to a seller based solely on their order fulfillment experience, as part of its formula to determine your buy box eligibility. You need to manage your seller feedback rating closely to ensure consistently strong sales.
In Amazon’s competitive environment, sellers need to be sure they are optimized to Amazon’s standards. Sellers can do everything right, by having the lowest price, free or Prime shipping, and still not win the buy box for a product due to a low seller feedback rating.
It’s important to remember, though, that your buyer feedback rating should not reflect any aspect of customers’ satisfaction with the product you’re selling. Buyer feedback is based on the shipping speed, if the order arrived undamaged, and any customer service the seller may have provided. Sellers earn this over time and it is displayed on their seller profile as an average feedback rating over the last 30 days, 90 days, 12 months, and lifetime of selling on Amazon.
To optimize your seller feedback rating, follow these three steps:
- Shipping: Be sure that your packaging and shipping processes meet customer expectations. No one wants to place an order, only to receive a damaged product with destroyed packaging. Make certain that everything ships quickly, safely, and to the intended customer.
- Customer Service: Provide the level of customer service you’d expect if you encountered a problem with your order. Customers usually reach out to the seller when their order is late, arrived damaged, or needs to be returned. Work to find a reasonable resolution for your customer’s issue. However, there will always be some you can’t please, so don’t compromise your business practices just to avoid one instance of poor feedback.
- Ask for Feedback: Amazon’s Terms of Service allow sellers to contact a customer and request feedback on their order fulfillment or customer service experience. You cannot, however, guide that feedback, such as by asking them to leave feedback if they had a great experience, and to contact customer service if they did not. Amazon views that as leading customers to only leave positive feedback and will take steps to curb this messaging – for example, but limiting or suspending messaging rights – if a seller is caught.
Unfortunately, if a customer already left poor seller feedback there’s not much you can do about it. Amazon typically will not remove buyer feedback even is cases where the feedback seems unwarranted, or even when the issue has been resolved.
Amazon’s policy states that it will only remove feedback if profane language is used, the seller’s personally identifiable information is listed, or the entirety of the feedback is a product review rather than a seller review.
Amazon customers often don’t understand the request for feedback and use it to review a product. If this happens, or any other buyer feedback policies have been violated, a seller can submit a request to remove the review in the Feedback Manager in Seller Central. If Amazon finds that its policies were violated, it may choose to remove the feedback entirely.
Another time you’d want to refute feedback is if the order was Fulfilled by Amazon. Usually, Amazon is pretty good about flagging these, but every now and then one will slip through. If a customer provides negative feedback about late shipments or damage to an order, Amazon will claim responsibility for the experience and remove the feedback’s rate from your overall feedback average.
All feedback issues must be submitted through the Feedback Manager within 90 days of receiving the feedback. In the past, cases could be opened to address feedback issues, but Amazon now requires sellers to use the semi-automated feedback manager portal. In fact, attempting to request removal in other ways can lead to account deactivation, as shown below:
“Contacting our Support teams through ‘Contact Us’, or any other methods to request for feedback removal, other than the Feedback Manager, may lead to account deactivation.”
