Product reviews are critical for Amazon sellers. Especially if you sell a similar product to a competitor, having more reviews, and more positive reviews than the competitor’s listing can be what gets the customer to buy from you — and not the competition.
But what happens when your reviews disappear?
Well, this happened to a lot of sellers in the Cell Phone and Cell Phone Accessories categories in the past. And just recently, we’ve seen many other categories get hit, too. According to Viral Launch, over 300,000 reviews were removed in one month from products in these two categories (cell phones & accessories) on the .com marketplace between May 1st and 31st.
The other categories that took a big hit in May included Home Improvement, Gourmet Food, & Health and Household.
Why is this happening?
The reason is obvious. Amazon wants to crack down on illegitimate, “incentivized” reviews.
What’s an incentivized review?
“Incentivizing” a review means that the seller is persuading the buyer to leave a product review with more than just a kindly written email asking for feedback. Often, buyers will get refunded for the product’s price after leaving a review. Or they’ll get an Amazon gift card to purchase the product and leave a review.
Of course, these are usually poorly written, 5-star reviews that are clearly fake.
It’s misleading to Amazon customers and an unfair advantage over sellers who play by Amazon’s rules laid out in their policies and guidelines.
First the Purge, Then the Limit
But what if you follow all the rules to a tee and still notice that you’re not getting as many reviews as before? Well, that’s because Amazon has put yet another limit in place: how many reviews you can get in one day.
When the first big crack down on reviews happened about a year ago, Amazon made the rule that reviewers had to have purchased at least $50 on their account in order to qualify to leave a product review.
If they had spent less than $50 during their Amazon account lifetime, then they would not be able to leave a product review.
But now, Amazon has added another limitation to review gathering.
Amazon Caps the Number of Daily Reviews A Product Can Receive
Amazon is putting a limit on how many verified product reviews a single product can have in a day, according to some sources.
They already limited unverified reviews to 5 per week.
If you blow past that daily limit, your customers will receive a message from Amazon that states their review cannot be accepted.
In these busy times we live in today, it’s highly unlikely that a customer would come back the next day to leave a review. They’d have to really feel passionately about your product – either loving it or hating it.
Amazon’s Daily Product Review Limit is NOT Based on Percentage of Sales
It doesn’t matter if you sell dozens or thousands of products in one day. There’s a hard, static number on how many verified product reviews you can get each day.
If you’re selling a couple thousand units per day, receiving 5-10 unverified reviews isn’t out of the ordinary. Especially if you’re also selling on ebay, your own Shopify store or in brick and mortar retail stores.
Amazon doesn’t care, and the product will be placed under a review block for having a few too many unverified reviews.
Or, those reviews will just be deleted altogether in typical Amazon style, that is, without warning.
Step Up Your Amazon Product Review Game
Having honest, unbiased reviews is important for buyers to make good purchasing decisions.
The difficult part with Amazon’s latest changes to review policy, though, is that your play-by-the-rules strategies might still get your product reviews caught in Amazon’s snares.
You might be using a killer feedback software like Kibly, with copy that undeniably converts higher than most. Or maybe your product is in a hobby niche where customers tend to be very vocal about their opinions.
The safest strategy is the “slow and steady” approach to gather Amazon product reviews steadily over time, and never stop sending out those review request emails!
Additionally, consider focusing your efforts on improving your product offering with some of the features Amazon has made available such as Enhanced Brand Content Feature.
