4 White-Hat Ways To Get More Reviews on Amazon in 2020
If you’re selling on Amazon, you’ll know that customer reviews are very important to helping you succeed.
More reviews gives other customers more reassurance in the product they’re thinking about buying… which leads to more sales.
More reviews also tells Amazon that your customers are happy with the product, and therefore, Amazon favors your product over others with less (happy) customers. The number of good reviews affects the algorithm of the ranking in the Amazon catalog.
Good reviews tell Amazon that people like your product. In turn, this makes your page come up more on people’s searches.
However – we all know that it’s quite difficult to get reviews! If you’ve ever bought a product on Amazon, do you take the time to give positive feedback?
So this article is all about how you can get more reviews on Amazon in 2020.
What’s the best way to get reviews?
You might think that it’s just a matter of messaging your customers to leave reviews if they liked your product. This may have worked before; however, Amazon are very strict in their rules and there are certain parameters that you have to follow. If you’re not careful, you might even get suspended.
You can of course just wait and hope that you’ll organically receive reviews on your product. However, this will be much slower and more ineffective. There are easier ways!
There are several tried and tested methods that will get you those reviews. Below are 4 ways to get more reviews for Amazon.
1: Utilizing The Buyer-Seller Messaging System
This is the classic way of getting reviews – message your customer directly, and ask them to leave a review if they liked your product.
You do this through Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging System. However, you have to be careful because Amazon has certain conditions regarding this feature. You could get suspended if you don’t follow Amazon’s guidelines.
Despite this, don’t discount this method just yet. This is good for new products that don’t have a lot of reviews.
Essentially, the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service is a way for customers to reach you for any customer service questions. On its terms and conditions, it’s stated that you should not use the service to market or promote your product.
It’s also clearly stated that your message cannot include the following:
- Links to other websites
- Links to amazon detail pages or storefronts
- Seller logos, if they contain or display a link to the seller’s website
- Any marketing messages or promotions
- Any promotions for additional products, or referrals to third-party products or promotions
So how can you get reviews through this method?
First of all, send just one email. No more. Make sure there are no PDFs and attachments, and no links whatsoever. Just make sure that you are sending a message that asks for a review in an unbiased way.
It also helps to add steps on how to leave a review in your message:
- Select “Your Amazon” on the upper right-hand side of your screen.
- Click on “Your Orders” to find this order.
- Select “Product Review”.
As long as you follow all of these tips, this method is still valid to get you reviews. During those early days, make it standard protocol to just send that message after you close a sale.
2: Early Reviewer Program
If you’re on Amazon Brand Registry, the Early Reviewer Program is a good way to get more reviews.
Amazon has a built-in setup which incentivizes customers to leave a review. This a great way to get the ball rolling for your new products. Incentives come in the form of Amazon gift cards valued at around $1 – $3, regardless of the rating that they give. It’s a great incentive because as a buyer, you don’t really have to do much in order to get it.
In order to enroll as a seller, you have to have less than five reviews for your product. Once you register your product for this, Amazon continues to run the program until you either get five reviews through the program, or you reach one year.
This means that even if you have other reviews, Amazon will still continue to incentivize buyers until you reach either of those conditions.
A huge caveat though – this is not free for sellers. You will end up paying around $12 – $60 per review. It’s worth it especially for really new products because you need those reviews asap in order to give your product credibility. However, do keep in mind that there’s a possibility that people might leave very short reviews on your product.
3: Vine Program
This next method was recently made available for 3rd party sellers who use Amazon Seller Central. Currently, it’s free – so it’s best to take advantage of the Vine Program right now.
The Vine Program is another program created by Amazon. A select group of customers with a strong reviewer ranking are invited to join the program – they get free items in exchange for their honest and unbiased product reviews.
The review will say it was from a Vine customer as you can see in the photo below:
Photo from amzfinder.com
So how do you tap into the Vine Program pool of reviewers? To start, you need to be in Brand Registry. You then allocate 30 of your products to give away for free to pre-selected Vine Reviewers. If they want your item, they will request it, and your item will be shipped from an FBA to the reviewer.
After they receive it, they must write an in-depth review. Since these are reviewers with a high ranking (usually within the top 1,000 reviewers on Amazon), you can be sure that they will be thorough.
This is great because all you need is to allocate some freebies for your product. Think of it as marketing expense. Also, the Vine Program shows you metrics – how many you are giving away, how many are claimed, and how many reviews have you gotten so far.
Through the program, 99% of people leave reviews within 35 days. These are 30, well-written reviews that would really give credibility to your listing.
4: “Request a Review” feature inside the Amazon orders page
You can tell how important reviews are for Amazon because they have added yet another feature in order to get reviews for your product.
Last year, Amazon tested a “Request a Review” button inside the Amazon Order’s page. Check it out – this is inside the order details screen in Seller Central.
This feature is available to everyone – even in multiple marketplaces.
Basically, when you click this button, Amazon sends an email to the customer. In the email, customers are given options to rate the product and the seller, and requests them to leave a review for your item.
A lot of sellers notice that deliverability for this new feature is great – not a lot of customers opt-out of this. Once you click that button for all of your transactions, the review rate really shoots up.
However, since it’s a new feature, the user interface is not that streamlined yet. It is all done manually which might take you a long time to do – because you have to go through the order confirmation page of each of your orders.
However, if you have the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension, there’s a great hack… You can do this automatically!
On your orders page, an orange Jungle Scout ‘request review’ button will appear. Just click on this to send the request to all eligible orders. It will automatically know which orders are ineligible, and it will not send the request to those customers. Pretty neat and saves you time for not having to do it manually on every order!
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These four ways are tried and tested to get those much-needed reviews for your page. Try it out, and see which method works best for you. This way, your product not only speaks for itself – you get your customers to speak on behalf of your product.
