How would you like to boost your sales on Amazon with a higher best seller rank and a raft of new reviews? That’s what a service appropriately called iLoveToReview offers.
iLoveToReview offer a spike in your products seller rank, an increase in conversion rate and reviews fully verified and compliant with Amazon policy within a 4 to 6 week window.
What do iLoveToReview do?
iLoveToReview recruit reveiwers keen to review your product, and once you’ve set up a campaign they’ll mail their database and get up to 200 reviewers lined up ready to leave you reviews on Amazon. One of the first questions I asked was are the reviews compliant with Amazon’s T’s and C’s and review guidelines and the answer is that they’re scrupulous in ensuring all necessary disclosures are made.
Return on Investment
There are of course costs associated with the iLoveToReview – both fees and product. You’ll need to either give product to reviewers for free, or offer it an a rock bottom price. However as we always say with any tool or service if the numbers stack up it’s still worth the investment, in the case from your marketing budget.
What results can you expect?
Once your campaign is set up iLoveToReview will issue single use coupon codes to the reviewers interested in your product. They’ll (importantly) purchase on Amazon. This means that your product will immediately get between 40 and 200 sales, which often will boost the product right to the top of the seller rankings. As we already know if you’re product is the first one or two search results on Amazon it’ll be the one that gets sales.
Then sometimes within a couple of days but definitely within a few weeks the recipients of your product will start to leave their reviews, which normally will be 4 or 5 star reviews if you’ve got a good product. Reviews will help you get sales in the future.
One of the real bonuses here is not just the reviews, but the influx of sales to reviewers will raise your sales rank which in turn will generate additional ongoing sales to keep your sales rank high in the future. Below the image shows an iLoveToReview case study on how it can work for you:
Costs
Costs start at £297 per campaign (plus the free or heavily discounted product) plus £2.99 per verified redemption. Campaigns should be for between 40 and 200 products. If you commit to multiple campaigns then the costs start to drop.
Who should consider iLoveToReview
iLoveToReview won’t be suitable for everyone – There’s no point raising the sales rank on a product for which you don’t have exclusivity on the Amazon ASIN and then see someone else win the Buy Box. That means it’s probably only worth considering for own branded products. It will also work best when your product is in FBA – many regular reviewers will have signed up to Amazon Prime to receive free shipping.
You’ll also need to consider the cost of giving product away or pricing it for reviewers at £1 or £2. That means generally it’s suitable for lower cost products as you won’t want to be giving £900 cameras away. Where iLoveReviews really comes into it’s own is when you’re an established seller on Amazon and are launching a new product line which you’ll be selling large volumes. Getting that initial boost up the rankings plus a ton of good reviews will kickstart your ranking and save potentially weeks or even months to start generating good sales velocity.
Sign up as a seller / Sign up as a reviewer
There are two reasons you might like to consider iLoveToReview – If you have products for which you’d like to kickstart sales you should look at signing up as an Amazon Seller/Brand. On the other hand if you’d like to receive free or very low cost products in exchange for leaving a review then you can sign up as a reviewer.
8 Responses
There are Amazon seller rules around product and seller feedback e.g.
“Do not misuse the ratings and feedback forum.””Furthermore, any attempt to manipulate ratings of any participant is prohibited”
I cannot find the specifics but there is definately a rule about providing monetary incentives for reviews, and i am sure this includes free or discounted products.
Do not get me wrong, i am sure this company has carefully worked around the rules, but is it right? And would you risk your Amazon account which is probably a big percentage of your business?
This company will not be able to get your Amazon account back after a ban, and personally i prefer genuine real reviews from customers who genuinely bought the product of their own free will, without incentive etc, their real feedback helps us to know how we are doing and helps us to develop better products in the future, thus getting improved real 5 star feedback on future products by actually providing a 5 star deserving product, rather than a mediocure one with a bribe attached, this does not take my business forward.
I am sure Amazon will clamp down further on these types of service in the future or come up with creative ways to stop manipulation.
Good luck if you choose to risk your business with such a service, Amazon seller performance are very well known for being ruthless and unforgiving, i would not personally take the risk and lose a channel that brings be hundreds of thousands of pounds in business every year.
The images show a nice increase in profits but this is short term, the long term might be having no Amazon account to sell with??
And here is an example of what can happen if you go about bribing customer the wrong way:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/amazon-merchant-caught-bribing-customers-for-five-star-reviews/
Worth a read if you are considering using such a service as the above.
I wanted to address these comments as I run iLoveToReview in the UK market.
Firstly let me comment on the link Kieran …I am really glad you drew peoples attention to this because Amazon sellers who either pays a reviewer to write a review and/or asks them to give you a 5 star review are asking for trouble.
That is not what iLoveToReview does and we certainly do not manipulate ratings or have fake reviews written…our reviewers make their own judgement. We find if the product is solid and does what it says then the rating are high and valued so we are careful to make sure the product is good quality and is something our reviewers will like.
Also…we do not ‘Work AROUND the rules’ …we are very careful to make sure our reviewers understand these rules every time they write a review and just because they didn’t pay the full price doesn’t mean they don’t write what they feel about a product. We have seen this time and time again in our US business where have done over 20,000 reviews in the past 3 months alone..
Amazon actually provide the same service themselves called Vine but it obviously very difficult to get your product in this system so we provide an alternative method for getting honest reviews and very quick redemptions to increase your Amazon ranking and get your product in front of more buyers searching for your type of product.
In the US market we have even had sellers contact us after speaking to Amazon support who suggested they talk to us!
Product discounts to gain market awareness and sales have been around for decades and this is why Amazon provide promotional tools within Seller Central to enable sellers to provide product promotions with % or £ discounts if they choose that method for marketing their products.
I would never presume to anticipate what Amazon will do next but the service we provide has been successful operating in the US for almost a year now and we certainly expect to deliver the same results for sellers in the UK and further into Europe.
Martin K
We have used this service in the US to promote our Bluetooth Speakers there and it worked well. No issues with Amazon but it is an expensive service if you take into account the cost of your products.
I have mixed feelings about discounting prices to encourage reviews. A good product will achieve a ‘Best Seller ranking’ by itself if the product is sensibly priced and does what it is supposed to do.
I have several products within the top 100 products in a number of product sub categories and didn’t drop prices or pay for any advertising whatsoever.
Dropping prices and paying another ‘Middle Man’ might well result in more sales, but I prefer to focus on profit.
To Martin K:
Interesting to read your rebuttal of the digitaltrends link.
What would your reply be to the fact that Amazon is actively pursuing lawsuits against companies that manipulate or cause distortion of the Review system?
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/operator-of-buyamazonreviews-com-responds-to-amazon-suit-insists-hes-doing-nothing-wrong/
I would have the concern that since the item is not purchased at full price, this distorts the reviewers’ mind-set favourably and so would be in contravention of Amazon T&C’s.
I wonder, do you have any written clearance from Amazon illustrating they are happy with your business model and if so would you be kind enough to share it subject of course to any NDA’s or confidentiality agreements.
In the absence of this would you be confident in prospective customers contacting Amazon and asking them for their opinion on this matter?
I am sure there will be prospective or existing clients who deem the risk acceptable, but I am sure you could win far more business with a published verified endorsement of your business model from Amazon HQ. Please do not misconstrue by post as overtly negative, merely someone requiring further validation and I am sure others would echo the above thoughts.
Hi Glen & Greg,
Sorry I haven’t responded sooner but I didn’t get any alert that more questions were posted and just came in here by chance to look.
I have pasted below the section from Amazon TOS which covers this but I will also get you the link later today and post again so you can reference it.
Let me answer a few of your good points:
Q1. I would have the concern that since the item is not purchased at full price, this distorts the reviewers’ mind-set favourably and so would be in contravention of Amazon T&C’s.
A1a: Amazon offer a very similar service called VIne where they enable product sellers to give a product review by giving the product for FREE to reviewers in return for a review. The reviewers must disclose this in review as they do with our service.
A1b. Amazon provide a promotional tool in the Seller Central account that enables ANY seller to create a discount campaign in % of $’s off (and 2 for 1) so why would they provide such a tool for sellers if they didn’t want discount promotions to take place.
Q2. What would your reply be to the fact that Amazon is actively pursuing lawsuits against companies that manipulate or cause distortion of the Review system?
A2: Amazon are rightly going after companies who either PAY reviewers for a review or worse still have fake reviewers who write BS and give it an automatic 5 STAR. As I wrote before, our service has real reviewers who make their own judgement on how good the product is and we provide no influence on what rating they give it. If the product is good it will get a good review, if it isn’t then it won’t…simple as that.
Our business follows the TOS from Amazon which I have pasted below. Amazon definitely know about us as we have had clients call us who told us their Amazon rep suggested us to them .
AMAZON TOS
Paid Reviews – We do not permit reviews or votes on the helpfulness of reviews that are posted in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment (whether in the form of money or gift certificates), bonus content, entry to a contest or sweepstakes, discounts on future purchases, extra product, or other gifts.
The sole exception to this rule is when a free or discounted copy of a physical product is provided to a customer up front. In this case, if you offer a free or discounted product in exchange for a review, you must clearly state that you welcome both positive and negative feedback. If you receive a free or discounted product in exchange for your review, you must clearly and conspicuously disclose that fact.
I appreciate both of you have taken the time to clearly outline your concerns which are valid and I hope this help answer thems. If not then please feel free to contact me direct and I will help you get the information you need.
Thanks
Martin