Over the course of the past few months Amazon has cracked down on its reviews policies and, in particular, become more stringent on the use of incentivised reviews on the site. We’ve written about it before.
On Monday they made further amendments to their approach in a blog post from Chee Chew, VP, Customer Experience. You can the post in full here.
“Today, we updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program. We launched Vine several years ago to carefully facilitate these kinds of reviews and have been happy with feedback from customers and vendors. Here’s how Vine works: Amazon – not the vendor or seller – identifies and invites trusted and helpful reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release products; we do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written; and we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product.”
It is hardly surprising that Amazon is becoming more protective of reviews because they are valued by buyers. That said the Vine development is also interesting. This policy comes in to effect immediately.
Will it impact your strategy?
