Although reviews on Amazon also operate with a five-star scoring model and allow customers to leave open-ended comments, there is a distinct difference between feedback and reviews.
Amazon product reviews deal with the customer’s opinion about a specific product and have nothing to do with seller performance or the shipping process. Reviews are located on each specific item’s product detail page.
Why Amazon product reviews are important?
1. Reviews impact product ranking
According to The Amazon Reputation Playbook by Feedvisor, customer reviews can significantly influence the sellers’ conversion rate, which demonstrates their essential role in Amazon SEO. Products with strong ratings, four stars or higher, are more likely to rank higher in Amazon search results than those with less than four stars.
2. Leveraging reviews to make informed inventory decisions.
Whether a seller is considering stocking a new item or simply watching one of their best-sellers reach the end of its life cycle – the knowledge that product reviews can impart is essential to continued Amazon business growth.
Monitoring reviews can help merchants to stay aware of trends, receive potential product improvements, and get real insight from their customers.
3. Customers rely on product reviews as social proof to inform their purchase decisions.
In today’s day and age, social proof is a driving force behind consumer purchases. The more reviews sellers have, the better.
Merchants will be able to convince hesitant, on-the-fence shoppers to convert while simultaneously increasing visibility for their catalogue.
More than three-fourths (79%) of consumers go to Amazon to check reviews before making a purchase, so merchants should continuously monitor their reviews to ensure customers do not abandon their potential purchase due to a negative review.
4. Learning from the competition
Sellers already know that monitoring their own product reviews regularly can shed light on potential ideas for future product development, line extensions, or quality improvements.
However, have they considered monitoring what their key competitors are doing? Keeping tabs on the ASINs that compete most directly with their products can give sellers a competitive advantage, providing you with ways to differentiate their listings from the competition’s offerings.
5. Reviews can significantly impact a seller reputation.
By responding to negative reviews in a timely fashion, sellers are showing their prospective customers that they value their time and experience with their products as well as maintaining a positive overall customer experience.
Over the last year, there has been a trend of fraudulent sellers leaving fake reviews on competitors’ products, either noticeably fake and 5-star or negative 1-star reviews that include wrong keywords such as “fake, harm, fear, counterfeit.”
These reviews are intended to trigger the algorithm and flag sellers’ accounts for fake reviews, product safety, or quality issues.
These “bad actors” are also stealing positive reviews from old products and merging them onto their brand new competitive listings, so they suddenly have hundreds of reviews compared to your dozens.
Monitoring reviews regularly can highlight potential issues like this so sellers can act as soon as possible.
Amazon takes measures to ensure that shoppers can trust the reviews on the marketplace. The marketplace has an anti-manipulation policy for reviews that states, “any attempt to manipulate reviews, including by directly or indirectly contributing false, misleading, or inauthentic content is strictly prohibited.”
Review manipulation can result in account suspension or termination, review removal, the delisting of related products, and withheld or forfeited payments. By violating state and federal laws, such as the Federal Trade Commission Act, there can also be civil and criminal penalties involved.
