Product Reviews, Seller Feedback and Customer Questions
Transcription
And understanding the importance of reviews and product listings reviews. You’re often attacked and an area of prevalent for black hat, tactics reviews, playing an important part in your brands listings. They reveal the product performance and likes and dislikes from users. They help with the algorithm and search rankings.
show moreThey provide brands with market insights into their products. They add credibility to your brand and product performance. And they are one of the first areas on the page listing that potential customers turn to. But as we know, by now, obtaining verified and legitimate reviews is no easy task. So oftentimes sellers turn to devious ways to obtain positive reviews, to not only boost their number of reviews. But also to slant the reviews in a more favorable light.
Historically in order to start making any positive traction in Amazon’s ranking system, our product needed a minimum of 20 product. We views with an average of four stars with an average of about 3% of unit sales resulting in customers posting a product review. This means a seller would have to sell roughly 650 units to obtain 20 reviews.
But if most purchasers by products based on the number of positive reviews, how then does a seller seller product without reviews? In essence, if reviews are needed to sell products and purchase products are needed to obtain reviews, it’s a catch 22. It’s the chicken and egg scenario that has led to many sellers to turn to obtaining fraudulent reviews, to start the Amazon system and machine churning toward their product.
Incentivizing for positive reviews is strictly against Amazon’s terms of service, but it’s as tactic, some sellers still use to obtain positive reviews. Amazon has changed this policy over the years, but their current terms for bid you to discount your product or provide one for free to a customer in exchange for a positive review.
Another method dishonest sellers are taking is to boost their own search engine rankings by sabotaging their competitors rankings through leaving negative reviews. Buying a product and reporting it as counterfeit and filing a to Z claims against a competitor’s products. And just recently some dishonest sellers were resorting to writing positive reviews for their competition.
Doesn’t sound too bad. Right? Well, the trouble is, they are not just writing one positive review. They are flooding the system with dozens and dozens of positive reviews. This flood of good reviews is out of the norm in a verified process and sending a red flag to Amazon system. Innocent sellers are suffering with products, suspension, and being flagged as manipulating the review process, which can result in losing seller privileges.
Another tactic, dishonest sellers are taking is asking employees. Friends and family who have not actually purchased a product to post a review. Some sellers even take this a step further by asking friends to buy the product poster review and then refunding their money through PayPal or cash. So the refund does not go through Amazon directly.
Also, there are review farms. Sellers can solicit whose sole job is to just post reviews on Amazon without ever purchasing or using the product.
But our black hat tactics really worth it for unscrupulous sellers. Maybe in a short run, these dishonest ways will work, but not long-term. Amazon is a mega e-commerce website with a highly complex algorithm over time that will catch up. And Amazon is finding ways to better detect these activities.
Amazon is committed to keeping the integrity of their review system in place. They have changed their position on a few key measures and started the crack down. They have banned Stellars from incentivizing reviews, with positive feedback, and now allow brands to post comments directly in response to customer comments and an event to fight back against reviews that are posted with incorrect information.
Or negative responses. And with Amazon, too many infractions or unscrupulous behaviors can result in a suspended account. And that is never good for any brand.