Best Ways to Handle Negative Amazon Reviews
What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you? For many Amazon sellers, receiving negative Amazon reviews is like a nightmare, because they may scare away your potential customers and drag your sales down.
In this article, we will give you some tips on how to handle negative reviews and protect your store reputation.
Analyze and identify reviews
When you receive a negative Amazon review, your first impulse is to try to defend your reputation and get the review removed. But before you start doing that, you will have to analyze and identify the details in the negative review and ask yourselves three questions:
- Is this review left by your competitor or a real customer?
- What makes the customer unsatisfied?
- Does the product review violate Amazon’s ToS (Term of Service)?
Sometimes your customers wrote about issues unrelated to the product in their reviews, like slow shipping, promotion or inappropriate content that are against Amazon review policy. In that case, you could contact Amazon seller support to have them remove the review.
If you have spotted a review that was left by a competitor, you can also report this issue to Amazon seller support. Unfortunately, it’s hard to convince Amazon to take down the negative review unless you have strong evidence to support your claims and prove they’re fake.
Respond to negative Amazon reviews
No matter what the negative review is about, the first thing you should do is to thank them for their time sharing their opinions, and always respond to all of your reviews as quickly as you can.
If you have identified the review that you cannot get Amazon to remove it, you can try the following ways to fix it.
- Ask customers to revise or remove a negative review
Product review can be edited or deleted by customers. You can write an email including an apology, explanation, and solution. Your message should always be personalized and sincere, and let them know you take their reviews seriously, and you will make it right. You can offer them a refund or replacement, but do not provide incentives for asking them to revise or remove the negative review. - Respond to negative reviews publicly
Responding to reviews publicly shows your customers that you care. Displaying empathy for the poor customer experience the buyers had would create a positive business image and customers do value sellers who would put in the efforts to solve their problem.
The following response to a negative Amazon review is a great example.
Avoid negative reviews in the future
There is no way you can prevent buyers from leaving negative reviews. However, there are some strategies you can do to reduce your chance of getting bad reviews.
- Send a follow-up email to customers proactively is a good way to ensure their overall experience was satisfactory. If a customer found an issue with the purchase, they may respond directly to the follow-up email you sent before leaving you a bad review publicly.
- Some customers like to leave you a negative Amazon review whenever they are unsatisfied with your service. To avoid receiving negative Amazon reviews and feedback from unhappy customers, you can stop requesting reviews from buyers who have contacted you for support.
- You can deliver email to the right recipients according to their review history. Having a mailing list that excludes buyers who have left you negative reviews prevents you from sending emails to buyers who may leave you a negative review.
Final thought
It’s difficult to get your customers to review your products, and it’s even more difficult to get your buyers to remove negative Amazon reviews. Prevention is better than cure! The above-mentioned tactics are easy to achieve with the right tool like BigCentral. It will help you change negative reviews into positive reviews.
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