Everyone knows that customers can leave reviews for products on Amazon, but did you know that customers can also leave feedback for 3rd party sellers?
Hopefully, those reviews are glowing recommendations about how great you are and how you over-delivered for your customers, but that’s not always the case.
As a 3rd party merchant, you must know how to remove negative seller feedback on Amazon to have long-term success on the platform.
Cultivating your amazing seller reviews can take time, dedication, and oversight, but it’s well worth it in the end.
The Nasty Impact of Negative Seller Feedback
Think of your account feedback as something to leverage directly into making your business more profitable. Positive feedback algorithmically helps you earn more sales, whereas negative feedback (you guessed it) does the opposite.
Losing Out On Buy Box Share
For instance, seller feedback plays a huge role in your competitiveness for the buy box – having enough positive feedback can help you win a larger share, whereas even a little negative feedback can severely count against you.
You’ll lose the buy box to your competitors more often if their account is healthier than yours. Click here to read all about the factors that help you win the buy box.
Account Health Issues
Not only does negative feedback cause you to lose a competitive edge when it comes to making sales, but it also affects the overall health of your account.
If your rate of negative reviews gets too high, you open yourself up to a higher rate of inauthenticity complaints, IP complaints, and possible account suspension.
These issues can sometimes take months to solve and cause a lot of headaches. Unless they’re successfully appealed, their effects can be felt long-term.
Say “Bye-Bye” to Auto-Ungating
Another huge reason to keep your account feedback in check is to help with auto-ungating in brands and categories in the future.
Without solid metrics, you’ll need to conduct research, find legitimate distributors, and purchase potentially hundreds of dollars in inventory to obtain an invoice for ungating.
However, when customer feedback establishes you as a credible 3rd party provider of authentic products, Amazon is more willing to grant you free, instant access to restricted categories. These categories are highly desirable because of reduced competition and (typically) higher profit margins.
With the right performance metrics, you can start selling these products at – quite literally – the click of a button.
A Grim Outlook for Prospective Buyers
Lastly, if you ever plan to sell your Amazon Seller account, it’s imperative to have perfect (or near-perfect) performance health.
When a prospective buyer looks at buying your account, they will no doubt dig into how stable the long-term growth of an account will be. You may lose out on profitability (or even the sale entirely) if your account is determined to be a risky buy.
Which Seller Reviews Should You Remove?
As an FBA seller, there’s no reason to miss out on sales or put your account at risk – it’s totally possible to have 100% positive seller feedback. To make this a reality, it will take a combination of generating positive feedback and striking out the negative feedback.
Prune the Junk
In our opinion, any feedback under 5 stars should be removed completely.
Although 3-star reviews are neutral and 4-star reviews are technically favorable, they obviously detract from the ideal, 100% positive rating to strive for.
However, if you choose to keep 4-star feedback, know that it could build up and eventually negatively affect everything all the factors we talked about above.
In our experience, accounts with a positive review rating under 98% start losing buy box share and accounts with under 90% positive review ratings have serious issues.
If your account falls under the latter, we recommend analyzing what customers had to complain about, addressing their problems, and re-evaluating your feedback strategy.
Get Rid of Negative Product Reviews
Despite the relatively straightforward system to leave reviews in the right place, sometimes things get messy.
According to Amazon’s policies, customers shouldn’t leave feedback exclusively related to products under feedback meant for sellers. If their product review is positive, there’s really no need to take action.
In fact, most of your positive account reviews will probably be about products. As far as Amazon is concerned, those are positive reviews about how you performed as a seller; that’s great – the more, the better.
If those product reviews are undesirable, though, we have an opportunity to have them removed from our account.
Fulfillment Reviews Are History
As an FBA seller, you’re also not liable for negative reviews related to the fulfillment of the order.
Since fulfillment is taken care of by Amazon, if the customer mentions anything about shipping, delivery time, or packaging, you’re covered there too.
How to Remove Negative Seller Feedback, Step-by-Step
There are several actions you can take to remove undesirable reviews, but we suggest handling it in this higher-escalation flow:
Automatic Removal
Check your account feedback in Seller Central here
If you see a negative review and it contains any of the relevant factors we’ve talked about above, we’ll try to get it removed instantly. To do that, click “request removal” from the gray drop-down in the “actions” column.
It may take a second to process, but the review will be struck through if it goes through successfully. A little message saying “This item was fulfilled by Amazon, and we take responsibility for this fulfillment experience” will pop up.
Nice, it’s been taken care of – no need to go further in these steps.
Contact Seller Support
That didn’t work? Try to open a case with Amazon Seller Support.
Talking to a representative about why you think it should be removed is the next best step. If you don’t know, read our article on how to open a case with Amazon seller support.
A simple, templated message should do the job. Something like:
“Hello, I received seller feedback from a customer that (I think would be a better fit on the product page, OR is due to Amazon’s fulfillment on my behalf as an FBA seller). The order number is (order number). For easier reference, I’ve included the content of the message here: (review content) Please remove this feedback from my seller account. Thanks, and have a great day!
Sometimes Seller Support can take a while to get back to you, so be patient. If you don’t hear back within a week, send another message through the same case to try to get a dialog going.
I highly recommend not opening another case since this will likely just cause confusion on their end.
Get in Touch with the Buyer
If they respond that the review can’t be removed, the next step is to reach out to the customer.
Be very careful with this, as these are Amazon’s customers, not yours. The words you use should be thoughtful, professional, polite, and considerate.
To open communications with a customer, click on their order ID from the account feedback page.
You can then contact the buyer by clicking on their name. You’ll be prompted to choose why you need to contact them – pick “other” and then “feedback request” from the subject.
The message should be to the point and abide by Amazon’s TOS. Breaking the TOS could result in your account getting suspended, and it’s not worth the risk.
Realize that making a customer feel appreciated and getting them to remove their negative feedback is worth a lot to you in the long-run.
Amazon’s rules state that you can’t offer a full refund in exchange for them removing their complaint, but you still have options. You are able to offer a partial refund or send them another unit if theirs is defective for some reason.
Use your best judgment on a case-by-case basis and do what you would want to be done to you.
Take full responsibility for what happened (even if it’s not your fault) and make the customer feel heard. Offer a sincere apology and let them know what you did to make it right.
Do NOT connect anything about the solution to them removing their negative feedback. Hinting at this will likely be seen as pressure to manipulate reviews.
Something as simple as:
Hi (first name),
I saw your feedback on my Amazon Seller account and wanted to do everything I can to make it right.
First of all, please accept my sincere apology for (whatever the negative review is about).
This was not intentional and I’ve taken steps to ensure it won’t happen again. Furthermore, I’ve (tell them what you did to make it right – partial refund, new product, etc).
If there’s anything more I can do to turn this around into a positive experience, please let me know!
All the best,
(Your store name)
If they respond to your message (which is uncommon, but it can happen), you can address any further concerns, if applicable, and then ask them to update their feedback. Do not request positive feedback – that’s asking for trouble.
Respond to the Review
If they don’t respond or update their review, you can post a public reply.
To do that, select “post a reply” from the actions column dropdown. This is visible by anyone, and the customer will get a notice that they’ve received a response to their feedback.
Same story as the message above – you could even post the same thing if you’d like.
It may not make much difference to get the negative review removed, but there’s a chance it could be taken down by the buyer.
How to Handle Worst-Case Scenario
Have you tried all these methods and yet the review still lives? Well, that’s not great, but it isn’t the end of the world.
Getting more positive feedback will dilute the negative feedback effects.
Furthermore, recent feedback is weighted more heavily than older feedback, so simply waiting it out will lessen the impact.
Failure to get the review removed probably means that something went wrong that was totally within your control. The product could have been a mismatch, inauthentic, or any number of other things.
Long story short, though, I’d suggest investing more in quality control. Make sure products are exact matches to the Amazon listing, that they’re the real deal, and that they’re in perfectly new condition.
Closing Thoughts
I hope this guide has taught you why you should prioritize taking care of negative account feedback and tools to do it confidently. The long-term impacts made by being a good manager of your seller reviews are well worth it.
To put this knowledge into practice, join our Rookie Leads: a totally free way to get 5 free online arbitrage leads delivered to you every week. It’s a great, risk-free way to gain some experience selling without having to source products yourself.
Comment below if you’ve had success getting feedback removed with any of these strategies. I’ll be right there in the comments with you!
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