Sergio Arboledas — July 19, 2018 — July 19, 2018
Amazon have more than 3 billion products across their 11 marketplaces worldwide. Each of those products can be reviewed by customers who (usually) give an accurate overview of the product that they have purchased.
The biggest barrier to sales of an Amazon seller is getting negative reviews, as this can potentially hinder the chances of generating sales when the product being sold has a bunch of 1-3-star ratings out of 5. In this article, you will learn how to handle negative reviews and improve your Amazon SEO.
Key Statistics
A recently published survey by Podium shows that 93% of consumers say that online reviews have an impact on their purchasing decisions.
The same source found that 3.3 stars out of 5 is the minimum star rating that consumers require to consider engaging with the business.
Based on these statistics, it is evident that online reviews are crucial in determining consumer’s trust in a product, as a review-less product may provide emptiness and uncertainty. We can also conclude that the star rating is important in determining quality assurance for the customer, as a low starred item may often be skipped completely due to perceived risk.
You may be wondering, if you are selling vast amounts of products on Amazon, how are you meant to know when you get negative reviews? The answer to this is simple, you have to…
Monitor your Amazon reviews regularly
You need to actively monitor the reviews your products are getting. This can be achieved directly from your Amazon product listings, and simply checking the reviews periodically to stay updated with the feedback you are receiving.
If you are selling a wide range of products, manual monitoring can be time consuming. There are tools that can check your products daily for bad reviews. One such tool is AMZTracker, which claims to skyrocket your Amazon sales through its reviews service.
Another Amazon review monitoring tool you could use is FeedbackFive¸ which sends you real-time updates when you receive negative product reviews. Additionally, you can solicit reviews from customers, as well as responding to submitted reviews to improve customer relations.
How to manage feedback on Amazon
There is never one way to give feedback to reviews, as each review will be tailored to that specific customer’s experience. This means that you must carefully manage the feedback you receive on your products, whether they are positive or negative.
For positive feedback, you want to be thanking your customer for their purchase, as well as pointing out specific attributes that they liked about the product or the service in the review. For example, if you are selling t-shirts and you get a review that compliments the quality of the material, you could reply with something along the lines of “thank you for the kind words regarding the quality of our t-shirts!”. These bespoke responses can make the customer feel recognized and can improve their attitudinal loyalty to your business.
Always end your response to a positive review with a call to action, reminding the customer to purchase from you again. This is extremely important to increase the behavioral loyalty of your customer, and they will be more inclined to purchase from a business that provided them with a positive shopping experience.
Negative reviews need to be managed similarly; however, it’s not enough simply acknowledging what the customer has mentioned in their review, you must reassure the customer that your products are produced with the highest importance on quality. You also need to understand the dissatisfaction that the customer is feeling; otherwise, they wouldn’t have submitted a negative review.
To improve the situation, you can offer the customer a replacement product or a refund if they return the faulty one. This works in your favor as you can either check to see exactly what was wrong with the product, to avoid producing defect products in the future, as well as increasing the trust with the customer if you are prepared to send them a brand-new product free of charge.
How to get a good rank for your product on Amazon
The goal for any business selling products on Amazon is to have their product featured at the top of the search results. There is currently one algorithm, A9, that can determine the positioning of products when searched on Amazon. Here are some tips to help your product rank higher on Amazon:
- Sell a great product
This is the most obvious tip to getting a good product ranking; however, many sellers seem to underestimate even the simplest of concepts. Your product must be good enough to make people want to share and recommend it with their friends. If your product isn’t great, then most likely it won’t receive a lot of attention, which is one of the factors contributing to the ranking on Amazon.
- Solicit reviews
By actively requesting customers to provide reviews on your product, chances are you will have an overall higher number of reviews, which in turn can make you rank higher on Amazon.
One way to achieve is by providing an insert into the packaging of the products you are selling. This insert can be a small piece of paper with a smiley face that says something along the lines of “Thank you for purchasing this product, we’d love it if you could give us a review on Amazon”. You may find that customers who initially wanted to provide a review had forgotten to, which is why the insert is a great way to reinforce an active response from your customers.
Alternatively, you can follow-up with past customers through email marketing or sending them direct messages on Amazon when you have new products that you think they might like. By knowing your audience and finding who your valuable customers are, they may provide more reviews for future purchases.
- Optimise your titles and images
Optimised titles will increase your conversion rate and can be achieved by containing keywords relating to your product offering, and be under 200 characters in length, making it easy to read for the customer.
Similarly, the images that you upload should follow Amazon’s image guidelines, which include using high-quality images with a maximum of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels.
Final thoughts
Handling negative reviews on Amazon is a great opportunity to improve your communication with customers, as well as obtaining potential sales and being able to turn negative responses into positive experiences for the customer – either through following-up or providing a free replacement/refund. If you want to stay ahead of competition within Amazon’s marketplace, you must ensure that you have as many positive reviews as possible. The tips mentioned in this article should provide the necessary actions to increase your ranking within Amazon, and hopefully increase sales too!
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