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Amazon Seller Feedback is essential if you want to boost your sales on Amazon and ensure stable revenue. To help customers identify trustworthy sellers, Amazon had to implement a system. This system continually monitors and evaluates sellers, and it’s called Amazon Seller Feedback.
Amazon’s goal is to feature only the sellers that offer delightful customer experience. Seller Feedback system helps Amazon identify “bad” and “good” sellers. To get the “bed seller” label, your Negative Feedback Rate should drop below 5%. At this point, you will receive an official warning from Amazon asking you to make adjustments to your business practices.
The good sellers are the ones whose product description actually matches the product. But this is not the only factor Amazon uses to calculate your Seller Feedback rating. There are two others – on-time order arrival and customer service.
How to maintain and improve your Amazon Seller Feedback? This is what we are going to explore in this guide!
As on any online marketplace, having great seller ratings is crucial when seeking to earn new customer’s trust and ultimately making new sales. Being held to a high-performance standard by Amazon, many questions may arise:
Customer feedback is integral to Amazon’s platform as they want to create a place where customers get the best product and service possible. There are 3 main forms of feedback on Amazon:
In this post we will be focusing on Seller Feedback as this is the most popular type of feedback especially since many shoppers leave a product review as a Seller Feedback (more on this later on). Seller Feedback is meant to evaluate a sellers performance in three main categories:
In order to leave seller feedback a customer needs to click on ‘view previous orders’ and then is presented with a form like this:
Amazon actually uses these Seller Feedback ‘questionnaires’ and translates them into a more tangible rating. Your standing is measured based on what is called your ‘Negative Feedback Rate’. The absolutely best sellers on Amazon have a 0% Negative Feedback Rate but generally speaking any rate which remains below 5% is considered good.
You can view your Seller Rating by going to your Seller Central dashboard and clicking:
Pro tip: Shoppers have 90 days to leave a review and 60 days are provided to allow for the removal of a review. In both cases, act swiftly, ask for positive reviews and try to immediately resolve issues that arise from negative reviews. The quicker you address the issue, the higher the likelihood of getting a negative review removed is.
I would like to mention two important Seller Feedback distinctions/facts you should be aware of:
Before delving into this I would like you to consider the following three statistics:
(Source: Local Consumer Review Survey, 2017)
Now that you fully grasp the importance of reviews let’s look at the two main reasons why Seller Feedback on Amazon is so important:
Do keep in mind that it is important to maintain a 97% or higher feedback score when competing for the Buy Box!
To say the least, it is much less common for buyers on Amazon to leave feedback. Consider the following statistic:
Less than 5% of shoppers leave Seller Feedback after making a purchase on Amazon! (Source: Amazon Seller Central Forum)
After digesting this mind-blowing number for a second, especially considering the fact that on eBay, by comparison, the number is around 40%, I would like to tell you that the main reason that a customer does not bother to leave feedback on products has nothing to do with the quality of service or product they received, rather customers simply do not feel strong enough about your items in order to drive them to action.
This statement comes following a recent study was done by the Harvard Business Review which looked into the importance of establishing an emotional connection with consumers:
(Source: Harvard Business Review)
Here are three simple ideas on how to foster an emotional connection with customers and motivate them to leave you Seller Feedback:
Or maybe, you keep it simple but use nice packaging materials and meticulously package the item so as to give your shopper a sense of exclusivity like in this example:
It does not need to necessarily cost a fortune but attention to detail and creating a unique and exhilarating user experience may very well set you apart from your competition and send shoppers running to leave you positive Seller Feedback. One distinct feature that you can focus on for example is the color of your box, by using a unique color such as bright pink, you can enhance the way your customer perceives your brand.
Additionally, ‘unboxing’ has become really popular and many vloggers (ie video bloggers) have posted videos on YouTube which have gone viral which needless to say, if this happens to one of your items, it is great for business.
2. Create engagement –
Creating engagement can also be a great way increase brand awareness but more importantly have shoppers feeling happy, emotionally connected to your brand and ultimately more than willing to leave positive Seller Feedback. Shopper engagement can include a variety of actions:
3. Ask politely –
Believe it or not, many shoppers are actually unaware of how important their Seller Feedback is and that is why you should always ask your customer to kindly rate you on Amazon. You can do this by:
Or you can combine all three. Whatever method you choose, do not feel uncomfortable as Amazon actually encourages merchants to solicit feedback.
You did everything right and you have plenty of positive Seller Feedback but just like anything else in life, you cannot please everyone and for whatever reason, you got negative Seller Feedback from someone. Remember that there are two other parties involved here ie Amazon and the customer – I recommend you contact both of them depending on the situation in order to try and resolve the situation and hopefully get said feedback removed:
2. Be in touch with the customer:
In order to do this, take a look at your Feedback Manager dashboard – there you can see a variety of information:
First of all, read the customer’s review and when writing to them make sure to address the concerns they raised in their review. For example, if a customer complained that the item was not as described then maybe offer them a refund or offer to replace the item with a new one. Whatever the concern is, let your customer know that you care and are doing your utmost to remedy the situation. At the end of your correspondence, politely ask that they remove their negative review. Do not use language which can be interpreted as forceful or bullying! This is strictly against Amazon’s policies and may very well get you suspended from Amazon.
First of all, it is important to clear up the difference between your Seller Rating and Seller Feedback:
For every order you (or Amazon for that matter) fulfill, you are graded on a scale from 0 (the worst possible rating) to 100 (the best possible rating) based on a number of categories:
Amazon does have a measure of fairness when calculating your ratings though and so they tally up your ratings over the course of the last 365 days and divide that by the number of orders you sent out in order to rate you on average and not only on a case-by-case basis so that if you are generally good but had one or two incidents it won’t harm you as much.
Do keep in mind that some categories carry more weight than other as far as Amazon is concerned. For example an A-Z claim is given more weight by Amazon than a late shipment claim. Also Note, that Amazon does not only penalize sellers but allows you to earn up to 10 extra points per order if deemed that you provided outstanding service. There is no recipe for this and is entirely up to Amazon but many times you will get these bonus points if you get a fantastic Seller Feedback for example.
The bottom line is that nobody ever wants to get negative feedback but sometimes it happens and you just have to know how to approach the situation in the best and quickest way. You should not shy away from asking for feedback from buyers from fear of receiving negative feedback. Reviews are part and parcel of the cloth from which eCommerce is cut. You should however aim to give the best service and encourage positive reviews. Choose whichever tactics work for you but being passive on this issue is not an option! Consider this an opportunity to build up your brand identity as well as a loyal customer base – always aim to turn a negative into a positive and you cannot go wrong.
Please share your Seller Rating and Seller Feedback experiences below – we would love to learn and grow as a community from the knowledge that you share.