My Seller Pal

Amazon Seller Feedback Defined

Amazon is well-known in doing the best it can to ensure that all of its customers are having only the best online experience possible. This is why the Amazon Seller Feedback System was created. With this system, customers are given access to previous buyers’ experience with different sellers. Customers are given the opportunity to share what are the positive and negative things they had experienced with a specific seller giving new customers the idea how they would be treated as well if they decide to become among those customers.

Seller feedback is often confused with product reviews but these two are totally different. Product review is about the specific product bought. What are its pros and cons while as mentioned earlier, seller feedback is about the customer’s experience with a seller. Moreover, seller feedback evaluates the speed and quality of fulfillment as well as rates how accurate the product’s listing description is compared with the actual product received.

How Does Seller Feedback Work

Customers are given 90 days from the date of purchase to leave their feedback. They can leave their feedback by either returning to their order page and clicking through a specific order or by directly going to the Amazon Feedback Page and then navigating from there. Customers can choose from pre-set options, leave a star rating – 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest rating and additional comments as they wish.

Total seller rating is aggregated over time and displayed on your storefront as well as on Amazon’s product pages. You may also see your overall Seller Feedback rating on your Amazon Seller Central’s home page.

How Important is Seller Feedback?

The Seller Feedback system is used by Amazon to monitor and evaluate sellers on their platform. Based on the ratings, Amazon is able to identify if a specific seller is failing to meet their obligation of creating a stellar customer service experience for its customers.

Sellers should not have a negative feedback rate of more than 5%. A seller that goes beyond this rate will get a warning, also known as “Performance Notification” from Amazon stating that they need to review their business practices and make necessary adjustments to ensure they will meet the demands of the customer. Receiving several performance notifications of the same issue may result in account suspension.

It’s also important to note that building up your Seller Feedback is an important step for every Amazon Selling account. Features like promotional codes are not available until a selling account receive a certain number of seller feedback. Moreover, having a good seller feedback rating has also been observed to have a positive effect on Amazon’s search algorithm.

Amazon measures seller feedback based on the following factors:

1. Prompt order arrival
2. Accurate product description
3. Customer service

Benefits of Having a Good Seller Feedback Rating

Winning the Buy Box

Negative feedback decreases your chance of winning the buy box. Winners of the buy box are determined by Amazon through sellers’ overall scores for customer experience. This means that if you have a bad feedback rating, it will be very difficult for you to win the buy box and get sales.

Remember that Amazon not only looks at the total rating you have but the quantity as well. So say, for example, you have 5.0 seller feedback rating and another seller has 4.9 but the number of positive seller feedback he has is more than yours, then they might still win the buy box especially if you have the same price.

Note: Amazon takes into consideration the feedback received in the past 90 days so feedback received past the said period will have a diminished effect.

Account Health

As mentioned above, if your seller feedback goes beyond the acceptable rating, your account may be at risk and your selling privileges may be revoked. Having a consistently low star rating can badly affect your account health as it counts towards your Order Defect Rate. If this rating goes above the 1% threshold, you’ll be in big trouble.

Receiving 3-star ratings isn’t that bad but isn’t a good thing too. Even if your Order Defect Rate will not be affected, receiving lots of 3-star rating can drag your overall score down.

Seller Feedback Solicitation

Product review solicitation is against Amazon’s TOS but soliciting seller feedback is allowed by Amazon. If you were able to successfully fulfill an order and customer have no complaints, then you should take the opportunity to request for seller feedback. Politely reach out to the customer to check-in how things went and request for seller feedback. Remember that without seller feedback, customers will not have the confidence to place an order with you since they won’t have a basis if they can trust that you would fulfill their orders. So proactiveness is the key.

Though it’s true that seller feedback can build organically in time, it’s still very important that you have a process in place to increase it faster. One best way to increase your Seller Feedback is through follow up email sequences. Thousands of our customers use our FREE Email Sequence templates to solicit not only seller feedback but to encourage customers to leave product reviews as well.

Seller Feedback Management

As mentioned earlier, customers can leave seller feedback 90 days from the purchase date but only 60 days to remove it. This means that you need to be proactive when it comes to managing customer complaints. Be prompt and immediately reach out to the buyer with a proposed solution so you can work together to solve the issue. Remember that you will only have 60 days to make the buyer happy enough for him/her to remove his/her feedback. It may seem long enough but never take it for granted.

You also need to note that Seller Feedback is marketplace-specific. It is unique to the marketplace where the order was placed. This means that seller feedback posted in the US will not be visible to Amazon CA and vice versa.

Dealing with Negative Feedback

Receiving negative seller feedback is unavoidable. As the saying goes, “You can’t please everybody” but still there are certain steps that you can take to mitigate the effect of seller feedback on your account. Below are two effective ways to do this:

Request Seller Feedback Removal

If negative seller feedback violates Amazon’s guidelines, then you can request it to be removed in Seller Central under “Performance” tab.

Below are the types of Seller Feedback that you can request to be removed.

• Is a product review and not about your performance as a seller
• Contains promotional content for other sellers or websites
• Contains customer’s personal information
• Contains obscene or abusive language
• For FBA Sellers: Complaints about a wrong item sent, warehouse/shipping damage, or anything related to picking and packing orders.

Request for removals usually receives an immediate response. If, however, it takes more time than usual, your request is most probably sent to Amazon for review and a resolution should be ready in a few days.

A lot of times, customers tend to leave a positive product review in your feedback. The good thing is that Amazon won’t proactively remove feedback even though it’s actually a product review. What does this mean to you? You can simply leave it on your feedback dashboard and take advantage of the 5 or 4-star rating that you received. You may also contact the customer to see if they’d be willing to re-post the feedback on your product’s detail page saying that Amazon erroneously posted their review as seller feedback.

Reach Out to the Unhappy Customer

If the feedback is indeed about how you performed as a seller, then you won’t be able to have it removed by Amazon. The best way to deal with it is to contact the customer. Next, to the feedback rating, there is an option to respond to feedback. You will then have access to the customer’s email and send them a message with the solution to resolve the issue. If they are willing to give you the chance to fix it, then you will also have the chance to request that they remove the feedback they left.

Help them towards removing the feedback by providing instructions on how they can do it.

1.  Go to http://www.amazon.com/your-account and navigate to “Personalization”

2.  In the “Community” column, click “Seller Feedback Submitted By You.”

3.  Click the “Remove” link next to the feedback you would like to remove.

Dont’s When Contacting an Unhappy Customer

You need to be very careful when reaching out to your customers as Amazon prohibits unsolicited emails to customers except if it has to do with customer service or order fulfillment. Below are some tips you might want to keep in mind when contacting an unhappy customer:

1. Do not contact a customer offering a discount, promotions, or other rewards other than a refund. But,
2. Do not offer a refund in exchange for removing negative seller feedback. It’s okay to ask them to remove the feedback but not with a promise of a refund.
3. No marketing communications of any kind.
4. Do not offer any compensation or reward in exchange for seller feedback.
5. Respond to the complaint as soon as possible. Unhappy customers tend to be more irritated as time goes by without any resolution.
6. Sincerely apologize and acknowledge that you were at fault – even if you’re not. Never blame the customer even if it’s actually their fault. It will make the situation much worse.
7. If the customer does not respond which will probably leave the negative feedback on your account, the last thing you can do is to leave a comment/response on their negative feedback. This will let other customers know that you made an effort to make things right.

Final words. Don’t sweat it too much.

Even if a high seller feedback rating is essential to your success on Amazon, there’s only much we can do to ensure we don’t receive negative feedback. If a time comes that you receive that not so good feedback from an ungenerous customer despite doing the best you can and chasing them to make things right, learn to live with it and move on.

Be sure to deal with issues as promptly as you can and learn from your mistakes to ensure the same thing won’t happen again. A few bad ratings here and there won’t automatically ruin your overall rating. Moreover, a perfect score might sound unreal to customers. So don’t be too overwhelmed with a few critical feedback.

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