Review Management on Amazon: Tips and Tricks for Brand Manufacturers

Over 60% of online shoppers report that customer reviews are a key part of their decision-making process for purchases. Amazon is no exception. Reviews offer vendors a rare opportunity to connect directly with their Amazon customers. Neglecting Amazon reviews can have a serious impact on your sales. Despite the consequences, review management often tends to be neglected by many brand manufacturers.

Why are customer reviews important?

Customer reviews are the most important decision criterion for consumers when shopping online:

For potential customers, good reviews are critical when visiting a product page and deciding whether to go ahead with purchasing a product. Reviews affect the Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CR), and thus the overall performance of the product. 

However, if negative reviews accumulate, this can quickly bring down a product’s rating. Sales and traffic will, in turn, go down. The declining performance usually has a negative effect on the visibility of the ASIN in organic search results. As a result, performance usually goes down even further.

Why responding to customer reviews is necessary

Customer satisfaction comes first for Amazon. Among other things, the e-commerce giant uses a sophisticated rating system. End customers receive product information ‘first-hand’ and thus obtain a better assessment of the desired product. Amazon and brand manufacturers can also benefit from customer reviews.

Analysing and managing Amazon reviews offers many benefits, including the following:

Official comments from the brand manufacturer

Each logged-in Amazon user can respond to customer reviews. As a brand owner, you can use the official comment function and respond as a manufacturer.

Official comments offer several distinct advantages:

- Your statement appears immediately below the customer rating and is marked accordingly.

- Negative ratings are “intercepted” and mitigated for potential buyers.

- The brand acts as direct contact.

- Official comments imply customer service.

However, before responding to comments, set your desired name on Amazon. This will make you the contact person for your customers. You also need to grant permission for “Customer Interaction” on Vendor Central. Only then can you act as “manufacturer” of the evaluated product.

After inserting your chosen response in the comment field, check or click the box ‘make this my official comment.’

There is no check mark under the field? Possible causes could be:

- The required permission to interact with customers is missing.

- The interface between Vendor Central and ASIN is not working optimally. It’s best to open a case to solve the problem.

How to manage reviews on Amazon

Proper review management requires the continuous monitoring of in-depth customer reviews. Customer reviews are presented in detail only on individual product pages, which include a respective number of rating stars. This circumstance makes it difficult to keep track.

The more ASINs you manage, the harder it will be to check them daily. Based on the scope of a product portfolio, vendors should, therefore, consider a suitable software solution that recognizes and documents new reviews on Amazon. 

The goal of the entire process is to turn negative reviews into positive ones, using appropriate manufacturer responses. In the case of a negative review, it’s important to act quickly and should be addressed within 24 hours. Keep an eye on your ASINs. Only then can you react immediately. You can also attempt to transfer a discussion with a customer to a private customer service context. Therefore, the brand’s comment response should include information about customer service.

As a result of answering critical reviews, vendors help reclaim or even strengthen their customers’ trust in the brand. Additionally, any remaining scepticism on the part of the customer can be translated to concern only a particular case of that product or its delivery. For successful review management, it is essential that the customer feels taken seriously and understood.

Responding to reviews in a goal-oriented manner

You do not have to answer every review with an individual text. Instead, put together a set of standard answers. Such set responses are based on analysing and classifying previous critical reviews of ASINs of your product catalogue on Amazon.

Determine the basic problems that have been important to your customers. By identifying root causes of negative customer ratings, you can provide manufacturers with valuable insight for product development. These issues can vary depending on the product category.

Some examples include the following:

- Basic dissatisfaction with the product

- Defective product

- Inadequate quality

- Product is not suitable for the desired application

- Missing information in the content

- Inadequate functionality

Reporting reviews

In certain exceptional cases, a review can be reported to Amazon. The condition is in general that the content has nothing to do with the product.

Some examples might be reviews that concern:

- Delivery conditions (including shipping time, incomplete deliveries, packaging, deviating product quantities)

- Rate another product

- Advertising products of the competition

- Complaints about the pricing policy of Amazon

- Keep in mind: Statements about the price-performance ratio are indeed allowed, and should not be reported

To report a review, just click on the “Report Abuse” button.

Liv Odenthal is content marketing manager at Dept.