Many people may attach too much importance to obtaining reviews, thinking that as long as they can ensure the continuous increase of good reviews, they don’t need to care too much about other aspects. The maintenance and optimization of reviews are equally important and should never be ignored! The optimization and maintenance of reviews are mainly reflected in the following three aspects.
1. No bad reviews on the home page
Comments that are ranked higher on the product details page and can be seen without clicking to turn the page are called home page reviews. The standard for judging home page reviews is that you can see them directly by scrolling down the product details page without clicking twice. This kind of home page review is also the most viewed by buyers, especially for products with lower value. Buyers may be too lazy to turn over the comments behind and will only refer to the home page reviews. Therefore, the quality of home page reviews is crucial to product conversion rate!
So what are the sorting rules for reviews? How can we display the reviews we want buyers to see? That is, reviews with more Helpful (positive feedback from buyers) can be ranked in front, and those with fewer Helpful will be ranked accordingly.
Those home page reviews are basically the reviews with the most Helpful. According to Amazon’s regulations, as long as the buyer’s account has a credit card consumption of more than $50 within one year, it has the right to click the Helpful button under the review. If we want to achieve no negative reviews on the homepage, we need to make the number of Helpfuls for good reviews greater than the number of Helpfuls for bad reviews.
2. How to contact customers to delete negative reviews
It is better to delete 1 negative review than to get 5 good reviews. As an Amazon seller, we must have the ability to handle negative reviews and minimize the negative impact of negative reviews on the product page. Next, I will share with you a way to delete buyer negative reviews through compliant methods.
First, we go to the Amazon seller backend and click the “Buyer Reviews” tab.
On the buyer’s review page, find the negative review we want to delete, click the “Contact Buyer” button on the right, and enter the “Contact Bad Review Buyer Page”.
The emails are all in a fixed format edited by Amazon, but there are two options: one is “polite refund” and the other is “buyer support”. Readers can make a choice based on actual conditions. For example, if the bad review is caused by the product itself, choose “polite refund” to contact the customer, and use full or partial refund to win favor, which will definitely be more effective; if the bad review is caused by some misunderstanding of the product by the buyer, choose “buyer support” to contact the customer and eliminate the misunderstanding through professional communication, which will be more appropriate.
In addition, it should be noted that in the process of email communication with buyers, do not mention any words related to “deleting and modifying bad reviews”. You can only use your enthusiastic after-sales service to influence the buyer who left a bad review and let him take the initiative to delete the bad review. If the buyer who left a bad review does not reply to your email, do not bother him again, otherwise there will be a risk of being complained by the buyer.
3. Star rating optimization and maintenance
Many sellers are more concerned about the number of reviews, but ignore the overall rating of the reviews, that is, the star rating. The rating of the review is more important than the number, especially now that buyers can directly choose the star rating when leaving a review, and then submit it directly, without having to write the review title and text content.
Now that we have realized the importance of star rating, we need to see what factors determine the star rating of a product. Many sellers may think that the overall star rating of a product is an arithmetic average of all individual star ratings. This understanding is wrong. If the overall star rating of a product is four and a half stars, and there is a one-star bad review, the overall star rating will be immediately pulled to four stars. If it is calculated by arithmetic average, the power of a bad review cannot be so great. Therefore, the algorithm for the overall star rating of a product is a weighted average, rather than simply taking the star rating of all reviews as an arithmetic average.
So what are the factors that affect the weight of star rating? The first is the existence time of the review. The longer the review exists, the higher the corresponding weight will be. Because Amazon will frequently delete suspicious reviews, the reviews that can be retained are naturally more trustworthy; the second is the number of “Helpful” reviews received by the review. The more “Helpful” reviews are, the more valuable the review is to consumers, and the higher the corresponding weight will be; the third is whether the review itself is a direct review. The weight of a direct review left without purchase is naturally not as good as the review left after the actual purchase.
Therefore, in addition to increasing five-star reviews as much as possible, we also need to find ways to increase the number of “Helpful” reviews (non-direct reviews) that have existed for a long time in order to optimize the overall star rating of the product. At the same time, the focus of subsequent work on increasing reviews should be on reviews with the Verified Purchase logo, rather than direct reviews with lower weights.
4. Merge international reviews
At the beginning of 2020, Amazon added a new feature to merge international reviews, which allows sellers to better expand into new sites. For example, if your product has 1,000 reviews in the United States, and you use the same ASIN to list the product in Europe and Japan, the 1,000 reviews in the United States can be directly moved over, greatly facilitating sellers to expand into new destination site markets. Amazon also wants to encourage more sellers in the United States to expand global sites by merging international reviews. A set of company information can enable global store openings, greatly reducing the difficulty for sellers to expand into new sites!