If there is one thing we all know about Amazon, customer purchasing decisions rely heavily on a product’s ratings. That’s why Amazon launched its one-click review system last year for people to leave product feedback quickly. Encouraging customers to share their opinions about the product. Now, Amazon created a system within Seller Central where brands can send review request emails to customers directly from Amazon.
State of Customer Reviews
Before we jump into the new program, let’s take it back to October 2016 when Amazon first changed the original policy. They updated the terms whereas products could no longer get incentivized reviews. Read more on the “State of Customer Reviews” in a previous blog post on our site.
In response, a sub-industry within the Amazon ecosystem of automated review requests and feedback software companies such as FeedbackFive, FeedbackWhiz, FeedbackExpress, to name a few, were developed.
Sellers can send messages asking for a review from customers through Amazon’s buyer messaging platform. You could never use it for marketing purposes or drive traffic to your website. But, over the past years, Amazon has been putting more limitations on what these feedback software companies can do. Such as, you can only reach out to a customer twice. They are preventing customers from being harassed by sellers asking for reviews.
One Click Review
Recently, Amazon created a system within Seller Central where brands can send review request emails to customers directly from Amazon. In the past, although emails were going through Amazon’s buyer messaging platform, it said “a message from the Seller”. Now, these are one-click review opportunities. The Seller can click “review request” within Seller Central, and a message will go out from Amazon allowing customers to review a product with “one click.”
With the new system, we expect brands will receive more reviews. Amazon can optimize their site so well because they have one-click to purchase and now one click to review. In general, the review rate should increase.
How it works:
- Customer makes a purchase
- They receive an email directly from Amazon
- Customer clicks the stars directly in the email
- They are then directed to a page where they are presented with the stars. As soon as they click them, it is submitted instantly to a sellers page as a ‘rating without a written review attached’
- Customers then have the option to leave a full review should they wish however this step is not mandatory.
Our team confirmed the submission of the one-click review was on the “Review Your Purchases Page.” When you visit this page, you can see that you left a star rating and an option to leave a written review.
Limiting Customer Dialogue
What we are predicting is that Amazon will eventually shut down the concept of Sellers reaching out and requesting reviews using third-party softwares. Customers are already able to opt-out of receiving these messages so now they’ve created more hurdles for the Sellers themselves to have a dialogue with the customer unless the customer reaches out. Being that we have our own feedback software, we estimate that over 40% of customers opt-out of receiving buyer messages from Sellers.
What we foresee happening is that Amazon will stop the ability of Sellers to engage with customers. Sellers will only be able to answer questions if a customer asks and engages the seller in conversation first. They are slowly working this into their system to stop review requests from Sellers and be more controlled by Amazon.
Conclusion
Even though we built our own internal system to send buyer messages, we as a company have decided to proactively shut down our buyer messages because we foresee Amazon shutting it down anyways.
We believe one-click reviews will result in a higher purchase to review ratio. The ease of a one-click review should generate a higher “review conversion.” We saw this when Amazon’s one-click to purchase skyrocketed conversion rates on Amazon product detail pages.
In the coming months, we predict an increase in positive reviews. A study shown on Inc.com said that when a customer has a negative experience they will tell 10-15 people while only one in 10 customers will share a positive experience.
Stay tuned!
