Getting Amazon Reviews After Amazon Bans Incentives for Reviews
As we wrote earlier this week, Amazon has updated their policies and banned the practice of offering discounted/free products in exchange for reviews. As Amazon sellers, we use that method for some of our products so we’ve been busy figuring out what to do. We’ve brainstormed a few ideas, which we’ve outlined below. Since the initial announcement, we’ve had a chance to think more about what this means moving forward.
Immediate Actions & Purpose of Reviews
When we heard the news yesterday, we immediately ended all active promo campaigns. Amazon can act swiftly and without warning. Since we hadn’t heard anything from AMZTracker, the review generation service we used, we wanted to be on the safe side.
Before we started making a plan of how to proceed, we reminded ourselves our two goals with our review promotion campaigns. The first was to generate more sales by generating social proof. We believed if people had a chance to see and try our products, they would be impressed, and write positive reviews. We have truly encouraged honest feedback, as it helps us to improve our product, but we recognize discounts have been proven to result in higher ratings.
The second goal was to use the promotion campaigns to sell some overstock inventory. There weren’t all that many pieces and we had didn’t plan to restock them. The reviews campaigns were a way of turning them into a small amount of cash, building sales volume, generating feedback, etc. In these cases, the reviews weren’t really important.
With those goals in mind, we listed a few options for moving forward:
Continue Using Review Generation Sites
Most review generation services (ReviewKick, AMZTracker, Snagshout, etc) have stated they will continue to allow sellers to send promo codes, but that customers are not required or even recommended to leave reviews. The services are reinforcing the benefit of sales volume to boosting future sales, regardless of whether reviews are left. With a good email automation campaign, you should still be able to get a decent number reviews.
We’re hesitant to continue using a service that is heavily focused on reviews from the customer-side, at least immediately. We’re going to keep an eye on this, but are holding off running more promos through AMZTracker for now.
Offer Promo Codes on Product Pages
The review generation sites typically did a good job of getting reviewers to follow through with posting a review after purchase. Without the requirement or encouragement for buyers to leave a review, the conversion rate of buyers to reviews is likely to go down. There’s still going to be some reviews, and sales volume alone can help boost Amazon rankings.
With that in mind, we decided it would be worth trying to offer similar discounts via promo codes available directly on the product page. There is a chance that Amazon will consider the low price in relation to product rankings, making it hard to increase drastically later. We’ve selected a small group of products to test this idea. The prices are higher than our previous review campaigns for now, as we believe organically-interested customers will be willing to pay a higher price.
Set Sale Prices
This is essentially the same as the above idea. Instead of offering a promo code on the product page, the sale price is already adjusted to a low price and no code is needed. The sale price should be more apparent, and doesn’t require a customer to be on the product page. However, Amazon doesn’t always show the regular price, which would make it harder for a customer to realize the value of the deal.
We have the same concerns regarding future pricing increases, so we’re testing this out with a small group.
Drive Sales from Outside-Amazon
Another option is to drive sales from a site or email list outside of Amazon. Review generation sites have essentially become sales generation sites listing items offered at a very low (or free) price.
There’s not a shortage of people that want things at a low price. We have a few lists of people that have shown interest in specific products, as well as a list of people interested in discount products. We’re experimenting with reaching out to them with unique codes, as well as simply driving them to the pages setup with on-page codes or sale prices.
Drive Sales from Amazon Ads
If you’re not already using Amazon Ads, it’s worth trying out. We’ve had good results in terms of ROI, but haven’t been able to drive significant traffic. You may have better luck. This may work well in conjunction with on-page promos and sales prices.
Summary
Although we used the discount-for-reviews tactic, we don’t believe the change is significant. We used this as a chance to re-assess how we were using reviews, and come up with other ways of achieving the same goals. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be testing some of the ideas above.
Did Amazon’s change effect your business? Leave a comment to let us know what you’re doing.
