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How to respond to bad reviews on Amazon — 7 tips for sellers

December 27, 2022
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Author: GuoJie

You may have asked yourself before:

“Are negative reviews on Amazon that important to my business?”

Let’s be honest:

Bad Amazon reviews won’t hurt you solely in a personal way. If you get a lot of negative customer feedback about your products — your overall rating drops. With that – your brand reputation gets damaged. And you’re losing the trust of your customers.

This is why staying on track with your Amazon reviews is essential if you take growing your Amazon store seriously. Amazon Review Analytics will help you stay updated respond to negative customer reviews feedback quickly and efficiently. This will show your customers that you really care about maintaining high customer service standards. At the same time – it’s a great source of knowledge to get to know and understand your customers better.

On the other hand — bad reviews are almost inevitable. Every customer has different expectations, and taking care of each one is impossible.

Is there a way to deal with negative Amazon reviews, then?

How to respond to a bad review on Amazon?

While you can’t avoid 100% of bad reviews, you can take action to keep your customer experience top tier by providing an effective response to customers’ concerns.

Let’s look at features that Amazon provides to its sellers that allow responding to customer feedback:

Contact Customer — quickly respond to bad Amazon reviews

Until December 2020, you could comment directly on each review left under your products. Unfortunately, it didn’t bring good enough results in resolving customers’ issues.

Luckily, Amazon didn’t leave its sellers hanging for too long. The service launched a dedicated platform called Contact Customer. It allows all sellers to offer their customers 1-1 interactions, regarding their negative reviews (1-star or 3-star).

The Contact Customer feature allows you to respond to bad reviews in 2 ways:

  • Courtesy refund: an offer of a full refund or a replacement item
  • Customer review: ask a customer for more information about a review

The 1st message you’ll send to the customer is not customizable — it’s a template created by Amazon. But once a customer responds to an initial email, you can write your message, without any templates from Amazon.

While it’s not a perfect solution — it achieves a higher response rate than just replying to a review in a thread. You reach your customer via email --which might help get a better response rate.

7 tips to give better responses to negative Amazon reviews

#1 Be quick with your response

The general rule here is — the sooner you reply to a customer review, the better it is for your business. Leaving a customer review for a week or two makes you look unprofessional and gives an impression you don’t care about good customer service.

That’s why you need to pay special attention to monitoring your reviews. It will make sure you’re always up-to-date with what’s happening to your business.

#2 Always apologize

Remember — it’s never a shame to apologize to your customers. Mistakes happen to all of us and stuff can go wrong even if you make sure everything’s on point.

The key here is to keep the apologies sincere, respectful and professional. Even if a specific review made you very upset — you have to refrain from being rude or aggressive while responding.

Remember — customers are always right. Even if you think you’ve done nothing wrong — there’s no hurt in saying sorry too much. On the bright side — people usually know when a customer is acting unfairly.

#3 Offer a solution

Usually, your customer complains about specific things about your product or customer experience. And that’s a fantastic opportunity to turn a mad customer into a satisfied one.

Sometimes, all you need to do is to give a hint to a customer about how they should use your product to achieve their goals. Also, don’t avoid mentioning your return policy — the cost of an unsatisfied customer can be higher for your business than the cost of a returned product.

If you’re:

  • engaged in addressing your customers’ concerns
  • answering their questions thoroughly

You’re on the best way to make your products stand out from your competition.

#4 Personalize each response

We all have seen those sleazy responses some sellers give their customers to their reviews, like:

“Sorry, you feel this way. Please contact our customer support…”

Blah, blah, blah.

1 thing you should always avoid is giving generic responses to your reviews. Don’t just copy and paste the same stuff — it will make the customer even angrier. And we want to avoid that as much as we can.

Instead, always add personal touches to the response by addressing specific concerns mentioned by the customer. It shows you’re concerned about the quality of your service and put time and effort to make it the best you can.

#5 Give ways to contact customer support

Sometimes it’s not that easy to resolve a customer’s problem.

You want to avoid dealing with the problem while everyone is watching. Ensure to provide the appropriate contact details, so your customer can get in touch with you.

The Contact Customer feature makes it easier for you — by using it, you reach out directly to the customer’s email. This gives you a better opportunity to offer compensation for poor service quality, without it affecting your future relationships with customers.

Also, don’t be too bold when offering discounts or other incentives in exchange for a positive review. Amazon has a strict policy regarding this kind of practice that may cause your account to get suspended.

#6 Don’t be afraid to make a change

We mentioned that customers are always right. But sometimes — it really IS true

Especially if you’ve noticed a pattern in the reviews you’re getting lately — there might be something you should look into.

We know that bad reviews are very frustrating — but listening to negative feedback can become valuable for your business in the long run. All the improvements you’ll make to your product development or other processes will improve your conversion rate later.

#7 Make bad reviews a minority

If your customers see a lot of good reviews about your product and just a handful of bad ones — they’re not going to be so concerned.

And sometimes — bad reviews can even work in your favour!

Let’s imagine you have nothing but positive reviews under all your products’ listings. It’s not entirely impossible — but it might seem a bit fishy, doesn’t it?

Your goal then should not be to get 100% positive feedback. Instead, aim to get many positive reviews and reach out to customers who didn’t like your products.

Each review is a great source of knowledge for you. And did you know you can easily analyse not only your reviews — but your competitors’ as well? All thanks to the Amazon Review Dataset which contains over 35 million reviews from Amazon.gives you access to this huge database and an easy analytics tool that ensures your success on Amazon. How exactly?

  • Find out which products get the most reviews — so they sell in good amounts, and which ones would require a bit more marketing effort from your side.
  • Determine the most common concerns of your competitors’ customers and address them in your offers.
  • Develop a more precise sales process by analysing the demographics of customer groups buying your product on Amazon.
Always encourage your customers to share their feedback after their purchase in your Amazon store. Make sure to read the Amazon Guidelines regarding communication with customers — stick to it and your account won’t get banned. Wanna know more? Check out our blog post about using Amazon Review Dataset!

Are you ready to grow your Amazon store?

Dealing with customer reviews is not an easy job. Yet it's essential if you want to become a successful Amazon seller. Remember to never take customer feedback too personally — a cool head and some healthy distance can take you a long way in this case!

Use Amazon reviews as a tool to improve your services and learn more about your customers, the market you’re working in and the potential niche you can target. Analyze the Amazon Review Dataset with Shulex and take your business analytics to another level!

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