Originally published Febuary 23, 2023
Last updated May 19th, 2025
There are few worse feelings in the world than seeing a 1 or 2-star review for a product you’ve spent weeks and months developing and thousands of dollars to get live on Amazon. A single bad review can affect your overall rating, hurt your conversion rates, and make it harder to grow your Amazon business. For Amazon sellers, protecting your brand’s reputation and increasing sales through positive reviews is a critical part of long-term e-commerce success.
What’s worse is that over time Amazon has taken away the ability for sellers to engage with customers who leave negative reviews.
They’ve taken away comments on reviews so you can’t offer rebuttals, they’ve made it more difficult to find contact information for buyers who leave negative reviews, and more over time. Managing your Amazon account through Seller Central is more critical than ever to stay aligned with Amazon’s guidelines. Smart inventory management and review request automation can help online sellers streamline workflows and avoid unnecessary friction with customers.
But recently, Amazon has thrown sellers a few bones and allowed for the ability to combat negative reviews left by customers.
In this post, we’ll go over the different review types on Amazon and ways to fight negative reviews that work.
The Two Main Review Types on Amazon
You can receive two kinds of feedback on Amazon: Seller feedback and Product reviews. Understanding the algorithm behind Amazon product reviews can help sellers improve optimization and stay ahead in the Amazon business space.
The one most sellers care about, product reviews, are vital to search rankings and conversion rates on Amazon, and seller feedback (while important) isn’t something sellers actively try to build, but it is good for both to get 5-star ratings consistently. A high star rating is crucial for ecommerce success. When running online businesses, positive reviews serve as social proof and are essential for improving product listing visibility.
Let’s look at each one in depth.
Product Reviews on Amazon (What You Want Most)
Product Reviews are what you want for your products; they are the star rating people see whenever they view your products or various products on a search results page. Customer reviews play a major role in winning the Buy Box and influencing potential customers to make a purchase.
These stars and star rating are the average of all a product’s reviews. Verified purchase tags and honest reviews significantly influence buyer decisions. By tracking review metrics and A/B testing changes, sellers can identify which updates lead to more Amazon sales and engagement.
It can’t be overstated how important product reviews are.
They are a huge factor in organic ranking and serve as a measuring stick for prospective customers to see if your product is worth buying compared to other offerings or even worth purchasing at all. An optimized Amazon listing with relevant keyword research can improve product discoverability and lead to more positive reviews.
Consistent bad reviews can kill a product and drop sales to 0, forcing a seller to discontinue that specific product. That’s why optimizing your Amazon product page and building 5-star Amazon reviews is a must for any serious seller.
The goal here is obvious: Get as many 5-star reviews as possible for your product line while avoiding lower-star reviews and not breaking Amazon’s guidelines when requesting customer reviews.
With that in mind, sellers will want as many 5-star reviews as possible, so let’s explore a few ways to achieve that.
How to get 5-star reviews (and prevent 1 & 2-star reviews)
1- Make an Excellent Product
This is the ultimate way to get consistent 5-star reviews for your product. Simply make a great product at an appropriate price.
Contrary to what you might have read online, products do get reviews by virtue of simply being great products, with no hacks or special campaigns required
Hallmarks of an excellent product:
- Build quality. The product in hand feels well-constructed and not “cheap.” This goes a long way to fostering 5-star reviews since Amazon has a reputation for “low-quality” products that look attractive in the listing.
- Packaged well. Products in attractive and robust packaging will deter customers from leaving a one star review because of damaged units.
- Your listing matches what the customer receives. Many products get 1-star reviews due to the customer expecting something that the listing appeared to promise but doesn’t actually come with. Don’t over-promise what you’re delivering, and don’t go crazy with the freebies, as those introduce too many variables that can lead to bad reviews.
- It solves a pain point competing products don’t. The secret sauce on Amazon is to offer something different and valuable that customers will appreciate that your competitors currently don’t offer. This leads to many “Finally, I got what I was looking for!” 5-star reviews.
- Isn’t TOO expensive. While you don’t have to be the lowest-priced option to sell on Amazon, you can’t price things too high because then people will complain via negative reviews about how expensive your product is and didn’t solve all their problems in life.
Simply put, make good stuff with great attention to detail, and you’ll get consistent 5-star reviews for your Amazon FBA product.
2- Request a review (without angering Amazon)
Asking for a review is a popular way to boost the rate at which you get Amazon product reviews, but it’s a risky tactic.
Why is it risky?
One main reason is that if you ask for a review in a way Amazon disapproves, you can put your Amazon account at risk. Another is that if you go too far with the request, you can end up getting a negative review instead of a good review.
Some examples of bad ways to ask for reviews:
- Using “emotional” language when requesting a review… messages like “Your review helps our small family business against large faceless corporations” or “This is a business run by a single mom supporting three kids, so I appreciate a good review” or even simply asking for five stars instead of a non-biased review. This is against Amazon guidelines and can shut you down.
- Offering incentives for reviews. That means offering cash, gift cards, or more products for favorable reviews. Obvious, but a lot of big-name brands on Amazon were shut down because of this.
Approved ways to ask for reviews:
- Amazon’s Vine Review System. While you can get sales and even reviews on new products with no reviews at all, Amazon does offer a program called Vine for registered Brands to offer your new product for free to approved reviewers on Amazon. When they leave a review, it will have a unique “Vine Voice” label.
- Push the “Request Review” button in Seller Central. When viewing your Orders (login required to Seller Central to view the page), you can view any recent order that has been delivered and hit “Request a Review”. Note that the review request is done through email and cannot be edited by you in any way.
Click an order to see the Request a Review button
- Ask for a review on the packaging. If you decide to ask for a review on your packaging, don’t use anything that could be considered emotional language or incentivize customers in any way. A simple request to review on Amazon somewhere in your packaging will suffice.
- Automate review requests. Apps like Helium 10 and Jungle Scout will offer customizable ways for sellers to send review requests at a specific time to customers, but remember the risk of requests. Going too far can have the opposite effect of what you want.
So that’s how to get good reviews flowing to your products, but what happens when you get a negative product review?
How to fix negative product reviews
First things first:
If you haven’t yet, get your brand registered on Amazon. Otherwise, you won’t have access to review management tools in Seller Central.
While Amazon doesn’t tell you when you receive a negative product review, you can use software like Helium 10 to notify you whenever one pops up. Even if you don’t pay for any account plan levels, you can use their free tier to at least have those alerts active.
If you ever receive a bad review, Amazon gives Brand owners a great option to fix it:
Go to your Seller Central main menu, and when you’re there, hover over the “Brands” menu:
You can see in the sub-menu of Brands there’s an option called “Customer Reviews.” Click it.
Once you’re in, you’ll see all the recent reviews your products have been receiving.
Simply viewing all of your reviews isn’t exactly helpful, but you can filter it down to 1 and 2-star reviews only with the “Star Rating” button:
When you see all of your recent reviews that are one or two stars, from here, Amazon allows you the option of sending a premade message allowing the customer to get a full refund of their purchase, or you can reach out to them and ask if there’s anything else you can do to help remedy the cause of the negative review.
This is extremely helpful as many customers on Amazon “opt-out” of email messaging from sellers, so there was no way to communicate with them.
However, the new Brand Customer Reviews menu allows you to bypass that and send emails to those that have opted out, which is extremely helpful.
While you can request that Amazon remove a negative review if it doesn’t follow guidelines, you will likely get your case denied multiple times and even potentially get in trouble with Amazon, so it’s best you take matters into your own hands and reach out to customers yourself now that you have the ability to.
Seller Feedback on Amazon
As we mentioned earlier, seller feedback differs from product reviews and is all about you and your Amazon account.
While customers can leave reviews for your products, they can also review you as a seller.
This means that if a customer is happy or unhappy with anything about your Amazon seller account that has nothing to do with your products (customer service, shipping speed, communication, etc.), they can leave a review.
But most of the reasons for leaving seller reviews are based on fulfillment. Now that FBA (products fulfilled by Amazon) has almost completely overtaken FBM (products fulfilled by the merchants), seller feedback has become deprecated and obsolete (but not completely!).
Still, it’s important to maintain high reviews here, as consistent negative seller feedback can result in action from Amazon against you.
How to get positive Seller Feedback on Amazon and remove negative feedback
Many customers leave seller feedback thinking it's a product review. If it’s a good review, great. But if it's a complaint about the product and not your performance, Amazon may remove it if you request it.
To request feedback removal, go to the Feedback section in the Performance tab of Seller Central. Locate the 1-star review and request removal if it violates the guidelines.
Once in the feedback section, you can find a 1 or 2-star review and request it is stricken from your overall rating because it doesn’t follow Amazon Guidelines:
If the feedback is a product review or relates to fulfillment, then your removal request will likely go through. If it wasn’t and Amazon doesn’t deem your request removal legitimate, they will deny it, and if you repeatedly request removal for valid feedback, they might even take action against you, so just be careful here.
Conclusion
With this guide, you now have a step-by-step tutorial to handle every type of review on Amazon, from product reviews to seller feedback. Whether you want to get more 5 star reviews, combat a one star review, or make sure you are following Amazon’s guidelines when requesting reviews, you now have the tools.
Use platforms like Helium 10 and Jungle Scout to automate your requests, monitor for negative reviews in real time, and build a library of 5-star Amazon reviews that improve your overall rating and support long-term growth in your ecommerce business.
The bottom line: honest reviews from verified purchases drive success. Optimize your Amazon product page, request reviews the right way, and maintain great customer service to thrive in today’s Amazon marketplace.
