Anyone that’s sold on Amazon knows that one of the worst feelings in the world is waking up to see that some absolute Karen has left you a scathing 1 star review on your product listing. Whether it’s your first negative review or your 50th, it doesn’t matter. You’d want to remove negative reviews for a product that you’ve created because it feels like someone’s decided to go out of their way and personally attack you.
As someone that’s sold on Amazon for over 4 years and sold hundreds of thousands of units, I’ve had my fair share of 1 star reviews from people that just love to moan and complain, even if it’s over something incredibly minor. And whilst I’ve had to take a lot of those reviews and accept them, I have been successful in getting a number of them removed by Amazon because they’re not compliant with Amazon’s community guidelines, which I’ve since become very familiar with. Amazon will often pick non compliant reviews up and automatically remove them, but often, quite a few will slip through the net.That’s why it’s important that you’re aware of what’s allowed when it comes to reviews and what’s not. If you receive a review that you think shouldn’t have been allowed, then the good news is that you can appeal to remove negative reviews on Amazon, which I’ll be discussing in this article.
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OK, so let’s now go through some of the reasons that you can use in order to get those pesky 1 star reviews removed on Amazon.
- Mentioning A Competitor
Did you know that if you receive a review on your listing that specifically mentions a competitor by name, then that gives you grounds for its removal? Amazon’s community guidelines state that “Creating, modifying, or posting content regarding a competitors’ products or services” in a review is strictly forbidden. So, take a look through your 1 star reviews and see if any of them mention a competitor’s brand by name. If they do, then you should be able to get it removed.
- Not Reviewing The Product
“Customer Reviews and Questions and Answers should be about the product. Feedback about the seller, your shipment experience, or packaging can be shared at www.amazon.com/feedback or www.amazon.com/packaging.”
Amazon states that customer reviews should be about the product, and not about the seller, shipment experience or packaging. If the review that you’ve received talks about the wrong product turning up, about the packaging being damaged, or about something so generic that it doesn’t actually mention the product itself, then it’s not compliant with Amazon’s community guidelines and can therefore be removed.
- Crowding / Bullying
“Don’t attempt to drown out other people’s opinions, including by posting from multiple accounts or coordinating with others.”
If you have received a series of reviews from the same person or company or you believe that a number of bad reviews have been left in a co-ordinated attack, then this is an obvious breach of Amazon’s community guidelines, which state that reviews should “not be left to drown out other people’s opinions, including by posting from multiple accounts or co-ordinating with others”. This is something that happened to me a few years ago, and whilst I was successful in getting the reviews removed, it did require a lot of proof from me to substantiate my claims that I was being attacked by the same person. If you’re going to go down this route to getting reviews removed, you’ll need to have a decent amount of evidence that demonstrates to Amazon that you’re being attacked.
- Mentions Pricing
“Comments about pricing, product availability or alternate ordering options are also not about the product and should not be shared in Customer Reviews or Questions and Answers.”
Every product review that is published on Amazon’s site should be about the functionality or usefulness or a product, and not about how much it costs. If you’ve received a bad review that is exclusively about the cost of the product, which includes whether the reviewer thinks its too expensive, then once again, you should be able to report this to Amazon to get it removed.
- Defamation
“Don’t post content that is libelous, defamatory, harassing, threatening, or inflammatory.”
Amazon’s community guidelines state that reviews cannot be harassing, threatening or inflammatory. What words fall under the scope of those terms is probably not clearly defined. If you find that a review you’ve received contains a swear word or something that some people may consider a swear word, such as “crap”, then you might be in luck when you report it in order to get it removed.
How to get Amazon remove negative reviews
If you’ve received a review that you think doesn’t comply with Amazon’s community guidelines and should be removed, then there are two ways to go about it. Amazon’s official guideline states that you should just scroll down to the review on your listing and press the report button. Whilst I’ve seen some people have luck with this method, I don’t like to use it myself as you won’t get any feedback or confirmation from Amazon over whether they’ve approved or rejected your request.
Instead, the method that I like to use is to email Amazon’s community help team through community-help@amazon.co.uk or community-help@amazon.com, with:
- Links to the review
- A few bullet points on why the review should be removed
- To help support the claim even further, you must provide the excerpt from Amazon’s community guidelines that explains why the review should not have been published, so find the specific wording yourself or quote the wording that I’ve used in this article.
Fortunately, the community help team are pretty responsive, and they’ll let you know their decision over request usually within 24 hours. If it’s accepted, you’ll simply be told that they’ve removed the review, and if it’s rejected, they’ll often just tell you that the content doesn’t infringe their guidelines.
If you’re not successful in removing the review and you still disagree with their decision, it’s always worth trying again to see if you can get somebody else that agree with you, but if you do that, my best advice is to try and include more evidence or reasoning as to why the review should be removed.
If you’re still not successful in getting a 1 star removed, then don’t beat yourself up too much. Having received plenty of bad reviews over the years, I can say with confidence that unless your product is a real stinker and it’s consistently getting 1 star reviews over and over, a few bad reviews are not going to break your product’s chances of success. Customers realize that no product is perfect, and some of them don’t even bother looking at the review score. I know that because I once received a 1 star as my very first review, and amazingly, I still managed to make sales and eventually recover.
So, don’t beat yourself up if you get a bad review. Try to see if you can get it removed by Amazon using the methods mentioned in this article, and if you can’t, see if you can ensure that it doesn’t happen again by incorporating the customer’s feedback or suggestion into your next order, and then focus on getting more 5 star reviews.
If you want to learn more about my journey (highs and lows), check out my post on my progress here.
If you want to learn how you can create an Amazon FBA business yourself, then check out my free training where I’ll teach you everything you need to launch your first product on Amazon and scale to $5,000+ in monthly profit.
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