Negative Feedback: What's Your Action Plan?
Hello Sellers,
Let's talk about negative feedback. Negative feedback is a reality of selling on Amazon. We're opening this discussion to help selling partners learn proven strategies from each other. Your shared experiences will help fellow sellers better handle negative feedback and also provide us with important details on how successful sellers are navigating it.
💭 Share your experiences:
1. What steps do you take when receiving negative feedback?
2. Have you successfully had negative feedback removed ?
3. What communication methods have worked best with dissatisfied buyers?
4. What strategies have worked for you?
ℹ️ For more information check out How to resolve or respond to buyer feedback
Share your best practices in the comment below, and don't forget to upvote or flag replies "most helpful reply"!
Looking forward to your insights!
- Joey
Negative Feedback: What's Your Action Plan?
Hello Sellers,
Let's talk about negative feedback. Negative feedback is a reality of selling on Amazon. We're opening this discussion to help selling partners learn proven strategies from each other. Your shared experiences will help fellow sellers better handle negative feedback and also provide us with important details on how successful sellers are navigating it.
💭 Share your experiences:
1. What steps do you take when receiving negative feedback?
2. Have you successfully had negative feedback removed ?
3. What communication methods have worked best with dissatisfied buyers?
4. What strategies have worked for you?
ℹ️ For more information check out How to resolve or respond to buyer feedback
Share your best practices in the comment below, and don't forget to upvote or flag replies "most helpful reply"!
Looking forward to your insights!
- Joey
Seller_SyPGXj255C19X
1. What steps do you take when receiving negative feedback?
First, I contact the customer to try and find out the root cause. However, MOST..as in 95% do not ever answer. The 5% that do are easy to handle and provide a solution for.
Then for the 95% who do not answer I ask Amazon to remove it.
2. Have you successfully had negative feedback removed ?
Yeah, sure who hasn’t. But the annoying ones are the ones that do not get removed due to trigger words used in the review where Amazon will automatically deny.
3. What communication methods have worked best with dissatisfied buyers?
The best communication method would be to find out a neat way to say, “please remove your feedback and you can take advantage of us where you get to keep the product and a full refund.” Of course, you can’t say that in those terms…it's against Amazon's policy. You simply provide excellent service and let the customer know I would like the opportunity to change their negative experience into a positive one.
4. What strategies have worked for you?
It’s not really a strategy. Most feedback left for FBA orders are removable unless it contains trigger words. And if that’s the case you contact the customer hoping they are the 5% who reply. For the 95% who do not reply, you ask Amazon to remove which they will not do if there are these “trigger” words in the FB that they don’t like. And that is the negative FB you get stuck with affecting your score for a year.
It also doesn’t help that, for me anyway, I get about 1 feedback per roughly 450 orders. And unhappy people are more determined to leave seller FB.
34 replies
Seller_QeFe6GpYlfyoK
Usually I look at it, say "This is a lost customer and has absolutely nothing to do with me or my products" (think "AMAZON left my gate open and my dog escaped" or "The sand paper didn't stick" where the item they ordered from you was not sand paper"), I click the request removal button, it gets denied, I argue with seller support, it gets removed, and I move on with life.
Seller_ctlHhuYQK8UHO
With all the tools at Amazon's disposal, making sure that feedback is correctly attributed should not be this hard. I also just read the thread of a seller getting hit with numerous 1-star product reviews... and again, I wonder, how does Amazon do such a poor job of controlling this?
For starters, with product reviews (yes I know this thread is not about that) allowing reviews from non-purchasers should never be allowed.
Seller_kWzASERYhgus6
My products are a lot like food. Some people gonna like em, some are not. There is not much I can do. There is no way to respond to product reviews, so they just sit there. Most times, negative seller feedback is completely about the products, customers just put it in the wrong place. The bot seems pretty accurate when requesting removal of the product-only feedback.
I really love to check how the AI interprets product reviews, incorrectly assigning negative or positive attributes to reviews and picking up on ONE WORD someone used 2 years ago to incorrectly summarize the reviews of my product.
Seller_LuY7EhG6PfzN5
Ignore it since its usually bunk and Amazon won't do anything regardless of how clearly untrue, unrelated to anything to do with what they bought from us or just straight up fraud.
Seller_SyPGXj255C19X
1. What steps do you take when receiving negative feedback?
First, I contact the customer to try and find out the root cause. However, MOST..as in 95% do not ever answer. The 5% that do are easy to handle and provide a solution for.
Then for the 95% who do not answer I ask Amazon to remove it.
2. Have you successfully had negative feedback removed ?
Yeah, sure who hasn’t. But the annoying ones are the ones that do not get removed due to trigger words used in the review where Amazon will automatically deny.
3. What communication methods have worked best with dissatisfied buyers?
The best communication method would be to find out a neat way to say, “please remove your feedback and you can take advantage of us where you get to keep the product and a full refund.” Of course, you can’t say that in those terms…it's against Amazon's policy. You simply provide excellent service and let the customer know I would like the opportunity to change their negative experience into a positive one.
4. What strategies have worked for you?
It’s not really a strategy. Most feedback left for FBA orders are removable unless it contains trigger words. And if that’s the case you contact the customer hoping they are the 5% who reply. For the 95% who do not reply, you ask Amazon to remove which they will not do if there are these “trigger” words in the FB that they don’t like. And that is the negative FB you get stuck with affecting your score for a year.
It also doesn’t help that, for me anyway, I get about 1 feedback per roughly 450 orders. And unhappy people are more determined to leave seller FB.
Seller_iLXnxt6JlKzbX
BEFORE buyers are allowed to leave negative feedback they should have to contact the seller, I have had a few customers leave nasty feedback when they never contacted me in anyway to try to make it right, correct the problem or send a refund! Can't fix what you don't know is broken!
Seller_K19x5S01Qcql4
The bigger issue is you are judged by the negative vs positive and not by the volume of sales vs negative feedback. In the last year out of 10,000+ orders we only received 103 feed backs with 34 negatives. The way I see it is we have had 34 dissatisfied customers out of 10,000+ orders. Amazon and the customers see it as 34 out of 103.
It is leading the Customer to believe there is a 26% chance they will have a negative experience. When in reality it is far below 1%.
Seller_ogmkwvZC9jILL
I look over our feedback every morning. If available, I'll usually try to have our customer service team engage with the customer. On occasion, I'll process a refund for the customer. Rarer still is trying to challenge the feedback (as we all know that goes into a corporate void).
I really detest getting negative feedback marked "Not a Verified Purchase". Because there is literally nothing that can be done.
We, of course, never ask for a change to the review. Though some customers do change or remove their reviews after we reach out with a solution. Some are genuinely surprised that a company takes the time to contact them.
I miss the ability to respond directly to reviews.
Seller_h1ofmykq7C5fz
Most Amazon customers, about 95 percent, do not leave seller feedback when they are satisfied with their purchase. Unfortunately, nearly every unhappy customer does.
I have been selling on Amazon for three years and have sold more than 10,000 units, but I have received only 20 seller feedback in total. Recently, this number was reduced to 14 because Amazon removed several positive feedback.
This is very discouraging, especially because the feedback that was removed included comments about fast shipping, good packaging, product quality, and excellent service. These are the exact areas that reflect seller performance, yet they are not being recognized. I respectfully request that Amazon review this policy, as it makes it very difficult for sellers like me to build a strong reputation.
Thank you
