Why It’s Important To Stay On Top of Your Seller Feedback

More often than not, buyers and sellers alike tend to misconstrue the meaning of seller feedback and underestimate its importance. Some buyers confuse it with product reviews, and even sellers who understand it don’t often have a good grasp of how it works and how it can affect their ratings on Amazon. It is important to understand the difference between seller feedback and product review so that buyers can use both systems to enhance their experience on Amazon and the seller can use both systems to improve their reputation with consumers. 

This post will focus on seller feedback but to offer a little bit of clarification, here is a brief explanation of the Amazon product review system. The product review system allows a buyer to leave a review describing the product and their experience with it so that it can serve as a guide for other customers considering the product. From the buyer’s perspective, positive reviews enhance the attraction of the product which impacts sellability metrics like interaction times, conversion rate, share rate, etc. While these are important to the seller, from the seller’s perspective, positive reviews add an additional important metric – discoverability. There are many nuances to impacting an item’s search result rank, but all other things being equal, the product with more positive product reviews will earn a higher search result rank than its peers.

On the other hand, seller feedback focuses on the seller itself. It’s a system that lets buyers describe the seller’s commitment to service, their shipping and delivery practices, their experience with the seller’s customer service team, and their overall experience buying from a particular seller while shopping on Amazon. Seller feedback guides potential customers not on what product to buy, but whether they should risk buying from a particular seller. This rating system warns customers to avoid ill reputed sellers and while positive marks won’t impact decisions much, low ratings will impact sellability adversely reducing interaction times, conversion rate, and share rate of the listing. Even highly rated products will see adverse impact on sales when sold by a low rated seller. What’s worse, however, is that while product reviews only impact 1 product’s discoverability, a poor seller rating will adversely hinder all of the seller’s items.

In this guide, we’ll explore why it is important to give regular attention to seller feedback.

1. Positive Feedback Leads to More Sales

Your reputation as a seller will be greatly enhanced if you constantly receive positive seller feedback. You will receive positive feedback when you ship on time, deliver products promptly, and provide top tier customer service when and if orders don’t follow the expected schedule. Most sellers treat customer service as a prerequisite to sell on Amazon. Successful sellers treat it as a means to improve their seller ratings. They know that paying staff to interact with customers is expensive and that customers attempt multiple interactions when they’re unhappy. Giving staff the goal of earning a 5-star feedback after each interaction often ends up costing less overall. If you keep receiving positive feedback, you are more likely to retain and even improve your sales metrics as your listings attract new customers. Unsurprisingly, data shows that sellers with high positive feedback scores also see triple or higher repeat customer sales even in categories where repeat customers aren’t the norm.

2. Negative Feedback Hurts Your Listing’s Rank

When a buyer searches for a product on Amazon, it matches the search query with the appropriate products. The results show up in ranked order, with the items Amazon’s algorithm believes are most likely to be purchased at the top. The rank order depends on a myriad of measurements but one that is often overlooked by sellers is the seller feedback rating. While its impact on an item’s search result may be lower than other metrics, seller feedback is unique in that it is one of the few metrics that sellers have a lot of control over. 

The Amazon algorithm nut may not be cracked anytime soon, but based on data collected thus far we know that there’s a correlation between positive seller feedback and earning higher search results ranking. The correlation isn’t straight forward, nothing in the algorithm is, but generally speaking higher ranked listings tend to have significantly more sellers with high positive ratings then their 3rd and 4th page counterparts, while 2nd page listings tend to feature sellers with higher positive ratings then their 4th and 5th page counterparts, and so on.

Another obvious but often overlooked relationship between seller feedback and listing rank is the drop in rank that negative seller feedback almost always causes. The issue starts with the fact that Amazon only shows product reviews in the search results page. Customers will click through to a product and only see the seller’s feedback once they’re on the page. Products with low seller feedback will see a high number of bounces (user comes in, sees low seller rating, leaves). When that number is combined with customers that choose not to buy from a low rated seller the result is a much lower conversion rate than the product deserves, which in turn leads to lower ranking. No matter how much you make up for it with optimized images, titles, and copy, listings that have high bounce rates and low conversion rates will steadily lose ranking.

All sellers compete to optimize their listing’s rank by updating copy, images, and adding videos. Successful sellers know they can improve rank by also focusing on buyers’ pain points and delivering an excellent customer experience.

3. Good Seller Feedback Protects You From Suspensions

Seller Feedback is an integral component of Amazon’s seller evaluation. Amazon’s business model relies on customers coming back and buying on their site again and again. A single negative experience can cost Amazon dozens if not hundreds of orders from a single customer’s lifetime. Amazon’s restrictive customer service policies reflect this. Their demand that sellers respond within 24-hours and their ban on contacting customers except for very few select reasons are great examples of the lengths Amazon will go to avoid a negative customer experience. Successful sellers incorporate this into their own business model and push returns and customer service expenses into the cost of doing business column. Products that lead to too high of a customer service expense are expunged from their catalog but they never let their feedback ratings drop. Sellers that try to work around the system and push back on customer complaints see their feedback score drop accordingly. The real problems happen when a seller runs into an Amazon policy violation. Most often these happen by accident, but data shows that sellers with high seller feedback generally see quicker response times and have the issues resolved favorably more often than sellers with poor feedback scores. The reason couldn’t be more obvious. From Amazon’s perspective, a seller that doesn’t care enough about customers may not necessarily be a seller they want continuing to operate on their platform.

4. Avoid the “Poor Customer Loop”

Probably the most common customer service complaint that Amazon sellers struggle with is when customers do not read the product’s description and expect something different than what they ordered. These are tough to deal with because sellers rightfully feel the issue isn’t their fault but customers don’t want to, and often can’t afford, to pay for the mistake either and demand a refund or replacement. With the exception of late shipments or poor carriers, both of which are within the seller’s control, these complaints most often lead to negative seller feedback even though they’re outside a seller’s control. 

What’s interesting is that there is a correlation between having a higher seller feedback score and having a low order defect rate (ODR). Most sellers point to the obvious link and say that a seller who is conscious of the one is often conscious of the other, and that’s true. A less obvious link, however, and one that is often overlooked, is that customers who avoid buying from low rank sellers are customers that actually pay attention to details. These customers will outright skip listings from low feedback score sellers but when they decide to buy they read descriptions and will avoid the dreaded “didn’t read description” customer service issue. Sellers with low feedback scores completely miss out on these customers. These sellers will only ever attract a “poor customer loop” and will always have a larger percent of their orders result in a “didn’t read description” type of complaint.

5. Your Chances of Getting A Buy Box Get Higher With Positive Seller Feedback

Most experienced sellers know that a higher feedback score helps you win the buy box more but it’s worth mentioning because this is not applied in a straightforward manner. The Buy Box is primarily awarded based on the offer price and the estimated delivery time to the customer looking at the listing. However, if you’ve earned negative feedback for orders on a given ASIN then you’ll find your offer doesn’t get the buy box as often as it used to. If your account earns more negative feedback overall than usual, even if from orders on other ASINs, you’ll start to experience a buy box percent loss across your catalog. These aren’t easy to track, since Amazon will show different customers different buy box options, but if you use tools to keep track of your buy box percentage you’ll notice that it gets harder to hold onto your buy box percentage when seller feedback score drops. The lower your score drops, the more aggressive you’ll need to be to earn the Buy Box. To make things worse, if you find yourself trapped in the “Poor Customer Loop” then it’ll be that much harder to climb your way back to a good feedback score.

6. Sellers With Positive Feedback Are Likely To Bag More Opportunities

Amazon is a “pay to play” marketplace, but not every seller gets the same opportunities. Daily Deals are an infamous tool worthy of multiple blog posts in their own right but not every seller will be invited to feature their items in Daily Deals at the same frequency. Amazon makes advertising opportunities, including access to Daily Deals, more readily available to sellers that maintain a high seller feedback score. This isn’t explicitly written but it’s implicit in Amazon’s seller guidelines. Amazon’s most important goal is to get customers to come back so it rewards sellers that are more likely to help them achieve that goal with more advertising opportunities. 

This advantage doesn’t just apply to special ads. Even tools “open” to all sellers like Sponsored Ads have an inherent bias in favor of particular listings and sellers. When you bid $x.xx per click Amazon takes that bid and ranks it against other sellers’ bids to determine which seller’s ad should be displayed. What many sellers need to remember is that Amazon’s bid comparison isn’t apples to apples. The Amazon algorithm will apply an adjustment to your bid, and an adjustment to every seller’s bid, and what they’ll actually compare are the adjusted bids. If your promoted item costs more than a competing ad’s comparable item then your bid will be adjusted down. If your promoted item has a higher conversion rate then your bid will be adjusted up. There are a myriad of measurements that each impact your bid up or down. Your Seller Feedback is important because it’s not just a measurement on its own, it also impacts other pertinent measurements such as bounce and conversion rates. 

If Amazon gets a click on your ad but no sale they’ll only get paid your bid, whereas if they get a click on your ad and the sale they’ll get paid your bid plus the sales commission. Your bid, therefore, needs to be so much higher that it compensates Amazon for not displaying ads on items more likely to sell. On the flip side, when your seller feedback score is high and you maintain a good conversion rate, you can afford to bid less and still win the auction to have your ad displayed because Amazon expects your ad will generate the bid plus the commission as revenue.

Conclusion

Seller feedback forms an important aspect of your journey as an Amazon product seller. Good seller feedback enhances your reputation, instills confidence in buyers, improves your rankings, translates to more sales, and leads to more advertising opportunities. On the other hand, bad seller feedback adversely impacts your listings’ ranking, drives away customers, exposes you to suspension risks, and reduces your ad budget’s effectiveness. It is super important to stay on top of your seller feedback and use any criticisms that come through to improve. Make sure that you or a manager at your company read every feedback and deploy changes to your process based on reasonable observations from customers. Delivery issues? contact your shipping carrier’s rep and work through them. Shipping late? Get your warehouse team or 3PL into a meeting and identify the pain points. Replies taking more than 24 hours? Get your customer service team a cheap but effective ticket solution.

In addition to leveraging negative feedback to improve, make sure that you dispute each and every negative feedback that shows up on your account. Amazon purposely makes this difficult for sellers to do. Their instructions to sellers is to click the “dispute” button next to a feedback and Seller Support will review it. In reality, most “dispute” submissions are relegated to an automatic deny bot and are never reviewed by an actual agent. This is done on purpose to prevent sellers from abusing the system but the result is that most sellers’ feedback rating is lower than what they actually deserve. The solution is to actively, but politely, engage with Seller Support and request that a person review each and every dispute request. The effort is time consuming and unfortunately cannot be automated because automation with Seller Support cases can lead to an account suspension. However, as time consuming as this is, it’s also very effective.

This is the part where I sell you something

Disputing each and every negative feedback is exactly what Seller Maven’s team does as part of our Feedback Removal service and the results speak for themselves. Whereas most sellers can get 2-3% of their negative feedback removed, our team regularly gets 15% – 25% of negative feedback taken off our clients accounts. Your goal should be improve your seller feedback score as much as possible, Seller Maven can help.