Have you been monitoring your Amazon account? Particularly the product reviews?

You should be. Monitoring your account is the only way you can keep tabs on what is going on with your products sales. You want to do that you can make adjustments and tweaks to your products, prices, and listings to maximize your Amazon FBA sales. If you’ve been monitoring your account, you may have noticed that some of your product reviews have been removed by Amazon. What’s up with that? Amazon has been cracking down on people who are getting reviews in illegitimate ways, and even removing some that seem questionable. In this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott is going to walk you through what’s going on, why it’s happening, and what you can do to safeguard yourself and your reviews as best as you can.

Here’s how you should think about those “base reviews” you get during your product launch phase.

The reviews you push to get by giving away free or discounted products have one purpose only - to give your product some social proof or legitimacy so when sellers see your product, they feel good that it’s legitimate and good quality. That way they’re more prone to buy it. Once they do, you should be following up with them to encourage reviews from them, the purchasers of your product who paid full price. At that point you’ll be building on top of your base reviews with organic reviews. When you do this right, it won’t matter if Amazon comes in and removes some of those initial base reviews you got. Why? Because you’re replacing them with organic ones - which is exactly what Amazon wants you to have most of all. Listen to this episode to find out what Scott recommends when it comes to your base Amazon product reviews.

Here’s the biggest reason Amazon is removing product reviews

It’s not because you gave the products away for free in exchange for a review. It’s not because you discounted a product in exchange for a review. It’s because the person who reviewed your product did not disclose that they received the product for free in exchange for an honest review. That’s it. So when you give those products away or discount them, make sure you’re stressing to the recipients that they MUST include a disclaimer similar to that when they leave a review for the product on Amazon. If they don’t, it may not only wind up not helping you, it could actually hurt you by the loss of that review. It would also turn out to be a waste of their time, so generously given. Listen to this episode to learn exactly how Scott recommends you stress this issue with your potential reviewers.

There’s also a theory about an additional reason product reviews are being removed by Amazon.

It has to do with what have come to be known as “review groups.” You know what they are, groups on Facebook, or some forum where people agree to exchange reviews on products. It’s a simple idea and it’s worked for a while, but many people who have a lot of experience on Amazon believe that Amazon is starting to target those groups somehow and are removing reviews that they believe may have come from those kinds of groups. It makes sense, and it’s a review tactic that could become more and more risky as months pass. Scott’s going to cover this issue in depth and give you his recommendation about review groups, so give this episode a listen.

What are the top 5 things you should do to ensure your product reviews on Amazon stick?

That question is at the heart of what Scott covers on this episode. He wants you to know how to make the most of your efforts to get reviews, so he’s holding nothing back. Here they are: (1) Understand the purpose of initial launch reviews. (2) Have reviewers include proper disclaimers. (3) Don’t rely on review groups. (4) Focus on organic sales (Pay Per Click / Pricing Strategies) (5) Use a good follow-up sequence to encourage organic reviews. Listen to this episode of The Amazing Seller to hear Scott’s explana...