How Quality Content Impacts Amazon Reviews in Q4

Good product reviews can do wonders for your Amazon.com business. Not only can reviews build brand trust and instill confidence in your products, but they also help your products show up higher in search results and increase your clickthrough rates and sales. Because reviews are so valuable, Amazon recommends that products should have 15 or more customer reviews to be considered “retail ready.”

Amazon Updates Policy for Generating Product Reviews

When Amazon updated its Terms of Service (TOS) around ranking manipulation — specifically addressing common review generation tactics — Amazon sellers were no longer allowed to incentivize shoppers to leave reviews on their product detail pages.

Review manipulation and abuse are a universal issue on any online marketplace, and one which has long frustrated both sellers and customers on Amazon. Since Amazon explicitly prohibited incentivized reviews in October 2016, the frequency of this abuse has dropped off significantly — though it does still happen. As with any system that can be exploited for an individual's gain, there will always be cheaters who attempt to profit from circumventing the rules. For brands on Amazon, though, we've seen these tactics produce only short-term results, at best, and typically result in harsh penalties.

Why Quality Content Impacts Amazon Reviews

Amazon sellers are constantly seeking new opportunities to improve their reviews (and star rating) on the Marketplace, and there's power in high-quality creative content.

More than ever, Amazon is working to empower brands with the creative tools and features they need to establish brand equity and promote shopper loyalty. Amazon offers a multitude of branding features, including Stores, A+ Content, Premium A+ Content, Enhanced Brand Content, and video.

According to Tinuiti’s 2019 Amazon Consumer Shopper Survey, although 41.1 percent of shoppers say “price” is still the top factor in their purchase decisions, customers are increasingly considering quality content such as product descriptions and photos when making a purchase. In the past year, we saw the value of product descriptions and photos increase from 6.3 percent in 2018 to 7.7 percent in 2019.

Credit: 2019 Amazon Consumer Shopper Survey by Tinuiti

Not only do these creative features help to improve the aesthetics of brands on Amazon's Marketplace, they also provide new opportunities to drive traffic to a brand’s entire product catalog, increase detail page conversion rates, and support review generation.

Why Negative Review Prevention is Important

It’s easy to focus on generating positive reviews, but negative reviews deserve as much (if not more) attention. In fact, for products with low review counts, a single negative review can be especially damaging since it will have a great impact. Clear, honest and upfront content increases the customer's understanding of the product and its features, with the goal of reducing confusion.

For example, if you don't mention on your detail page whether a skillet can only be used safely up to 400 degrees, you’re going to get negative reviews from people who melt that product because they didn't realize its limitations.

Don’t Forget About Your Star Ratings

What many sellers don’t realize is that there's a significant impact in dropping from 3.8 stars to 3.7 stars. Essentially, that's the difference between displaying as four stars or 3.5 stars on the search engine results page (SERP).

Just take a look at the example below:

Credit: Tinuiti

You can see that the product is 3.8 stars, but the picture shows four stars.

What’s important to remember is that Amazon isn't a static entity for which you can adopt a set-and-forget strategy. The Amazon ecosystem is constantly evolving, therefore, brands must always be ready to adapt to Amazon’s latest tools and policies.

Tara Johnson is the lead content strategist at Tinuiti, the largest independent performance-based digital marketing agency in North America.