How To Deal With Negative Amazon Feedback

Negative Amazon feedback can hurt you as an Amazon seller

We have already discussed how Amazon uses feedback to work out its Buy Box algorithm, but this is not the only reason you should concern yourself with negative feedback. We all know that customers will look at customer experiences with a product or service before they make their purchase. So, you want to keep your negative feedback to a minimum. You want your reviews to be as positive as possible to convince new customers to buy your product. If you want to build a profitable e-commerce brand you will need to take care not to sabotage your ownership of the Buy Box and to make sure that people have a generally good experience that will attract new buyers.

Reducing effect caused by a negative feedback

How can you reduce negative Amazon feedback? You can work on enhancing your customers’ experience. A simple way of doing it is to respond to customer issues by sending your feedback comments as soon as you’ve received negative feedback. However, you could be busy with a lot of important things like taking care of other aspects of your business. In which case, you may need a feedback tool that can help you monitor your Amazon sellers feedback.

There are a couple of best practices you can use to streamline your response time and reduce your risk of attracting more negative feedback.

One: Be Prompt in Leaving a Response

You have to face the simple truth about online selling. Customers have the advantage of being able to find similar products in just a couple of clicks and buying those products instead of yours. So, as an Amazon seller, you need to have an edge. You can’t have this when your product page is full of negative reviews. Thus, you need to learn how to respond to negative feedback on Amazon quickly.

Luckily, Amazon wants you to succeed which is why they share the findings of their research survey tools about Buyer-Seller Messaging Service in a documentation. They have found that customers’ messages that get a response within a 24 hour period get 50-percent less negative feedback than those that take more than 24 hours. Your responsiveness to your customer queries can improve your ratings and help attract more customers.

Amazon not only tells you about the importance of quick responses but they help by giving you advice and suggesting customer feedback tools that you can use. As a seller, you are probably familiar with the contact response time metric on your Seller Central account. Amazon displays this information so that sellers can improve their customer service. Amazon might not use the information to suspend sellers, but it uses it to gauge the overall customer satisfaction. This helps the company to offer a better service to buyers. Amazon wants sellers to improve their service because ultimately bad service is a bad reflection on Amazon itself. And we know how important the customers are to Amazon.

The bottom-line is that in order to reduce negative feedback on Amazon, you need to be more attentive to your customer and improve your customer or user experience. Respond to your customer as quickly as possible so that they know you care. While Amazon has tools to help you communicate and improve your responsiveness, you should continuously look for other tools to help you with your response time.

How to Respond Quickly Using Communication Tools Offered by Amazon

So what can a seller do to ensure they provide quick responses? Amazon has a couple of communication tools that can help speed up the process of responding to customers. A lot of sellers already use the auto-forwarded customer initiated messages that appear on the Seller Central account. When a seller responds to a customer using his or her own email inbox, there’s an automatically saved copy automatically in the “sent messages” tab in the Seller Central Account.

To be truly connected and up to date with what is going on with your customers, there is SageMailer which conveniently enables the seller to respond on the fly. Both methods bypass the Seller Central login, which means that they are not only a convenient way to communicate with your customers, but they also make sure that you save time.

Once you have confirmed that there is indeed a bad comment, you need to respond as soon as possible. There might still be a chance for you to convince the customer to revise or remove negative Amazon feedback.

How to Respond Quickly Using Feedback Tool

Sometimes, negativity seems like an inevitability you cannot escape despite your best efforts. So customers will still find something to gripe about even when their issues have been resolved promptly. There are people who will still leave the negative feedback because they are aggravated. To begin with, and they might have expected not to be disappointed by your product or service in any way. It is easy for them to do this because they have nothing to lose.

The good thing is that Amazon understands that a few negative feedbacks are not an indictment and if you are the kind of seller who takes the time to be attentive to their customer, Amazon has created an option for customers to change their minds about the negative feedback they might have already posted. Buyers have 60 days to change their minds and this could be a great time to cultivate some kind of relationship. Amazon will send you an email or text when a buyer leaves a negative feedback, and you can try your best to convince them to turn it into a positive feedback.

What is feedback tool? SageMailer is a tool that tracks feedback and alerts you so you can take quick action to remove the negative feedback.

Two: Handle Amazon Feedback Complaints Properly

If you sell on Amazon, you probably know that there are a few ways that customers can complain about your service. From direct complaints through email to public ratings and A-Z claims, customers can choose how to let you and other customers know that they’ve had a poor experience with your business. Knowing how to handle Amazon seller feedback can be a real challenge. But to make this going for you, we collected potential responses to each situation. These may not teach you how to remove negative feedback on Amazon, but these can help you assist your buyer in learning how can a buyer remove negative feedback on Amazon.

Direct Complaints

Although we all want customers to be happy when they purchase from us, sometimes we just can mix up with an order or shipment. Then, there are those customers who are always unsatisfied even when the transaction goes through without any reasonable reasons.

As far it concerns you, buyers filing a direct complaint is actually the best case scenario for sellers. Although you may have a frustrated person emailing you, the feedback will be private and not shared with the public. Additionally, a direct complaint provides you the opportunity to respond directly to the customer and try to resolve the issue before it can escalate. As a result, it’s easier for you to convince the customer to provide feedback rating better than what they initially plan to give.

Amazon customers can easily contact your business. For an open order, customers can choose the “get help with order” button and go through the steps indicated by Amazon. If your order is being fulfilled by Amazon directly through the FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) service, their fulfillment or customer service may take care of the problem without your needing to involve yourself in it. You don’t have the responsibility of addressing any Amazon FBA negative feedback.

For an order that’s already been completed, customers will have more digging to do if they want to place a direct complaint. The most common way to contact you involves finding your Amazon’s seller page and clicking the “ask a question” button. The wizard helps customers by asking a question that’s linked to an order.

A-to-Z Claims

In some cases, you may overlook a direct complaint and headed for an A-to-Z claim. If you’re not familiar with how this works, keep in mind that customer’s orders are subject to Amazon’s A-to-Z guarantee, which provides guarantees for everything – from an item’s condition to the timing of delivery, and more. A buyer may qualify their purchase for this claim in the following circumstances:

• The buyer contacted the seller directly at least once.
• The seller did not respond within two business days.
• The order meets at least one of the A-to-Z requirements listed in Amazon policies.

As an example, think about a situation where you hired a shipping manager to handle your merchant-fulfilled Amazon orders. During the training process, there might be a few orders missed, which can cause your business to miss some shipments. Customers complained, and you shipped the packages, believing that was all that was needed to resolve the problem. However, one customer was still forgotten and you later discovered an overlooked email. By the time you realized your mistake, you were past the three-day delivery date grace period, and the customer has the right to make an A-to-Z claim.

Once the customer has made an A-to-Z claim, it is going to result in some poor feedback for your business. You’ll notice when this happens because your account health dashboard reminds you of it. This is why it’s important to take Amazon feedback complaints seriously.

Public Feedback

Seller feedback falls in the gap between an A-to-Z claim and direct feedback. Keep in mind that this is actually different from product reviews. Not every customer uses the public feedback to brag about your company. Usually, it’s only when customers have a negative experience that they make the effort to share their review of your service. Positive seller feedback can happen, but it’s generally less of a priority for most customers.

How do you deal with complaints shared in public feedback? Try one of these tips:

• Address the complaint promptly. Ignoring a negative rating will only decrease your chances of eventually removing it.
• Check to see if the feedback violates Amazon’s community guidelines. If it does, you can open a case and send a removal request to Amazon. Amazon won’t remove the feedback when it does not violate their guidelines.
• If the feedback is in line with Amazon guidelines, try to resolve the customer’s complaint. You can contact the buyer directly and ask for details about their dissatisfaction. Then, you can convince them to agree to remove the feedback.
• If you’re able to resolve the problem, consider asking for negative Amazon feedback removal. Amazon allows you to do this but avoid pressuring the customer.
• Set up feedback alerts or use feedback widgets so you’ll be able to deal with any negative feedback promptly.
• By developing a method to deal with negative feedback, you can prevent any negative consequences for your reputation and help turn any complaints into good feedback.

Three: Listen and Act

Keep in mind that not all prime member and/or common customer complaints are bad for your business. According to Google Analytics, you just need to set up alerts for both negative and positive associations, so you can make positive online PR. But, of course, if you have too many negative comments, your reputation can go downhill. Spend some time to understand the sources of your customers’ complaints and create the best practices to deal with each type of complaint.

Use SageMailer to collect feedback and screen them. It is available for a 21-day risk-free trial. Sign up and see how it can improve your business.