How to Remove ALL Negative Seller Feedback on Amazon!

In today’s post I want to share a quick tip that I’m shocked the majority of Amazon sellers don’t seem to know about – how to remove negative reviews! And this is something that really does work 99% of the time.

But before you get too excited I’m talking about seller feedback here – NOT product reviews.

Product vs Seller Reviews on Amazon

For those who don’t already sell on Amazon, there are two types of reviews you can get for an order.

You can get seller feedback, where the customer rates you as a seller, and you can also get a product rating / review.

Now back in the eBay days seller feedback was so important – but on Amazon it really isn’t as unlike eBay you can’t even see the seller rating on a product page.

You have to go to the seller profile for that:

Product reviews on the other hand are to me the no.1 factor when it comes to your Amazon business. Why? Because they affect everything – starting with your conversion rate!

It’s doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if a customer is faced with two products at a similar price point, one rated 5* and one rated 4, they’re going to choose the 5* product… that’s just common sense.

And the knock on effect this has is huge!

A higher conversion rate means Amazon will improve your search ranking, leading to more traffic and more sales.

A higher conversion rate will also improve your ad performance, again leading to more traffic and more sales at a lower cost.

I can’t overestimate how important product reviews are for your Amazon business.

But that doesn’t mean seller reviews don’t matter at all and you can simply ignore them, not at all – I still suggest keeping a close eye on your seller feedback and removing any negative feedback when possible.

And it is nearly always possible when you’re using FBA to sell.

Which Reviews Can You Remove?

Though Amazon state that they do “not remove customer feedback even if it is unwarranted or the issue has been resolved” they also say “there are some situations when Amazon will remove or strike through customer feedback. In such situations, if your request is granted, the impact of the feedback will be removed from your feedback rating and Order Defect Rate (ODR).”

So let’s take a closer look at what these situations are:

Removal of feedback

Amazon will only remove feedback in the following cases:

• The feedback includes words commonly understood to be obscene or profane.
• The feedback includes seller-specific, personally identifiable information, including email addresses, full names or telephone numbers.
• The entire feedback comment is a product review. For example, “The Acme Super-Widget lacks the sharpness and speed of the Acme Ultra Widget.”

However, if the comment contains both a product review and feedback about your service, we will not remove the feedback. For example, “Seller’s delivery service was very slow, and the Acme Super-Widget lacks the sharpness and speed of the Acme Ultra Widget.”

Striking of feedback

Amazon might strike through feedback in the following cases:

• The order was fulfilled by Amazon: The entire comment relates explicitly to delivery experience for an order that was fulfilled by Amazon (FBA). In addition to the strike-through, the following statement will appear: This item was fulfilled by Amazon, and we take responsibility for this fulfilment experience.

• The order was shipped using the Buy Shipping service: The entire comment is related to a delayed or undelivered order, which you dispatched on time by using Buy Shipping services. In addition to the strike-through, this statement will appear: “The fulfilment issues associated with this order were not due to the seller”.

So there you have it, straight from Amazon themselves.

To sum it up, if your negative feedback is a product review, which is in my experience 80% of any negative feedback left for you as a seller is, Amazon will remove it.

And if your order was fulfilled by Amazon and the negative feedback is about the order fulfilment, Amazon will also remove the feedback (well in this case technically they strike-through it).

As there are practically no scenarios where negative feedback will be related to something other than the product or order fulfilment, that means it’s in fact quite easy to maintain a 100% seller feedback.

How to Remove Negative Reviews on Amazon

Just bear in mind that you need to request the removal within 90 days and it needs to be done via the Feedback Manager. Amazon are very explicit with this, even stating that contacting support teams via Contact Us to request feedback removal can result in account deactivation.

This seems extreme to me and I’ve never actually heard of that happening but better to be safe and follow Amazon’s guidelines here!

So simply head over to Feedback Manager within your Seller Central account. There you’ll see a list of all your recent feedback and beside each one there’ll be an Actions tab.

If you click on this you’ll get two choices: Post a public reply and Request removal.

And that’s all there is to it! As always when dealing with Amazon seller support they may sometimes answer saying it can’t be removed, even when it clearly should be. Simply reply politely stating that according to their own policy, which you can quote or link to, the feedback should be removed and 99% of the time it’ll be done.

So that’s it for today’s quick post and tip.

As always if you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear from you so email me at help@andrewminalto.com or post below and I’ll personally get back to you.

Otherwise, until next time!

All the best,
Andrew