How to Remove NEGATIVE Seller FEEDBACK on Amazon!

Welcome back!

It has been a super busy week for me, so, today, we’ll have a short and to-the-point post about a little-known feature/Amazon rule that not many people are aware of: Seller Feedback Removal! Yes, you can quickly and easily remove most of the neutral and negative feedback you receive on Amazon simply by filling out a short form!

Before we get into that, I just wanted quickly to share some news about my Amazon FBA US journey. If you’re not familiar with my monthly posts, you can read more about it here. I’m starting to regret the decision to begin development of a new version of the product. Why? Take a look at today’s sales data for the existing version of my product:

30 sales TODAY alone! With no ad spend whatsoever!

That’s obviously a record day, but I wonder what is going on here? Will it continue growing like that? Will days like these become the norm? That wouldn’t be bad at all because 30 sales a day means I’m netting $100 a day or $3k per month. The problem is that I probably won’t find out because I will run out of stock very quickly at this rate! At the same time, I have already started working on my new, bigger version of this product. Arghhh! So many decisions to make! I will put more details and results in my August 2018 Amazon FBA update post, which will go live early in September.

I don’t know exactly how this will work out, but, once again, the whole situation just reminded me to be more patient when it comes to results, rankings and sales on Amazon. To some extent, my monthly update posts put an unnecessary pressure on me because I want to share new things with you, make good progress, show that sales are improving, etc., but you often just have to sit it out and wait a few months to see whether something will work or not.

I often receive emails from people asking me something like:

“Hi Andrew! My listing went live two days ago. I created an Auto PPC campaign but there have only been few clicks and my listing is not shown in the first pages of the search results. What should I do?”

You should do nothing.

A few days is far too early to make ANY decisions. Sometimes it takes few weeks for Amazon to even properly index and list your product in the search results, so forget about achieving good rankings in such a short period of time. Amazon wants to see early CTRs and conversion rates to determine how good or bad your listing is. Remember, it is an ALGORITHM/ROBOT that you’re dealing with here—not a human being who manually looks at and evaluates your listing!

So, let’s all strive to be more patient and not panic if our early results are not what we expected them to be. This applies even to experienced sellers, and my Amazon US experiment and expansion plan almost proves that point perfectly. I say “almost” because it is still too early to know for sure how this will play out (see—yet again, it needs more time!), but the underlying principle is the same.

Ok, let’s get started on today’s main topic…

Seller Feedback Removal Process on Amazon

Most Amazon sellers are obsessed with product reviews—and for a good reason! They are super important for your listing rankings and conversion rates. On the other hand, seller feedback is often overlooked because it is not that important. True.

But we shouldn’t forget that Amazon still uses this metric for ranking purposes and for general monitoring of the health of your account. Too much negative feedback could actually put your whole account at risk—no matter how positively your individual listings or products are reviewed.

In general, if you sell high-quality products and use FBA for fulfilment, you will have very few issues with feedback. My own feedback score is 99% when we look at lifetime ratings, just like with this account:

This means that I get less than 1 negative or neutral feedback out of every 100.

But do I?

Actually, no. In reality, it’s more like 2 or 3 negative or neutral feedbacks out of every 100, but I get the majority of them removed. It’s not that I’m happy to receive bad feedback, but you know how some buyers are. They complain about late delivery, for example, when I have nothing to do with it, or they simply did not read the product description properly. Either way—and luckily for us—we can easily get most of these bad feedbacks removed.

Amazon themselves says that, in general, they DO NOT remove seller feedback UNLESS:

• The feedback includes obscene language.
• The feedback includes seller-specific, personally identifiable information.
• The entire feedback comment is a product review.

While I haven’t had any experience with the first two situations (yet), the last one is actually very, very common! I’d say that 80% or 90% of negative or neutral feedback that I have received are actually product reviews OR something to do with order fulfillment/FBA.

Amazon also says that they will strike-through feedback in the following cases:

• The entire feedback comment is regarding fulfilment or customer service for an order fulfilled by Amazon.
• The entire feedback comment is solely related to delayed or not received deliveries, for orders delivered on time by the seller, with tracking, using Buy Shipping.

Strike-through simply means that the feedback text itself stays in place but it’s not counted towards the seller’s overall feedback score and metrics. So other people can still read it, but it won’t affect your account in any way.

So, basically, Amazon will remove or strike-through the seller feedback if it’s actually a product review OR if it’s related to an FBA issue. Which basically means almost every single time! 🙂

All you have to do to get feedback removed is follow these five simple steps:

1. Click on Help > Contact Us
2. Select Selling on Amazon Issue
3. Customers and Orders
4. Paste your order number and click on Next.
5. Select Customer Feedback Removal Request and click on Next!

And that’s it!

In most cases, you will get an INSTANT result for this action. The feedback will either be removed, you will get a strike-through, or your feedback removal request will be denied. Amazon has built an algorithm for this process. Previously, it was all manual, human decisions, but it is now done automatically and instantly based on the WORDS contained in the feedback as well as other information the customer has left when the feedback was written (for example, if there was an issue with delivery, etc.).

What matters is that this is a super QUICK and easy process, and it is something you should do for EVERY neutral or negative feedback you receive! You have nothing to lose, and sometimes I even wonder why the feedback was removed! 🙂 Do it for every bad or neutral feedback you receive and you too will have an amazing overall lifetime feedback score!

I really hope this information will help new Amazon sellers, as well as more seasoned pros who have possibly forgotten that this function existed.

I would also like to point out that I always analyse any negative feedback to see if they make a valid point on my product’s quality or the listing itself—even if I get it removed. If a customer is not happy with the order, I’m not happy either. In most cases, I contact customers who leave bad feedback and offer them a straight refund. You may not want to do that if you sell something expensive, but for cheap items, you shouldn’t think twice.

Ok, that’s it for today! Enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend, and I will be back next Thursday with a rather interesting post about 3D printers. Stay tuned for that! 🙂