Amazon is one of the most customer-focused online stores in the world, so it will be very difficult for sellers who cannot get customer support on Amazon.
However, new sellers often make some obvious mistakes that affect their scores. These errors can cause customers to be put off from using these sellers’ services and generate negative feedback for the sellers, making it more difficult for the sellers to grow in the marketplace. Here are some common mistakes made by novice sellers.
Slow response to feedback
Managing a business can be difficult even in the best of times. When you're wearing so many hats, it's hard to keep everything in order. Unfortunately, Amazon will not sympathize with sellers because they are busy, but will expect sellers to respond quickly to feedback. Regardless of when the feedback was left, Amazon expects sellers to respond to customers within 24 hours.
Be sure to take time every day to review the feedback you receive and respond accordingly. If the item sells well, this may mean that the seller needs to hire employees in order to complete this specific task. Even if feedback doesn’t seem to require a response, it’s still appropriate to respond anyway. At the very least, take the time to confirm that the feedback is “no response required” to avoid being penalized.
Buyer
Most of the time, sellers only receive emails from buyers when they are dissatisfied. Unfortunately, this reality does not help sellers improve their feedback scores. Therefore, it is important to proactively contact buyers to encourage them to leave feedback.
A buyer may completely forget to leave a positive review for a product, or perhaps it simply doesn’t occur to him or her. Regardless, there’s no harm in tactfully asking buyers to review your performance via email. Many buyers will be willing to leave feedback after a little reminder.
Of course, Amazon does have strict operating guidelines for how sellers should communicate with buyers. Therefore, make sure you understand the guidelines and are aware of what is not allowed.
Make negative product reviews irreversible
Mistakes happen all the time, and even the best sellers get negative product reviews from time to time. At this time, the seller’s response is crucial. When buyers are dissatisfied, they seek to have the issue resolved as quickly as possible.
If the seller does this, the buyer will be very happy and will delete all negative product reviews for the seller, returning the seller's feedback score to normal. What's important is that something is done, and that the action is visible - whether that's a quick refund or sending out a replacement. Once this is done, sellers should publicly respond to reviews so that any future potential buyers know that the seller is trustworthy.
Offer Rewards
When sellers actually contact customers, they must pay attention to how they communicate with them. Amazon prohibits any form of assisted marketing or promotion. Therefore, sellers should communicate with buyers around the delivery details of specific orders.
In most cases, sellers should not offer any form of incentive to customers to persuade them to leave a positive product review or to remove a negative product review. Therefore, if a seller tells a customer that they can remove their review in order to receive a refund, this would be a violation of Amazon’s guidelines and could prompt Amazon to take action against the seller.
Do all the work manually
Managing feedback is a core part of a seller’s sales strategy, but it is also a difficult and time-consuming task. Fortunately, there are many feedback management tools available to sellers, which can help sellers track their interactions with customers and manage product reviews.
FeedbackWhiz allows sellers to see all their feedback – good or bad – and helps sellers automatically send emails to keep in touch with buyers, making it easy to manage reviews and customer interactions.
Using FeedbackWhiz, sellers can also obtain a large amount of data, which can provide them with a deep understanding of their business. For example, sellers can see all reviews for a single product Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). And if sellers see a trend developing, they can use the data to improve their service to customers.
Of course, sellers are very busy and it seems impossible to do everything, so inevitably some work will be missed. But in a customer-centric business like Amazon, it’s crucial not to miss out on responding to feedback. Whether you do this yourself or hire a full-time employee, feedback management software tools can help you avoid costly mistakes and stay ahead of the competition.
