Seller Feedback on Amazon is a public rating of their overall seller performance. Often confused with product-centric reviews, seller feedback is seller-centric.
Amazon will proactively remove feedback that pertains only to the product, and not about the seller, promotions, or that contains personal information.
Feedback also allows merchants to monitor their performance in terms of packaging, shipping, response time, customer service, and overall professionalism. Customers have 90 days from the date of their order to leave their seller feedback rating and any open-ended comments they wish to include.
According to Feedvisor’s Amazon Reputation Handbook, feedback percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number, which is why the totals won’t always add up to 100%.
Amazon uses the following calculation to determine a seller’s feedback score:
Feedback score = sum of positive feedback / sum of all feedback
As a general rule of thumb, Amazon will not typically remove buyer feedback, even if it is unfounded or the issue has been resolved.
Amazon will only remove feedback if:
The comments include obscenity or profanity.
Reviews include personally identifiable data specific to the seller, such as full name, email address, or phone number.
The entire feedback review is a product review, which is more suitable for that use case, rather than a feedback review.
It’s also important to note that seller feedback scores do not transcend international marketplaces, but rather reset with each marketplace.
Why is Amazon seller feedback important?
1. Feedback provides valuable insights into your overall business performance
Positive feedback confirms areas of excellence for the seller team and store, and negative feedback reveals areas of the business that can be optimized to increase overall customer satisfaction.
In the Amazon ecosystem, which is increasingly saturated with sellers with similar products, positive feedback can be used as a competitive advantage.
2. Feedback ratings affect your ability to win a car purchase
Feedback count is the total number of buyers who have given feedback to the seller. This metric is used to accurately measure the feedback rating between sellers with a long history and a lot of feedback and newer sellers with a shorter history and less feedback.
It is also a key metric in itself - if all other metrics are equal, then sellers with higher scores are more likely to win the buy box below the seller.
Negative Feedback Rate is also one of the three metrics used to calculate the Order Defect Rate (ODR).
While this score has only a moderate impact on the Buy Box algorithm, sellers who exceed 1% ODR for a long period, orders from one to four months ago, or a short period, orders from one to two months ago, in the category are severely penalized. Ideally, this number should always remain below 1% to have a chance of winning the purchase car.
3. Low feedback standards have serious consequences
If a seller’s average feedback rating falls below Amazon’s standards, their account may be suspended or even closed entirely, damaging their seller reputation.
4. Seller feedback provides information for customers’ purchasing decisions
While customers do have the opportunity to leave a private message for sellers through the Seller form, which sellers should respond to within 24 hours, many people leave public feedback, which should also be addressed promptly.
