Understanding the 2016 review-policy change
If you have logged in recently into your Seller Central or Vendor Accounts you probably saw Amazon's latest policy update:
Important Change to Customer Review Policy Amazon no longer permits providing free or discounted products in exchange for reviews
Within less than an hour, everyone was going crazy trying to figure out what exactly this change means for Private Label sellers on Amazon. Is it The End?
We've carefully evaluated the possible outcome of this change and after speaking with folks at Amazon don't think this will change things that dramatically.
Customer reviews are one of the most valuable tools that any internet retailer can offer its customers for making informed purchase decisions. Lately, Amazon has been implementing number of changes to make sure that the reviews are doing their job. If you remember, first came new machine learned algorithm that gives more weight to newer, more helpful reviews. Combined with Verified Review badge it helps to weed out bogus reviews.
Amazon's community guidelines have always prohibited compensation for reviews, with an exception – reviewers could post a review in exchange for a free or discounted product as long as they disclosed that fact. On October 3rd, 2016 Amazon updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program:
"We launched Vine several years ago to carefully facilitate these kinds of reviews and have been happy with feedback from customers and vendors. Here’s how Vine works: Amazon – not the vendor or seller – identifies and invites trusted and helpful reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release products; we do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written; and we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product. Vine has important controls in place and has proven to be especially valuable for getting early reviews on new products that have not yet been able to generate enough sales to have significant numbers of organic reviews. We also have ideas for how to continue to make Vine an even more useful program going forward.
The above changes will apply to product categories other than books. We will continue to allow the age-old practice of providing advance review copies of books. – Chee Chew, VP, Customer Experience"
I will continue evaluating this latest change in Amazon's TOS and will publish more on the subject. In the meantime, the sky is not falling! If you are a Private Label Manufacturer looking to launch your product on Amazon, you can still give out discounts during initial product launch. You just can't ask for reviews. You can also utilize Amazon's Vine program – and get high quality reviews from respected Community Members.