Reviews play a big part in your online shop’s success if you are selling on Amazon. When you are trying to book new sales, your potential customers will often look to other Amazon reviewers’ suggestions for guidance.
When Amazon removes your hard-earned customer feedback, it can be more difficult to secure a sale. As a reviewer, it can also be frustrating to see your reviews have been removed.
In this guide, we’ll guide you on why this happens and what you can do to fix it.
Why Did Amazon Deleted All My Reviews?
Before we can discuss why this is occurring, it’s important to understand what is going on in the first place. Like most things relating to Amazon’s behind the scenes operations, the company doesn’t always share a word on what they are doing. As a seller, this can make it difficult to know exactly what is happening.
The company has not published any formal statements about accounts with deleted reviews, so most information about this phenomenon’s cause and effect comes from individuals who have shared their firsthand accounts. These are from both from the seller’s and buyer’s side.
From what we have learned, there seem to be three main ways that reviews are being restricted.
Amazon Deleted My Reviews
In some situations, sellers have reported that while the number of sales they book increases, the number of reviews they have received is going down. This can be confusing, especially for sellers who request reviews from each shopper by using Amazon’s email feedback tool. Amazon reviews deleted, now what?
Amazon is Blocking Them
In this case, sellers are often unaware that reviews for their products have been blocked. It can be difficult to know that this situation is happening unless you receive feedback from a buyer that the product does not provide review access.
When products are blocked from receiving reviews, it’s not generally clear how long the block will last for.
Amazon is Limiting Them – Fake Reviews
Sometimes products on Amazon will have a limit on how many reviews can be left per day. This can also be affected by whether a reviewer is verified or not. Most users who have reported this issue experience a limit of 3-5 reviews per day. Using a review checker can often spot fake reviews, but Amazon will use its own internal software to determine whether a review is real or not.
Whether they are being deleted, blocked, or limited, this process is quite stressful for you and your business, especially if you are taking a lot of time to market your goods.
At first glance, it may not make sense why Amazon would try to restrict or hide your customer feedback, particularly when the seller and product credibility are based heavily on purchase reviews, leading to more sales. So why is my Amazon review not showing up? We’ve found a few reasons why you may be experiencing this.
Your Amazon Listing Has Been Flagged for Unusual Behavior
One reason this can happen is if reviewers include unusual or suspicious words in their rating. This is often caused by review bots that repeatedly post the same amazon reviews with slight word variations to increase the listing credibility. ie too many unverified reviews.
This can also happen in cases where Amazon listings have a high amount of unverified reviews. Verified product feedback receives a logo, which means that Amazon has confirmed that it was purchased on their site and at a normal price point. This icon helps discourage incentivized reviews written in exchange for a free or highly discounted product.
Being unverified doesn’t confirm that they’re not genuine positive reviews, simply because Amazon cannot prove that they are.
One other way this can occur is when your product has suddenly received significantly more reviews or sales than usual. While this could be a sign that there is a review bot impacting your listing, it can sometimes be caused by family and friends as well.
If a large number of people close to you decide to flood your listing with 5-star reviews, Amazon could detect this behavior as a digital bot or an untrustworthy review, causing a review block.
What Does It Mean to Have Your Amazon Account Wiped?
Like the idea of a verified and unverified Amazon review, Amazon can track each person’s review history. If the team determines that you are doing fraudulent reviews or have been writing reviews in exchange for free or discounted products, the reviewer’s account may be wiped.
When this happens, Amazon will remove, or rather suppress, all of your product reviews. Additionally, you are unable to continue posting reviews on the platform. Amazon does this to ensure that reviews are legitimate, and their review system maintains a standard of high-quality for their sellers.
While the review scanning system Amazon uses can catch a majority of bad reviewers, thousands of reviews are being made every day. This means that reviewers who author honest posts that have done nothing wrong are sometimes included as well.
What Can You Do When Your Account is Wiped?
One of the first steps is to reach out to Amazon and request your review access reinstated. If your account was wiped by mistake, there is a chance that you will be able to get your reviews back.
Since Amazon doesn’t completely remove your reviews, the company just suppresses them so nobody can read them on the product page. This means your previously written reviews would be returned as well. However, even in these cases, it seems like most people are unable to get their full access back.
Try Opening A New Account
If Amazon cannot reinstate your previous account, you can create a new account and continue writing reviews. However, you will need to ensure that you do not use any of the same information in your new account. If Amazon’s system detects that you are the same person with two email addresses, it will restrict access to your new account as well.
If you decide to start fresh, make sure you follow each step to prevent the system from recognizing you.
- Clear your cookies and browsing history
- Use a new name
- Use a new email address
- Use a new mailing address and payment information
- Set a new IP address for your browser
Can You Get Banned From Amazon for Reviews?
The short is yes, particularly if you have written incentivized Amazon reviews. Amazon previously allowed these types of reviews if the posts disclosed that the buyer account provided the item for a marketing review in exchange for a fee, gift card, or another commodity. However, after thousands of biased reviews, it has banned these reviews, as they are generally always good reviews with no guarantee of credibility.
One other thing to note is that readers can usually tell which Amazon reviews are written as a biased marketing review. No one wants to feel misled by marketing reviews, and may also report those reviews to the seller support system.
How Many Reviews Can You Do on Amazon?
While there’s no real limit on how many items a user can author a review on, if you are writing many reviews per month or on several varieties of the same item in a short period of time, it could raise suspicion.
From the perspective of a seller, you should only receive a certain number of reviews for your product per week. Most of our sources determined there is currently a limit of 5 unverified reviews each week. After this, if one of your buyers tries to leave a review, they will receive an error message that their review cannot be accepted.
If you are worried about your Amazon account getting flagged, there are two common ways you can still write reviews about products you love:
- Take part in email marketing and send info about particular items to email groups. In this case, you can include anything and everything you want to write in your review without the worry of anything being removed by Amazon.
- Writing reviews is also a common idea for many bloggers. This way, you can keep the Amazon logo off your reviews and use your own platform to write your review. Whatever decision you make may help influence friends’ and potential customers’ behavior, so ensure your review is honest.
Solution
The simplest solution to Amazon blocking reviews is to simply move on and try and get more reviews. Using feedback auto responders or follow up tools like FeedbackWhiz, feedback genius can speed up the process.
Conclusion
No one wants their Amazon account to be blocked on any level, either as a seller or a review author. As a seller, there is not a ton you can do to reinstate reviews once Amazon has made the decision to remove them. However, this can be a good thing. By removing fake reviews, your product will receive more credibility and can help you book more sales.
As a reviewer, it is always best to remain honest. If a seller tries to book you to write an Amazon review with the promise of compensation, it is better not to write anything than risk compromising your account. And if anything does happen, be sure to use an updated email address and other personal information if you decide to make a new account.
