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The Value of Feedback For Amazon Sellers

by The Selling Family

Amazon seller feedback is your social credibility on Amazon, the world’s largest product search engine. It tells shoppers if you’re worth buying from. If your score is high, you’re considered reputable. If your seller feedback score is low you’ll lose sales to competitors. Seller feedback only measures a seller’s timeliness, product packaging, boxing as well as responsiveness and helpfulness. The seller feedback score has nothing to do with product reviews.

Why is Amazon seller feedback so important?

There are a myriad of reasons as to why seller feedback is so important on Amazon—both positive and negative.

Consequences of Negative Seller Feedback

• Account suspension
• Lower chance of winning the buy box
• Lower search ranking
• Fewer sales
• More time spent resolving customer issues and less time growing your business

Consequences of Positive Seller Feedback

• Higher chance of winning the buy box
• Increased sales
• Higher search ranking
• Mitigate account suspension and A-Z claims
• Increased shopper trust

How Amazon Measures a Seller’s Feedback

Amazon measures a seller’s performance based on four criteria: order defect rate, pre-fulfillment cancellation rate, late shipping rate, and refund rate.

Order defect rate (ODR)

This is used to determine the percentage of orders in the past 365 days that have received negative feedback, A-to-Z Guarantee claim, or credit card chargeback. If your ODR is greater than 1% then you risk getting your account suspended. The best way to avoid the metric from dipping is by maintaining a low negative feedback rating and working with customers to resolve issues.

Pre-fulfillment cancellation rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders canceled by a seller prior to shipment confirmation divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.” If your pre-fulfillment cancellation rate is greater than 2.5% then you could face account suspension.

Late shipping rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders with shipments that are not confirmed by the expected ship date divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.” If your late shipping rate is greater than 4% then you could face account suspension.

Refund rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders refunded by a seller divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.”

Amazon uses seller feedback to measure the customer service experience a seller provides. A feedback score is given to each seller and is rated on a 0 to 100 scale with 100/100 being the best possible score, and 0/100 being the worst possible score. This score is based off of the number of orders completed in the past 365 days.

Product reviews are important for the products you sell because they are a direct reflection of a shopper’s experience with what you sell. Amazon is the internet’s biggest product search engine so getting positive, high-quality product reviews will be a key element in your products getting noticed in such an information-driven and competitive marketplace.

You can view more here about how Amazon calculates the Seller Rating.

How to Monitor Seller Feedback

Sellers can view their feedback score from the Seller Central dashboard. Within the dashboard, go to Performance>Customer Satisfaction>Customer Feedback to view feedback. You can download a feedback report there, too. Sellers can get a bird’s eye view of their account health. Amazon displays the target percentages sellers need to stay below in order to avoid suspension.

What Can You Do If Your Feedback Is Lacking?

You can’t please everyone. Some shoppers are just unhappy people and will find any reason to leave negative seller feedback and product reviews. There’s not much you can do in those situations. But if you find you’re receiving more negative or neutral feedback than usual, you need to identify the problem and fix it.

Feedback Genius is the perfect tool to remedy an Amazon seller account back to good health. The program has features to help sellers improve and maintain their seller feedback. You can create automated email sequences based off of specific order events. Its email templates and notifications have helped many sellers increase and improve positive seller feedback.

Any seller can use Feedback Genius to track negative and positive feedback. A crucial Feedback Genius feature isNegative Seller Feedback Notifications, which inform you when a shopper leaves negative feedback. This allows you to respond promptly to resolve the shopper’s issue. The same kind of feature is also available for negative product reviews. Feedback Genius’s dashboard gives you a great overview of product reviews and seller feedback for one week, one month, three months, six months, and one year.

With linear data like this you can track how customers react to changes and practices over both a small and big scale.

Small scale: if someone leaves you feedback saying your product description is vague. You can quickly update your product description.

Big scale: if you notice in your notifications that over the past two months your customers are growing increasingly frustrated with your communication you can set up more automated emails to be more attentive.

Informed changes like these will help you reach your online selling goals.

How to use customer data?

You can sort your seller feedback into sections of “What I’m doing right” and “What I need to improve.” Sort the positive feedback that compliments replicable aspects of your store into the first category. If you get 50 customers in the past month who compliment your packaging, add them to the list and create a message to respond to the complement. Save the message for further use when you get more positive feedback. For example,

“Thank you [[Customer Name]], I’m so glad your product arrived safely and you found the packaging easy to open. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. Best, [[Seller Name]]”

All negative seller feedback that point out faults in your store suggesting you need improvement, should go into a second category. Every single negative feedback should be handled immediately. One unhappy customer could be the difference in another potential buyer deciding to purchase from you or from winning the buy box. Let’s say a shopper disliked the packaging (important for merchant fulfilled sellers). If the shopper is unhappy with the packaging you should address their complaint with sympathy and curiosity.

Dear [[Customer Name]], I’m sorry to hear that your order arrived in a damaged condition. I know you were looking forward to using [[Product Name]] today. Please let me know what I can do to make your buying experience better. Best, [[Seller Name]]

Empower your business with seller feedback

The more positive seller feedback you receive the more attractive your seller account will be to shoppers. By focusing on the seller feedback telling you what you are doing right, and what you can improve, you can better your customers buying experience, and increase your profits. Feedback Genius makes getting, responding, and tracking seller feedback incredibly easy and simple. Sellers should ensure that they are listening to their customer’s feedback so they can stand above their competition and avoid account suspension.

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