[Crew Review] What NOT to do when you get a bad review

Safeguards 

To save face and reduce the number of times it has to go to court, Amazon has always required sellers to hold product liability insurance, but rarely ever enforced it. A Tuesday announcement from its VP of Trust and Fraud could change all that.

Here’s what it said. 

Vengeful Sellers Are Hunting Down Bad Reviewers

Great customer feedback is a surefire way of driving traffic and conversions. But we know all too well the other side of the coin: a single negative review could damage your reputation and sometimes be fatal to your ecommerce businesses. Some sellers are going to great lengths to keep this from happening.

The Wall Street Journal reported that some sellers are hunting down and pestering customers who leave negative reviews outside of Amazon’s official channel. 

According to the report, a number of third-party Amazon sellers are reaching out to customers who leave bad reviews and offering them gifts or refunds in exchange for revising or removing their bad ratings. 

Just so we’re clear, Amazon does not allow you to

• Pay people to leave positive reviews, and
• Go after people who leave negative reviews.

Of course, this policy has not stopped a lot of sellers from black-hatting their way into pristine product ratings, but there are proven and tested white hat tactics to getting good reviews for your products.

Amazon and GoPro Join Hands

Speaking of bad reviews, some customers were very disappointed with GoPro products, but the products were not actually GoPros. 

GoPro “Handler” floating camera hand grip as listed on Amazon

Turns out, the first case handled by Amazon’s newly commissioned Counterfeit Crimes Unit is that of Chinese sellers blatantly selling hard-to-detect knockoffs of GoPro’s hand grip and tripod grip—without even flinching to use the American tech company’s own logo. 

This is yet another counterfeiting issue on Amazon’s hands, although its hands are not exactly clean themselves. What’s for certain is that it needs more anti-counterfeiting initiatives like the dedicated legal unit and authentication programs to allay our counterfeiting woes. 

A Second Chance for Your Unsellables

Amazon has rolled out a couple of new programs that could help sellers get some value out of unsellable inventory.

• FBA Liquidations. We talked about this first one in our guide to liquidating your inventory. Through this program, Amazon will sell your excess inventory to wholesale liquidators and let you recover a portion of your inventory cost. 
  
• FBA Grade and Resell. This second one lets you have returned items (“not new”) graded by Amazon and resold as “Used” on the platform for a fraction of the original price, which Amazon says you can set just as you would for new items.

In terms of economic value, these programs sound like reasonably better choices than just having your items destroyed or donated. 

What you want to watch out for is having your products copied or resold after passing them on to liquidators. Also, do you really trust Amazon to grade your “not new” products accurately? Thought so.

Walmart Wants to Work With You

Retail giant Walmart recently announced that it’s going to offer internally developed retail software to other businesses, something it has never done in the past. 

The software, which could hit the market in early 2022, mainly helps retailers offer BOPIS services (buy online, pick up in store). This will come alongside mobile technology that would help store personnel facilitate online orders.

This change may or may not make a huge dent in the whole ecommerce ecosystem, but, just like opening its marketplace to non-US sellers, it shows the brick-and-mortar giant’s interest in planting its feet deeper in the digital space.

Something for the Early Birds

Our FBA for Beginners course launches in a few days, but we’re offering discounted early access for early birds. If you’re looking to start an Amazon FBA business or are looking to expand your existing online business into Amazon, you can join our active waitlist here.