How to Get Reviews on Amazon

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

One of the most crucial factors to having a successful product on Amazon is the quality of your customer reviews. This week, Jeffrey Cohen, Director of Business Development at SellerLabs, joins us to explain how to garner better reviews for your products and the strategies to create incentivized reviews. Jeff also shares up-to-date tools that bring organic reviews to your product listings and can boost the number of reviews your products get.  Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Jeffrey Cohen of SellerLabs) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast. The show dedicated to helping high six and seven figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur Andrew Youderian. Hey guys. It's Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerce Fuel Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me on the episode. Today, we're gonna be continuing our series on Amazon, and specifically talking about reviews. You know, getting reviews, how they impact, you know, the search algorithm, how important they are, some of the implications behind incentivized reviews. All this kind of stuff we'll be tackling today. And joining me to talk about it is Jeff Cohen from Seller Labs, and you may not have heard of Seller Labs, but there's a good chance you've heard of the products that they put out. Their most popular one is called Feedback Genius, and it's a tool that allows you to affectively set up automated email campaigns to communicate with your Amazon customers. I get feedback from 'em and drive reviews to Amazon. They also run a site called Snagshout, where they help facilitate getting reviews for your products on Amazon through, a lot of times, giving away products or discounting products, things like that. So those are the two businesses that Jeff is involved with. He knows a tremendous amount about Amazon, but particularly, how reviews impact everything. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into my chat with Jeff about reviews on Amazon. I think its interesting understanding Vine a little bit better now. You know, there's been a lot of press about non-legitimate, like paid reviews, which is against Amazon's terms of service. I know, you know, about Snagshout totally doesn't plan those at all. But it'll be interesting knowing that Amazon is very heavily in creating reviews through free products as well. I didn't know that they were so entrenched in that, especially with only offering it to people who sold directly to them. All that being said, what are Amazon's terms of service about generating reviews in terms of payments, giveaways? What can you do, what can't you do? Generating Reviews for Payment or Giveaways Jeff: Yeah, so here's kind of the easiest way to say it. Amazon allows you to sell products at a discount. Amazon allows you to give products away for free. Amazon does not allow you to sell products at a discount, or give them away for free, and require a review. You can encourage your review, but you cannot require it. And so Snagshout does not require a review when the product is given away. But we do ask our buyers to leave reviews once the product has been received, and so it is semantics. But it does make a big difference, and so what Amazon is going after are sites. So there are some sites out there who will say, "Our reviewers understand their obligation to leave reviews." Well, your buyer cannot have an obligation to leave a review. They cannot be provided an incentive to leave a review. You cannot provide the product to a family member, and ask them for review. And you cannot sell a product, never ship a product, and then have somebody write a review. And those are the main things Amazon has been going after. So Fiverr, there were literally people on Fiverr who were running deals,