If you’re an Amazon Seller that values what consumers say and share about your products in the marketplace, monitoring and reporting on your product reviews is an absolute necessity. But how are you going to do that when you have dozens of products?
While during the past few months it has rained with new tools for Amazon product review monitoring, there are five major aspects that sellers should look at and get informed about before deciding which tool to choose for their Amazon business.
#1 – Different Seller Segments Require Different Review Tool Capabilities
First, you need to make sure that the tool you want to hire for your product review monitoring has managed to get the attention of, been validated and is used by similar companies like yours. If you are a large global brand then you might find the tool highly more credible if it is used by other global large brands instead of only small one-man Amazon shops.
With business type and size comes a series of factors like product review accuracy, which we talk about below, and capabilities that meet the requirements of a larger product listing which may cover multiple brands, rich product breadth and depth.
Besides product review aggregation and monitoring, brands that need to get more visibility into how customer review volumes and average ratings change over time across product categories and brands will require reporting capabilities that provide them with this data.
Not last, you might need to know how customer sentiment changes over time for your keywords or product features. This requirement is possible only with tools that are backed-up by machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that will help you make sense of everything that your customers put into your product reviews.
#2 – Product Review Data Accuracy
When you receive your reviews and start reading and analyzing the data, wouldn’t you want to rely on your data?
Aggregating reviews requires a complex technology behind. Yes, the reviews are right there, on the eCommerce platforms and bringing them to one place may seem easy, apparently. But it’s not and that is due to the numerous anomalies that each eCommerce platform has and which a review monitoring tool needs to take into consideration. Such anomalies consist of not properly designed APIs, duplicate reviews that appear on the eCommerce sites, changes in the way reviews are allocated to each product variant (child-ASIN on Amazon) and many more.
Verifying all this data on all possible scenarios requires that one should have met with them first and found the solution that ensures product review data accuracy.
#3 – Amazon Customer Data Protection
A number of tools out there claim to help Sellers match their customer reviews with their orders and provide access to their customer data so that whenever customers leave them a negative review, they contact them and repair their negative feedback. Lately, some of these providers admitted that it might take a while until their tool will provide the customer data to you, so you need to be patient.
What does that mean?
It means that they are claiming to be able to help Sellers violate Amazon’s e-commerce customer policy which is the maximum flagrant act that Sellers and whoever helps them achieve that can do. The consequences of such data confidentiality breach acts are that Sellers are immediately blocked from selling on the Amazon marketplace. We hope that you do not want to get involved into such immoral – as Amazon names them – acts, even if getting customer data might sound like all you want in order to contact them and change your negative reviews or get new reviews from them.
If the above is not convincing enough in order to understand how important is for Amazon to protect the consumer data, you may want to find out more about a recent case that has taken place within Amazon in the autumn of 2018.
At FeedCheck, we understand that and commit to staying compliant with all Amazon policies and regulations regarding consumer data confidentiality.
#4 – Is Back-End or Front-End That Matters Most?
Given the above-mentioned details regarding the challenges that are often met in review data aggregation and monitoring, just putting a nice front-end to a tool is not sufficient nowadays and definitely should not be a priority. There is nothing more precious for any customer and user of such tools than relying on a robust product review monitoring engine that keeps its promise to deliver reviews on time and in an accurate manner and also help users easily understand the data.
There are so many tools out there touched by designer hands in the front that have nothing solid on the back-end and you definitely do not want to spend time on such experiences.
#5 – Provider Reliability, Professionalism and Business Conduct
Last but not least, do you want to collaborate with and use a product review monitoring tool from a provider that is transparent and supports you and your company instead of creating more troubles to you?
If yes, then you should seek out to understand who is behind the tool and make sure they are coming from a place where professionalism and business conduct hold the first place when they do business with your company, be it for 1 month, 1 year or longer than that.
A company that has been credulous enough to believe that cheap SaaS services for Amazon Sellers are the way to go has shared its experience with their provider on a B2B reviews platform:
“I subscribed for a $10/month plan but been extra charged $150 for e-mails exceeding the number included in the plan. I could not receive my money back!”
This feedback does not honor the provider. It is not about the times we are living in when providers should be customer-centric but about common-sense and ethics. Nobody is perfect, mistakes happen sometimes but at least they should be admitted and corrected without periclitating the relationship with the customer.
There is even an old saying “tell me who do you do business with so that I tell you if you’re in good company” which holds so much truth in it.
In conclusion, with apparently so many tools out there that say they can help you monitor your product reviews, there are very few that meet the above five characteristics. FeedCheck.co is one of them and you can easily find out which consumer goods companies benefit from our platform and services which is a real validation of our promise and relationships we have developed over time.