Update 10/24/2022: It has been narrowed down to just Amazon Business accounts. Regular (personal) accounts are not affected by this bug. Still no word from Amazon on the matter.
It appears that Amazon has been making changes to its product review pages over the last so many weeks. During this process, a strange bug seems to have formed and many users have been reporting that they have been unable to leave reviews (via desktop browsers) because of it. Hoping to find answers via sources like Reddit, only to find others experiencing the same without any luck.
Basically, the bug was originally much worse and has calmed down a lot. But that hasn’t solved anything as affected users are still unable to submit anything as it still prevents the reviews page from being used. Originally, all these users had to do was click somewhere within the body of the page. This action would cause the page to collapse, leaving only the header/footer sections and nothing in between.
Now the problem seems to be isolated to the main text box where the person leaves the text of the review. The stars, title, and images all work. However, when you start to type out the review into the main box, the page once again collapses. Preventing the user from continuing.
Some have reached out to Amazon about it without any success. Amazon seems to be currently having trouble with its support team’s ability to properly read emails before responding to them. It could be that they are being forced to respond to a much larger queue of messages than the human brain can handle. Either that or they simply are choosing not to read anything.
In fact, we ourselves, have reached out to Amazon about it and had zero luck obtaining an appropriate response to anything. One of our accounts is experiencing this, thus we were not only able to duplicate the issue, but we were even able to send them a video screen capture of it happening so they knew exactly what we were referring to. All we got back was a generic response completely unrelated to the request–as follows:
Please allow me to elaborate we read the review and did not find that it qualifies for removal for violating our Community Guidelines…We encourage our customers to give their honest feedback, whether positive or negative, about the products sold on our site. Our Community Guidelines exist to cultivate a space where customers can share their opinions about the products they receive in a way that is relevant and helpful to other customers…If you want to report violations of customer reviews in future, please click on the “Report abuse” link near the content. If no “Report abuse” link is available, please contact us via E-Mail. — Reply from Amazon Communities/Support
As you can see, that response had nothing to do with the problem. We tried explaining it briefly, as well as explaining it in as much detail as we could possibly think of. We even stated multiple times that their response didn’t have anything to do with what we wrote in about. However, we got the same response every single time (as you could imagine, that was quite frustrating). We even spoke with Amazon’s team via live chat, who them claimed to understand and forwarded it on to the company’s review support team. And, of course, we got the same unrelated message back yet again.
What was originally just a good deed of letting them know about a bug on their site, turned into a plea for help, turned into completely giving up. So we just decided to stop submitting reviews (and that account is an Amazon Influencer). Sometimes, you find a company that really knows how to let the customer know how much it really doesn’t care about anything.
The Solution
I honestly wish we had one for you. Since Amazon has done everything it can to avoid the situation, all I can leave you with is a workaround.
The bug seems to be limited to affecting desktop browsers. So if you you access it via a mobile device and are able to view the mobile version of Amazon’s website, you should be able to post reviews. Else, you will have to do it using the Amazon app (via Android or iOS). The app doesn’t seem to be affected.
We have tried every possible scenario, from browsers, to multiple computers, networks, clearing cache, disabling javascript (which completely breaks the review page from even showing), and so on. The only thing we got to work was the mobile version of the site and the app.
Sorry to leave you with just that, but there just isn’t anything else to share. At least, you can rest assured that it isn’t on your end. It is absolutely something on Amazon’s end that needs a fixin. So, hopefully, the company figures out the problem exists on their own as they don’t want to hear about it from anyone else.
Also, if you’re reading this Amazon, it’s “in the future”, not “in future”. There a little bonus bug fix for you.
4 Comments
I’m in Amazon vine program and when I have questions or a review isn’t posted I get this exact message. Sometimes I’m also told I can’t review a product because it appears I know the seller. So stupid. But most times it seems to be that the person on the other end can’t even speak English. I get so upset
Ditto. I’ve also been having this problem– for months– and it is still broken, and numerous attempts to report it to them have all received unrelated responses.
SAME problem here. I’m a vine reviewer, and I can’t write a review. I touch the text box and the page collapses. I’m getting very frustrated. This affects my vine account, but my hands are tied.
YESSSS This has been driving me insane. I stopped reviewing my purchases because of this. I didn’t bother to see if mine had gotten a little better like you describe. For so many days I tried to review items and then simply gave up. I didn’t bother reaching out to them either because I’ve never had any luck with reporting bugs on their site. Ever.