Amazon is on the hunt, declining more product reviews than ever

We have been getting a lot of questions and chatter relating to Amazon lately. This is likely since they have been one of the most popular shopping destinations during the whole lockdown. Many of these having to do with their review system. From why Amazon doesn’t notify you when someone comments on your review (here’s a video on that), to why you couldn’t upload images for awhile there (which has since been fixed).

What do you mean “declined”?

One of the more popular questions over the last week or two is why Amazon has suddenly started declining valid product reviews. With these, we have seen a number of text samples from the offending reviews, and some of them truly do seem to be non-offensive to policy (assuming they were presented to us unmodified of course).

Apparently, Amazon has been on a hunt, likely in the hopes of cracking down on fake reviews (hopefully). However, this seems to also be affecting valid reviews as well. We do feel for those who have been affected because we ourselves are influencers, including on Amazon, and our reviews have also been getting the decline stamp lately–and we have been reviewing things for quite a long time and know how this work (it’s kind of what we do after all).

This could be an issue of language barriers as well, as we don’t know who (on Amazon’s end) is reviewing your reviews. They may have been outsourcing their reviews to save some cash during the lockdown, and some of the information in the review may not be translating properly to those judging it. We would like to think that they would have thought about things like that before making such decisions, so this is unlikely yet a possibility nonetheless.

So don’t worry, you are not alone if you have been noticing this. For now, you just have to be even more OCD about what you type than ever.

For example, one of our authors here recently left a nice long review on a product on Amazon. In a portion of this review, he compared it to something (because that’s always useful), saying the following: “It reminded us a lot of those affordable toolkits you used to be able to buy at certain computer-specialty stores back in the day”. Now, picking this apart you can see that none of the text offends any of the policies. e. He didn’t mention any brand/store names, URLs, or anything else that violates them in any way. However, removing this from the review resulted in the review being approved. Which verified for us the “offending” (although quite debatable) portion of the text that resulted in their initial judgment.

One would normally think “well, that’s not fair, I didn’t do anything wrong!”, and that would be correct. However, there really isn’t much you can do about it because it’s their platform and they can say or do whatever they want. Your only option is reaching out to the chat feature within their contact section and pointing it out to their support. If enough people do this, it might have an effect.

For now, keep in mind everything you type. If you even have to ask “I wonder if they might mistakingly decline this part”, then don’t include it. Keep your reviews short, simple, and dumbed-down, as that seems to be what they are pushing for at the moment. At least, until they fix this glitch within their Matrix (oops, that’s a name, good thing this isn’t Amazon).

Hey! What happened to my original text?

What tickles our patience is the fact that they no longer preserve the original text of your review. You might find yourself stuck within a creative box of thoughts while working on a review you meant to only include a sentence or two on but instead finish with a number of quality paragraphs. Well, that feels accomplishing. You proofread everything to make sure everything fits within policy and submit.

Then a day or two later you get the dreaded email from Amazon saying that your review was declined, giving you a list of broad policy points that may not have anything to do with what you wrote. Now, you don’t feel so accomplished anymore. You used to be able to go back and edit the original text, making it not so dreadful. However, they recently changed that. Now, when you go back to leave a review a second time around, you’ll find that all of your original information is: gone. That sense of accomplishment is completely stolen from you at this point, and now you ask yourself “do I even care at this point?”. We ourselves have walked away from reviews in the last week or so because of this in order to avoid frustration and just move on.

So this is another something to keep in mind (if it matters to you). If you take pride in the text you write within a review and find the review being quite long, you may want to make a copy of it somewhere until it gets approved–just in case. The last thing you want is to put your head through your screen because you are told you have to start from scratch and do it all over again.