What the Terms of Service state explicitly:

Violations of Customer Reviews policies include, but are not limited to, these actions: 

Customer Product Reviews Violation Examples

• A seller posts a review of their own product or their competitor’s product.
• A seller offers a third party a financial reward, discount, free products, or other compensation in exchange for a review on their product or their competitor’s product. This includes using services that sell customer reviews, websites, or social media groups.
• A seller offers to provide a refund or reimbursement after the buyer writes a review (including reimbursement via a non-Amazon payment method). This could be done via buyer-seller messaging on Amazon or by directly contacting customers or using 3rd party services, websites, or social media groups.
• A seller uses a third-party service that offers free or discounted products tied to a review (for example, a review club that requires customers to register their Amazon public profile so that sellers may monitor their reviews).

Let’s look into these points more detailed.

Since we aren’t writing reviews for our own products, point Nr. 1 is not relevant,

Point Nr. 2 states the clear wording  that a seller offers a financial reward “in exchange” for a review. This is not the case since we are not requesting at any point that the customer is required to leave a review on amazon. We offer a funnel that allows you to interact with the customer, collect their email address, get their honest opinions about your product and in this context, we also ask them if they want to leave a review. In the Amazon TOS compliant settings “Review optional, request can be skipped” and “Review option, request at the end” we simply kindly ask the customer to leave a review without any connection to the Giveaway. A Violation would be using a Packaging Insert Flyer with the text “Leave a Review and get a 10$ Amazon Coupon”. Combining such a campaign with the setting “Review required to get the Giveaway” would be a violation as there is a clear exchange between the receival of the Giveaway and the writing of the review. We do not recommend such campaigns.

Point Nr. 3 states that the Seller offers a refund or reimbursement after the review has been written. Again a clear connection between the offer that a refund will be given and the review.  This rule targets sites that require customers to leave a review, send the sellers for example some proof like a screenshot of the posted review so that they can then receive the refund.

We don’t offer such services. In our funnel the customers are getting the Giveaway no matter if they leave a review or not. The request for a review is optional and can be skipped, if customers choose to write a review, they do so voluntarily. The Giveaway is linked to incentivice the customer to join the funnel itself and leave his email address there, these are indeed mandatory fields. But the review itself is not and therefor not a violation of the Amazon terms of service. We also have the setting “Review optional, request at the end” where the customer can claim the giveaway, for example a free E-Book or a User Manual and on the last page of the funnel we ask them to kindly leave a review. This is no violation of the Amazon TOS.

Point Nr. 4 is the same, again they use the clear wording that a free or discounted product is “tied to a review”. This rule is again meant for services that simply sell reviews. You offer customers the product for free when they leave a review.

We also don’t offer this. We want to simply increase the natural rate of reviews with our funnel. There is no tie to a review in our campaigns. When you offer a One-Year Warranty Extension and during this process ask your customers if they want to leave a review on amazon as well (that can be skipped at any time) then there is no tie. These campaigns are fully compliant with the amazon terms of service.

The setting “Review required to receive the giveaway” is a violation of the Amazon TOS and we do not recommend to use it on Amazon. We have implemented it as our service will soon be available for many other platforms that don’t have such strict guidelines such as Amazon.

ReviewsFor.Me helps you to naturally increase the number of Reviews and build a powerful email list at the same time – the amazon compliant way!

Pre-filter reviews

According to Amazon guidelines, it is forbidden to deflect negative reviews from Amazon. This includes the pre-filtering function available on ReviewsFor.Me.

With this function we first ask customers how they liked the product. Customers can click on stars 1-5. For example, if you have set that no customer who has clicked on less than 5 stars should be redirected to Amazon, customers who have only clicked on 3 stars will not be redirected to Amazon for a review. Customers who clicked on 5 stars will be redirected to Amazon.

ReviewsFor.Me was developed for a variety of marketplaces, not all of them have the same strict Review rules as Amazon. The setting to pre-filter reviews is a violation of Amazon policies. We do not recommend to use it for Campaigns on Amazon.