Customer feedback and reviews can make or break your e-commerce business.
In one survey, 82% of people admitted to purchasing after reading other reviews. Another study discovered that displaying reviews can increase conversions by 270%. On the flip side, if your brand garners negative reviews and feedback it will experience an undesirable impact. Holistically, reviews and feedback affect your account health on e-commerce marketplaces and if you have too many negative ones, they may lead to account suspension or deactivation.
Before jumping on the impact on account health, we will like to share how selling activities that have gone wrong can affect the feedback.
Let’s start!
Factors Affecting Buyer’s Feedback
Out of the different factors that influence a buyer’s feedback, one is their purchase fulfillment experience, which is majorly influenced by inventory stock-outs and late shipments. Stock-outs can happen when inventory is unavailable, while delivery delays usually result from the product taking longer to ship than promised initially. If a buyer does not get the tracking information and shipment notification for their purchase, it can also impact their experiences and your feedback rating.
Product-related issues also annoy customers and push them into negative feedback territory.
Does the product image accurately depict its features?
Does the product size and material match the customer’s expectations?
Did you ship the correct product?
Also, did your customer service department provide a timely and relevant response to the customer’s query or complaint?
If you answered “Yes” to all these questions, chances are you will get a positive customer rating which may improve your account health. But if you said “No” to even one of these questions, be prepared to get negative feedback and ratings.
Buyer’s Feedback Affecting Account Health in the Marketplace
Every marketplace has a set of metrics that are highly influenced by customer feedback. A marketplace such as Amazon treats positive and negative feedback meticulously as they drastically affect the “Amazon seller rating” (ASR) and play a vital role in increasing a seller’s lifespan in the marketplace. ASR is one way for Amazon to measure the performance of your brand and the satisfaction level your brand offers to the customers.
Your Amazon seller rating is the average of all the feedback received within the time range buckets of 30, 60, 90, and 120 days. Amazon calculates the feedback score by considering three types of reviews – positive reviews (4 and 5-star ratings), neutral reviews (3-star ratings), and negative reviews (1 and 2-star ratings). For a good seller rating, it is imperative for you to have an adequate number of positive reviews.
Managing the Feedbacks
The good news is that you can reduce the quantity and frequency of negative feedback for your e-commerce brand. The secret? Proactive and consistent action!
Start by identifying the problems that usually lead to negative ratings. For instance, if customers are complaining about the unavailability of products, the problem could be inventory stock-outs. You can solve the problem by ensuring that you always maintain a minimum inventory threshold. You should also synchronize all back-end systems to ensure you can match stock availability to ship times.
To minimize negative feedback due to late shipments, set an accurate lead-time-to-ship for each SKU and use the fulfillment latency element provided by the e-commerce marketplace. Also, send delay notifications to customers as early as possible while maintaining a courteous and appropriate tone in all customer communications. Whenever possible, allow customers to upgrade automatically to an expedited shipping method.
To prevent product-related complaints, it’s always good practice to provide accurate product descriptions. Also, include high-quality images with all listings and make sure that buyers always receive the product as described on the product details page. You should also simplify your returns process so your returns policies don’t become the reason for negative customer feedback and poor account health.
Optimize customer service by acknowledging every customer phone call and email within 24 hours, especially if it is negative. Always provide the correct customer service contact details (phone number and email address) on your store’s help pages. And finally, adjust your email spam filter to ensure that incoming customer messages don’t land in the junk folder and escape your review. If they do, you will likely see more negative feedback, which then will hit your account health – hard.
Conclusion
Sellers often emphasize account health technicalities such as ODR, LSR, or VTR. In the quest to keep these ratings under the marketplace’s threshold, they usually forget that apart from the violations, customer feedback can also have a drastic impact on all the ratings, thereby impacting the overall account health rating.
As a seller, you must continually optimize your account health which is affected by customer feedback. If you can increase the positive feedback and decrease the negative, there’s every reason to hope that your e-commerce brand will be a roaring success.
For more insightful content about e-commerce account health, check out the Ergode blog. If you need more personalized advice about improving your account health, contact our e-commerce experts.
