Why Amazon Ratings Have Replaced Reviews and What It Means

When Amazon ratings made their debut on the marketplace in late 2019, we were very interested to see their impact. How many new ratings could sellers expect? What brands or products would benefit the most? Would the ratings lean more toward 5 stars or be on the lower end? Now that some time has passed, let’s take a look at what’s happened—for better or worse.

What Are Amazon Ratings?

If you’re not familiar with them or need a refresher, Amazon ratings allow shoppers to leave a simple one to five-star rating without also having to write a full product review, which previously required a title and written text.

The quick “one-tap” rating system was developed with two main goals in mind:

To get shoppers to rate more products. It especially targets those who generally would like to leave a review but either don’t have the time to write one or don’t want to exert the effort.
To give shoppers more authentic customer ratings from a larger pool of their peers. Amazon’s fake review problem is well known, and the marketplace wants to mitigate what was, or might have been, incentivized or paid for reviews with real feedback from more consumers.

Once Amazon was all-in on the experiment, “ratings” officially replaced “reviews” at the top of product detail pages. This cumulative number now includes one-tap ratings as well as traditional written reviews.

Ratings can be left via the Your Orders page, the product detail page, or solicitations sent from Amazon. Only ratings from Verified Purchases will count toward the overall star rating. Buyers also have the ability to go back and add a written review with optional photos or video at any time.

Pros and Cons of One-Tap Ratings

One-tap ratings have certainly left their mark on the marketplace. The question is whether that’s a good or a bad thing. It likely depends on how your brand has been impacted by them, but here are a few things to consider.

Less time for less value: The speed and ease with which you can leave an Amazon rating without a review are undoubtedly its biggest draws. A consumer can probably leave 20 ratings in the time it takes to write one quality review. But what are those ratings really saying?

Amazon highly values reviews because they help shoppers make more informed purchasing decisions. Without the context of a written review, shoppers don’t have any information as to what warranted the rating. This is also an issue for sellers as reviews, both positive and negative, are an important asset that can tell you valuable information about your product, customers, and business as a whole.

Ratings are easier to get: A good review strategy is imperative for your success on the marketplace. The one-tap system is proving to be very effective for generating reviews—the first product on Amazon just reached one million—but not everyone is benefitting from it. Big brands and top sellers are gaining ratings by the hundreds each day, so new sellers are likely going to have an even harder time competing against them.

The fake review conundrum: As ratings continue to rise, it appears as if shoppers who’ve had a positive experience with the product are the ones most responsible for the increase. However, the influx of positive ratings, typically left with no written review, can make it seem like these responses aren’t real. One-tap ratings aren’t immune to being faked, and bad actors may even be maliciously using them against competitors.

It currently doesn't appear that written reviews affect your organic search placement any more than one-tap ratings do, but Amazon continues to prioritize products with more reviews higher up in search.

So the big question is this: how can you get more reviews and ratings?

Using FeedbackFive to Drive Ratings and Reviews

It's well known that FeedbackFive can increase product reviews and seller feedback, but it can also increase product ratings. The same automatic requests that sellers use to ask for reviews still work, allowing buyers to leave either a written review or just a rating, whichever they choose.

You can easily magnify the good effects of the new ratings system for your own products by using this fully automated tool.

Combining this automation with the Amazon Request a Review message, also available in FeedbackFive, guarantees that you're increasing your genuine ratings in a fully Amazon-compliant way. FeedbackFive also tracks both ratings and reviews on your items and helps you see effectiveness of your campaigns on the Campaign Analytics page. Let's dig more into this innovative feature.

Monitoring the Effectiveness of Your Requests with Campaign Analytics

FeedbackFive’s Campaign Analytics is a game-changer for Amazon sellers.

Previously, it was difficult to monitor product ratings closely. There was also no tangible way (short of manually checking every day) to see the number of feedbacks, product reviews, and ratings that your ASINs received.

Thankfully, that’s all changed and the guesswork (and frustrating legwork) is now gone—the Campaign Analytics page gives you this key data and much more in a matter of moments.

To start, go to the page and choose the campaign you wish to view from the dropdown menu. You’ll instantly see the number of emails sent with the corresponding number of positive/negative seller feedback and positive/negative product reviews received. You can filter by a set number of days, display daily or weekly ratings, or drill down even more to look at written reviews, total ratings, or average ratings over a certain time span.

The Products Metrics Table is another very useful feature. Use it to quickly gather information on the average star rating, total ratings, orders, emails, reviews, and feedback received for each of the products that you’ve sent requests for. You can easily sort the grid to better see top performers or identify products that need more attention.

While the Campaign Analytics page gives you great high-level information about feedback and reviews, you can also track them more closely on FeedbackFive's dedicated Feedback and Product Reviews pages.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

In short, here's what you need to remember: the impact of your requests is far-reaching. When you have a better understanding of what works and why, you can use this invaluable information to structure more successful campaigns and business decisions in the future.