Don't Be Scared of Amazon Reviews—Do Something Valuable with Them

Brands might work hard to make their product detail pages appealing on Amazon, but all bets are off once they scroll down to the customer reviews section. While it can be frustrating to have no control over product reviews, there are ways brands can leverage consumers' opinions and questions—the good and the bad—to their benefit, and even reduce negative reviews in the future. eMarketer's Patricia Orsini spoke with Rob Gonzalez, co-founder and executive vice president of business development at ecommece product management consultancy Salsify, about why brands should embrace the reviews section.

Historically, brands have conducted customer panels and customer research, but abdicated the consumer relationship to distribution channels—they called Target their customer, and they called Amazon their customer. Now, brands can talk directly to the people that are using their products. That's a huge opportunity for them to do all kinds of things differently, including how they handle product reviews.

They're also underutilized from a brand loyalty perspective. Brands can respond to reviews—it's a chance to have a dialogue with somebody who's upset about your product and learn something from it. Negative reviews in particular are great market signals.

Reviews are also an untapped resource for helping to improve product pages on Amazon and other ecommerce platforms. If a reviewer says the product wasn’t as described, the brand can redo the bullet points in the product description to give consumers the information they’re asking for. And that could help put the product higher in search results.

That makes you wonder, why don’t more brands do that? You could also put a quote from one of your 5-star reviews in the product image gallery. This is just another example of how reviews are an untapped resource for interacting with your consumer.