How to Get Review Privilege on Amazon (Everything You Need to Know…)
Leaving a review for your purchase is an integral part of the Amazon experience. Reviews let other potential buyers know exactly what they paid for, and let sellers see what customers are saying about their products. Reviews’ ratings also help Amazon customize search results to ensure the best products are shown most often.
However, if you abuse your review permissions, Amazon can take it down. This sometimes happens even without violating Amazon’s terms of service. So how do you get censorship privileges on Amazon?
How to Get Review Privileges on Amazon
In order for you to receive review privileges on Amazon, you must file an appeal. An Amazon employee will review your account and decide whether to lift the ban. You can initiate this appeal process by calling Amazon or using their email or chat service.
The review process is important, so Amazon has a vested interest in ensuring product reviews are legitimate. There are a lot of sellers who try to manipulate the reviews of their products to make them sell better.
They try to pay for good reviews and sometimes even hack into legitimate buyers’ accounts in order to leave fake reviews from real accounts.
If your account goes against Amazon for violating Amazon’s Terms of Service, you may be flagged and your review removed.
While this is to protect buyers from illegal reviews, sometimes legitimate accounts can be incorrectly flagged and your ability to post reviews will be disabled.
This can be stressful for legitimate users who play by the rules, as they have little recourse other than dealing with Amazon’s customer service.
If you want to learn more about Amazon and its review process, why and how someone is banned and how to revoke it, read on…
Why am I banned from reviewing on Amazon?
To understand how to regain your review access on Amazon, we first need to understand what kind of activity violates Amazon’s review policy:
- Sellers post reviews of their own (or competitors’) products
- Sellers offering incentives, discounts, or other compensation in exchange for reviews, even if those products are offered through a third party
- A seller’s family member or employee posts a review of the seller’s product
- Sellers ask buyers to delete or change their reviews
Doing any of the actions listed above is a surefire way to revoke your review privileges and, in extreme cases, may even result in account suspension. A more detailed list of rules and expectations can be found in Amazon’s Community Guidelines listing.
However, there have been numerous reports online of people’s customer accounts being flagged and stripped of censorship privileges, even if they haven’t violated any of these guidelines. If this happens, an appeal is usually required through Amazon’s customer service.
Will Amazon let me review it again?
Legitimate accounts are banned for illegal activity due to Amazon’s automated review system.
Certain types of activities can trigger bans even if no rules are actually violated.
These things may vary, but there are several reasons why this might happen:
- Customer accounts leave a lot of reviews in a short period of time.
- Customer reviews contain specific keywords that make reviews look suspicious.
- Customers’ legitimate accounts were hacked to leave fake reviews.
If your account is banned from comments or suspended entirely, be sure to read the ban notice and understand exactly why it happened.
Once you know exactly why your account was banned, there are a few steps you can take to help ensure that you regain your review privileges on Amazon.
What to do before making an appeal
Once you’ve read the action notice for your account, take some steps to make sure that nothing that happened was your fault.
Contact any buyers or sellers who may have reported activity on your account and take steps to alleviate their grievances with you, if any. Keep a screenshot of this activity and provide it when submitting an appeal.
If your account activity shows that you haven’t done anything unethical, you should have no problem reinstating your review privileges. Oftentimes, Amazon’s automated review process is the culprit behind these little missteps.
You might also like: Where do Amazon returns go?
How does Amazon identify fake reviews?
The short answer is: they don’t. Amazon’s automated moderation process is programmed to respond to certain suspicious activity, but it’s not a reliable way to determine whether a review actually violates Community Guidelines.
That being said, professionally written reviews often stand out in a number of ways compared to real reviews from clients:
- Detailed technical product descriptions
- 100% perfect grammar, spelling and punctuation
- A description indicating that the reviewer does not actually own the product
- Overly literary writing style compared to an organic tone
If a comment shows any such writing, it may be flagged as a paid comment, even if the post was organically written by a legitimate client.
Will Amazon Deleted Reviews Reinstate?
Whatever the reason for it, it can be frustrating to have your review rights revoked when you did nothing. Fortunately, there is an appeals process for comments that have been removed or blocked. You can contact Amazon’s customer service and have them investigate the problem:
- Go to Amazon’s customer service page
- When prompted to choose what you need help with, click Other
- Scroll down to the “Tell us more” section
- Select “Membership, Subscription or Newsletter” from the drop down box.
- Select “Other members and subscriptions” from the second drop-down box
- Select “Phone” to contact a representative via phone, or “Chat” to contact a representative via an online chat client.
Once you’ve contacted a representative, let them know what the problem is, and they’ll usually be happy to investigate it for you. There’s no guarantee your review privileges will be restored, but generally if your account is legitimate and free of suspicious activity, you shouldn’t have any issues.
If your appeal fails to restore your moderation privileges, you will have to open a new account to comment again.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to let us know in the comments section!
Want to learn more about Amazon?Read these related articles to learn what a renewal on Amazon means and whether Amazon checks returns
in conclusion
In order to reinstate your review rights on Amazon, you must file an appeal and a team member will check if your account has been incorrectly flagged.
If they mistakenly flag your account, Amazon may give you review access within a few days.
