A large number of reviews dropped before Black Friday! The number of seller reviews was cut by 90%

Tomorrow afternoon is the much-anticipated Black Friday on the US site, and in the period before Black Friday, sellers have been saying that their products have received a large number of fake reviews, and some even have more than 90% of their reviews gone !

Although Amazon has always cleaned up reviews before and after big sales, the timing this year was too tricky. They actually deleted reviews the day before Black Friday without giving sellers any chance to react. Everyone knows that the number of reviews during big sales is one of the most important factors that determine product performance, including display, ranking, and conversion rate. If a large number of reviews are deleted at this point, there will be no time to make up for them, which will inevitably have a serious impact on sellers' Black Friday sales.

Under Amazon's severe crackdown this year, the space for fake orders on the US site is now very limited . Machine-generated reviews are almost deleted as soon as they are posted. Even if they are real-person reviews, if there are slight problems with the account, they will be removed by the algorithm. It can be said that the reviews that survive on the US site are relatively solid. Even in this case, Amazon actually did this before the big sale, directly cutting 90% of the sellers' reviews, many of which were very old and survived wave after wave of deletions. The fact that Amazon was able to delete so many reviews this time can only mean that Amazon's screening mechanism for fake reviews has changed significantly.

Another thing that can help to formalize this point is the recent frequent occurrence of old negative reviews appearing on the homepage.

This situation is very common and is gradually becoming more and more common. Not only in our WeChat group, but also many sellers in online forums have reported the sudden appearance of stale reviews.

According to the information we collected, many of these old negative reviews are from 2018 and 2019. Some sellers reported that these negative reviews had more likes, which was probably caused by competitors who pushed their own negative reviews up, greatly affecting the product traffic and conversion. However, in most cases, the number of likes was too small to overwhelm the old negative reviews of other normal reviews, and they appeared on the homepage.

The order of review display is affected by many factors, and chronological order is a very important factor. If old negative reviews can appear on the homepage, it means that the weight brought by other factors has overwhelmed the chronological order. In this case, if there is no obvious change in the number of likes (in fact, the weight brought by recent likes is already very low), it can only be that other weights have changed significantly. This kind of change can basically be caused by Amazon changing the review weight determination mechanism, making some factors that originally had low weights higher now, and some factors that were originally very important lowered. This is why the old negative reviews inexplicably move to the front even though they obviously do not have more likes.

During the last review weight adjustment, some sellers were playing tricks behind the scenes, taking advantage of the weight change to suppress their competitors.

In addition, the weight of likes for positive reviews has been lowered recently. If the quality of the positive review account is questionable or has been contaminated by fake orders, the effect of likes will be minimal. It is difficult for sellers to deal with these negative reviews on the homepage. But there is no need to rush. Amazon has just updated its algorithm not long ago, and the capture of like weights is not stable enough. It is recommended that you try to deal with negative reviews on the homepage again after a while.