How to Save a Product That is Struggling With Negative Reviews
If your product is going through a downward spiral of negative reviews, not all hope is lost. You might interpret negative reviews as a failed product (which could be the case), but negative reviews are often the result of a discrepancy between your customers’ expectations and the reality of your product. This can sometimes be saved simply by making changes to your Amazon listing.
Negative reviews are a serious threat to your product because running ads on a listing where customers are speaking poorly of it is an inefficient use of your ad spend. Shoppers will often scroll directly to the reviews when comparing products. In this circumstance, bad reviews would result in a customer immediately exiting your listing. If your product rating dips below 3.5 stars, you will be unable to run Amazon promotions like coupons, but more importantly no one will want to buy your product.
Is it possible to save a product from an influx of negative reviews, simply by changing the listing?
This depends on the nature of the negative reviews. If customers are complaining about any of the following, you may be out of luck:
Product arrived broken
Product breaks easily
Product does not work
Product is bad quality
Product is unsafe
Wrong product arrived
Product took a long time to arrive
The common theme above is having a poor product and having poor seller service. This can only be fixed with a better product, better pricing, and better seller practices.
Since it’s the holiday season, I looked for some Christmas lights listings that were struggling with negative reviews. As you can see, the following reviews could not be saved by simply changing the listing:
But what if I’m getting negative reviews as a good seller with a good product?
If you are getting negative reviews despite above average seller services and a safe and functioning product, then your product is being misunderstood by customers.
Your listing is a doing a poor job of communicating a realistic expectation of your product to your customers. You are either not describing your product accurately or overpromising your product’s features and benefits. This creates unrealistic expectations, resulting in a poor customer experience and hurting the long-term success of your product.
For example, you may be using listing images or A+ content that is misleading. Are your listing’s visuals properly communicating the size, color, and functionality of your product? For this blog I looked at Christmas lights with bad ratings, and two common complaints on 1-star reviews were:
The length of the light string is misleading
The color of the lights is inaccurate
Below are 2 examples of Christmas lights with negative reviews. For each product I will show you the listing and negative reviews, explain how the listing caused these negative reviews, and then offer a revision to the listing that might save the product (if it’s not already too late).
Product 1:
Product 1 complaints:
This complaint is a direct result of customer expectations. The product is titled “2-Pack 66FT 100 Count Christmas Lights” but that is actually not true. The product should be titled something like: “33-foot 50-bulb Christmas Lights, 2-Pack (66 feet and 100 bulbs total).” Because customers are allowed to leave reviews, and because they matter to other customers, the less accurate your description is the more you are hurting yourself as a seller.
This second negative review is referencing the same discrepancy in length, so you can see how one misleading description could spiral out into an entirely failed product, especially if that feature is paramount to customers. In this case, understanding the total length of lights is necessary to plan the light design of the interior or exterior of a house’s holiday lighting. As you can see in the image, the customer is showing how a large percentage of this “33 feet” is actually just a plain wire with no lights. Even if the seller isn’t counting this as part of the “33 feet,” they have don’t a poor job of explaining that to the customer. In this case, a graphic that shows the length of the plain wire and the length of the wire with lights would eliminate this confusion and misleading expectation.
Product 2:
Product 2 complaints:
For all of the above complaints, the description and images did not do a sufficient job of communicating the lights’ colors. Customers expected to receive red for the holiday color and did not get that. The second image shows a brightly lit house with red-hue lights, but there is no such color on the actual product. There is no image that clearly shows the colors on these lights, so if I were trying to save this listing, I would make that clear in an image and list the colors in a bullet point.
Here is a review I used in the first part of this blog as an example of something that could not be saved. The reason I am bringing it back up is to show how customers looking for holiday lights are very particular about having the correct color:
The customer says: “The colors are all off. The green is not emerald, it is lime. violet looks pink. Red is red-orange.” This gives me a clue into the specificity of color this demographic of customer wants to know. I would even go one step further in my bullet points and use words like “lime/emerald, violet/pink, red/red-orange.”
Reviews help you understand customer expectations and the kind of language your customers use. You can leverage positive/negative reviews on your listings and competitors’ listings to create product copy, listing images, A+ content, brand stores and Q+A’s that sell more of your product and get you consistent positive feedback.
