Amazon sellers are begging and bribing customers to remove negative reviews, report says

Some Amazon sellers are reaching out to customers who leave negative reviews on their products, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Monday. Some sellers would have gone a step further and offered a refund of a greater value than the original product in exchange for revising or removing the bad review.

Contacting a customer outside of Amazon’s email service violates terms merchants agree to on the e-commerce giant’s platform. Amazon’s email service does not display a customer’s personal email. In addition, sellers are not allowed to request the removal of a negative review or the publication of a positive review.

New Yorker Katherine Scott bought a kitchen oil spray – with an average of 4.5 stars on Amazon – but when it arrived, the bottle was not working properly, the Journal reported. After Scott left a negative review, she allegedly started receiving emails from someone claiming to be part of the product’s customer service team. The rep offered Scott a full refund and asked if she would delete her negative comments, according to emails the Journal reviewed.

Amazon told CNET that the company does not share customer emails with third-party sellers.

“We have clear policies for reviewers and business partners that prohibit abuse of our community features, and we suspend, prohibit and initiate legal proceedings against those who violate these policies,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNET by email. “Bad actors who try to abuse our system represent a tiny fraction of the activity on our site and we use sophisticated tools to combat them and we make it more and more difficult for them to hide.”

Customers who have been contacted by a seller about a negative review can report it to Amazon via email, through the Report Abuse link available on posted reviews, or directly in the messaging system.

False or “push” reviews are a problem on Amazon, according to a company blog post in June. In 2020, the company deleted 200 million suspected false reviews before they can be published on product pages listed by any of the 1.9 million third-party sellers on the platform, CNET’s Laura Hautala reported last month.

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