Amazon sellers found harassing customers for leaving negative reviews

Amazon is still notorious for fake reviews and inflated product reviews, and while the company has tried to clean up its system, its efforts have not been particularly successful. A new Wall Street Journal The report now highlights how leaving real reviews on Amazon has resulted in nuisance for many customers.

Quoting examples from several Amazon buyers, WSJThe latest results from Amazon show that Amazon sellers have resorted to bribing customers and ceaselessly chasing them down to remove negative reviews. Sellers who ship products through Amazon are not supposed to contact customers directly, but this is exactly what happened to several people.

When New York-based Katherine Scott bought an oil spray bottle from an outside Amazon seller, she did so based on roughly 1,000 good reviews and 4.5-star ratings. However, the $ 10 products didn’t work as advertised. A week after leaving a negative review on Amazon, she received an email from the company’s customer service that the oil spray offered a full refund and asked her to delete her negative Amazon review.

“If we don’t get a response, we’ll assume you haven’t seen them and keep sending emails,” the message reads.

The company didn’t stop there. When Scott asked for a refund but refused to remove the review, another member of staff reached out to her and denied her request. “A bad rating is a fatal blow for us,” the email said. “Could you help me clear the rating? If you can, I’d like to refund you $ 20 to show you my gratitude. “

Eventually, Scott received several other requests from the company. She reached out to Amazon about the annoying emails, but after making several promises to investigate the matter, the company didn’t reach out to her.

WSJ‘s report highlights several other incidents where customers were tracked by Amazon sellers and more than doubled their money to delete negative reviews.

What’s the real problem?

The biggest problem with this practice is that Amazon sellers are not supposed to contact customers outside of the platform. Third-party sellers should also not have access to customers’ email addresses according to Amazon’s guidelines. Sellers who ship orders themselves have access to customers’ postal names and addresses. But for orders that are carried out by Amazon, customer data should be hidden from sellers and brands.

“We do not give customer email addresses to third parties,” said an Amazon spokesman WSJ. However, the publication suggests that there are many ways sellers can extract customer data from Amazon’s watchful gaze.

The report mentions one company that provides email extraction services for Amazon sellers and another that selects email addresses from Amazon reviews for up to $ 60 apiece.

In Scott’s case, the Amazon listing for the oil spray stayed live for a long time after her complaints with all the positive reviews. In fact, it wasn’t until after that Amazon removed the brand and seller WSJ contacted the company about the problem.

How can you protect yourself?

While you may not have complete control over how sellers access your contact information on Amazon, there are a few things you can try to avoid similar problems after leaving negative reviews on products.

For one, WSJ recommends that you do not use your real name to leave a review on Amazon. You can too Your account> Order and shopping preferences> Your Amazon profile to change your public name as it appears on Amazon reviews.

You should also save any communications or messages you receive from Amazon sellers so that you can forward them to customer care.

If sellers don’t stop pestering you and filling your inboxes with requests to remove negative reviews, then you can block their email addresses. Most email services allow users to block senders.