If you go to “Brands” and then “Customer Reviews”, one sees the below.
Not sure what to make of it, nearly everyone was opted out of getting any communications from any seller by default anyway, but this seems to say that we simply cannot address customer reviews from idiots who buy the wrong product and then blame the product, or people who get Amazon-damaged items in the stupid paper bags, and blame the product for being broken by Amazon.
That has been the subject of at least one thread on the Amazon forum
Contact regarding product review has been strictly forbidden with the sole exception being through brand registry – and then only when Amazon supplies a link.
It seems that exception has been removed.
Amazon just wants vendors to be BOTS-unfeeling, quiet, semi-efficient.
On this one I side with Amazon.
From forum history and from reading seller responses to product reviews back when they were allowed I would agree to barring sellers from responding or contact.
The seller’s one and only concern is to get rid of the review. I saw zero evidence of willingness to learn from review. Plenty of lies about trying to make the buyer happy (it was always clear that this was only the professed contact reason). But in fact what the seller wants is to beat the buyer to death with words until they finally agree to remove the review.
Sellers being forbidden this contact but leaving open the exception for brand registry rankled. Now it’s a little more even.
In mid-June of 2025 (link, SAS), this banner appeared on the Customer Reviews Dashboard (link), announcing the feature’s deprecation - in favor of integration with a planned new capability of the Voice of the Liar Voice of the Customer functionality - on 093025:
A great hue and cry arose among the Seller Community, and, in one of those rare instances of Amazon actually listening to Selling Partner feedback, the plan was rescinded on 090525, when Amazon substituted that banner with this one:
As our friend April astutely alludes, a preponderance of the available evidence strongly suggests that Amazon has now backtracked from the earlier recision for the same reason that the original ability to post comments to Product Reviews was taken away in the first place:
Because Bad (and/or Ignorant) Actors abused the process.
So do I.
Amazon has made it harder to leave a negative review for products. It has not announced that, but I have had to try several times and had to eliminate some complaints to get my negative reviews on garbage products published.
Some of those reviews were on Amazon branded products, many of which seem to have tried to meet mediocre quality without much success.
I see this as a perfect use of AI. When a seller wants to communicate with a customer, they would enter their message into a special portal, where Amazon’s AI would then translate it into something the customer won’t find offensive.
Original Message from Seller: “Good grief, how stupid are you? The included instructions specifically told you not to do what you describe doing, yet you did it and by doing so, broke the item. Not only that, but your review had a grammar level of the 1st or 2nd grade. Please stop buying things until you know how to read and write!”
AI Translation to Customer: “Thank you for shopping with Amazon, the most incredible ecommerce site on the planet. As one of the millions of happy sellers on Amazon, we apologize profusely for failing to better understand your needs and would like to offer a triple refund in hopes that we can make up for some of your pain and suffering. We encourage you to buy more of our products and let us know what you think when you do. Please have a great day!!”
Wow… I didn’t fully grasp what this was affecting because we could still contact until today…
We use this feature a lot to try and get negative reviews down by refunding the buyer and sending them a note to address their concern, which you can do (could do), by clicking “view messages” after sending the refund offer…
This really sucks…! 