Just got this… I believe they rolled this out last year and rolled it back. Now it’s official and STUPID…
Hello,
On August 4, 2025, we’ll launch a simplified seller feedback submission experience, so customers can give a star-only rating with optional written feedback. This simplified review experience can help you receive more seller ratings faster.
Honest and authentic star ratings are an important way for customers to know how past order experiences were perceived by other customers. To make it easier for customers to submit ratings, we’re making written feedback optional, which will help increase rating submissions and give customers more information to confidently make purchase decisions.
When customers submit seller feedback with or without text, we automatically look for signs of abuse and evaluate them against our community guidelines. When there is no text, the feedback appeal feature in Feedback Manager will be disabled for all star-only rating reviews. If you believe the star-only rating violates our community guidelines, you can request additional review through Report a violation.
Another tone-deaf/anti-seller decision brought to you by Amazon (oh, and with your obligatory 6 days of notice).
Buyers can now leave feedback and leave no actual comment and these basically can’t be reviewed for removal (they automatically will check when it’s left it it’s fraudulent AKA they won’t remove anything).
What an absolute joke considering Amazon doesn’t even realize that feedback has been obsolete on every single other e-commerce site now for 5 years due to the fraud and bad actors.
No one who’s posted there, as of this writing, has linked any of the several NSFE discussions which have appeared in recent weeks presaging this announcement, but I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t happen.
Whoever the crackhead was that thought of this needs to be… (I’ll let you choose your own terms here. Mine would get me banned permanently… Not like I haven’t been through that before on the OSFE )
I bet they will - another way to push sellers to use FBA, for account protection from feedback ratings.
Mine would be 2 stars lower if I didn’t get bogus feedbacks removed over the years. Wrong item, subjective product reviews instead of seller performance, didn’t like the flavor, didn’t fit well, etc. Alleged late arrival when delivered within the delivery window.
Since Amazon cannot compel the buyers to read and comprehend, they should not foist the result of buyer incompetence on us.
This already happens, so not any new incentive.
I assume (yeah, I know) that Amazon will continue to mostly strikethrough FBA feedback, and the ones that aren’t, if they have no text, we will have to
Unfortunately, this was the predictable result when sellers pressured Amazon not to replace FB with one of two proposed systems of objective seller ratings.
It took longer than I expected. Probably because of the staff turnover which resulted from the covid epidemic.
No matter what is done about FB there will always be sellers who think it is unfair, and they are usually correct.
Ebay no longer uses FB to evaluate US sellers. It only uses it for offshore sellers who ship to the US. Sellers in the US and abroad still complain about their negatives and neutrals, request removal, complain when it is not removed, and point to their 100% positive FB when disciplined for specific customer service failures.
I mistakenly placed an FBM order last week. Tracking was sent quickly. Unfortunately, the seller used DHL ecommerce’s hybrid service which has cruddy tracking, and delays in transferring the package from DHL to USPS. I find myself uneasy enough with the transaction to understand the reason why many Amazon buyers will not buy FBM. The transfer to USPS is occurring in CT.
The other consequence is Amazon’s use of feedback rating in the Buy Box algorithm. I know there are times I’m awarded the BB because of better feedback scores, even at higher prices and longer ship windows, if the rating difference is substantial.
I understand this but as a conscientious seller it is dismaying. I wish Amazon could just clean house of lousy sellers for the sake of buyer confidence. But FBA is their answer to that problem. Unfortunately FBA isn’t suitable for all niche or seasonal products, especially with the low / high inventory fees.
Also, people on the NSFE always make the wrong argument that if Amazon is going to do this, why don’t they give auto positive feedback after a certain amount of time. I don’t know why sellers care about getting auto positive feedback (similar to the Ebay people saying why can’t we leave negs for buyers…like it has literally no affect on your business). No one checks feedback on Amazon, no one leaves it, no one cares.
However, negative feedback can get you suspended if your ODR goes too high because of it. I don’t care about positive ratings being automatically done to put negs more in context really…because you can have positive feedback on every single transaction besides from the people who left you negs and it won’t help you at all if your ODR is over 1 percent.
Both of these sites have this messed up. People on Ebay look at feedback from a seller and don’t look at product reviews and vice versa on Amazon…it’s always been this way, it’s a learned behavior, and it’s not going to change.
None of this is going to change the fact that buyers don’t leave feedback on Amazon and aren’t going to start now because of this change.
Plus the supposed increase in FB for sellers, because words will now be optional-is the stupidest argument yet. t’ll be a disaster…chaotic…can the higher-ups not see this? Are their brains all in their lower extremities??
As I continue to cull our inventory in hopes of selling our house, I wonder, when I’m finished, whether I will even bother to box all these darn titles, tote them and their shelves-or pay someone else to tote 'em- to the PODS which will take our belongings away. I think I need an adult beverage-several of them!!
Great. Now, I won’t have any recourse when a customer leaves us bad feedback for the low quality horse saddle they purchased from a Shenzen-based seller, instead of the pack of pens they actually bought from us.
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