Review policy change - how to adapt & win in Amazon Europe

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Review Policy Change - Amazon Europe

Amazon has announced the introduction of its review policy change to its European Marketplaces, following the implementation by Amazon’s US Marketplace last month.

The announcement on 22 November confirmed that Amazon Europe now:

“prohibit incentivised reviews, including those posted in exchange for a free or discounted copy of the product.”

Sellers in Europe who have relied on offering discounted / free products in exchange for reviews to launch products and / or boost performance will have to adapt their strategy.

Below, we outline some important areas to focus on going forward, to ensure you get sales, reviews and ultimately succeed on Amazon’s Big 5 European Marketplaces (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain)

Recommendations for future success in Europe

1. Develop & Implement Localized Email Sequences

With the change in Amazon’s review policy, developing a good customer email sequence is now critical to get more reviews and feedback going forward.

We strongly recommend you develop localized and tailored post-purchase email sequences for your customers in each European marketplace - you can use a tool like FeedbackZ, which functions with Amazon Europe, to automate this business process

If you can build this automated review system successfully, unlike before, your competitors and new market entrants won’t be able to close the gap in reviews by doing large promotional giveaways. As such, this process can provide your business with a sustainable competitive advantage.

2. Optimize / Localize your Product Listings

As Amazon Sellers, we all know that reviews provide social proof for our products and can help increase our organic rankings on Amazon. Without the ability to give away large numbers of products to get the reviews required to match / surpass your competitors, the quality of your product listings is now even more important to beat the competition.

For Amazon Europe, the presence of 5 different languages and cultures presents a challenge to Amazon sellers. Evidently, this is a challenge that many sellers choose not to tackle - according to data from WebRetailer, almost half (229) of the top 500 Amazon Sellers in Europe sell in only one of the 5 European Marketplaces!

We can immediately see that listing your products in all 5 Marketplaces will provide you with an edge over many of your competitors in Europe and open you up to a larger customer base. However, it is important to note that in each market you will be competing against local sellers / business. In order to compete effectively, it is critical your listings are both optimized and localized to the customers in each specific market.

Lucky for you, that’s where we can help! We specialize in producing optimized and localized product listings for the Big 5 European Markets. Full details here.

3. Engage in Amazon Advertising / PPC

Some sellers like to wait until they generate their first few reviews (5-10) before engaging in PPC on Amazon. The belief is that PPC is more effective and will provide a better return on investment (ROI) once your product has these initial reviews / social proof. Without the ability to easily get initial reviews from promotions / giveaways, we recommend beginning PPC immediately when launching a new product in Europe.

This will provide visibility, traffic and help you generate initial sales - and assuming you have a good customer email sequence in place (as mentioned in point 1 above), your first reviews will follow soon after! It will also provide some valuable initial insight on how well you are converting for different keywords - this will help you focus your PPC spend on strong performing keywords and also which keywords to emphasise in your listings.

Please note if you order our product listing service for any market, we include a list of high-volume and relevant keyword phrases to kick-start your Amazon Advertising / PPC!

4. Run Product Promotions

Discounted sales / promotions on Amazon are still a useful tool to:

Get initial sales in a marketplace during a product launch;
Boost sales volumes during periods of underperformance / decline; and
Improve the visibility of your products.

5. Enable FBA Export to reach more customers in Europe

If your export settings are incorrectly configured, you are missing out on customers from many countries in Europe!

By simply enabling FBA Export in Seller Central, your business will be able to sell to customers from many more countries in Europe.

Selling in Europe - Checklist for Success

List your products on each of the Big 5 European Marketplaces
Ensure your product listings are localized / optimized
Generate a localized customer email sequence that will serve as an automated business process to generate product reviews and feedback
Engage in Amazon Advertising / PPC
Run product promotions - you won’t be guaranteed reviews in exchange, but it will provide a sales boost / initial sales to get the ball rolling
Enable FBA Export to reach more customers in Europe

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