We’ve talked before about the damaging effects negative feedback can have on your account, and we’ve talked about why it’s so important to always aim for great reviews. But what about reviews right in the middle — neutral reviews? It’s when buyers leave 3 stars, but what does it mean? FeedbackExpress takes a look at the difference between negative feedback and neutral feedback.
Negative Feedback vs Neutral Feedback
Negative feedback is easy to identify. It consists of one or two stars, and a review that’s unhappy or dissatisfied in nature. At the opposite end of the spectrum is positive feedback where a buyer leaves four or five stars and generally has positive things to say about their purchase.
So, that leaves three stars. Sometimes the buyer will write about their experience and sometimes they won’t, but that three stars is the hallmark of a neutral review.
Neutral feedback is tough for sellers to deal with, as it doesn’t really indicate much about what the buyer liked and disliked. Usually, sellers see neutral feedback as negative feedback under the reasoning that if it’s not a positive review, then it’s a negative review.
How Does Neutral Feedback Affect Your Account?
In a nutshell, neutral feedback is not good.
One of Amazon’s metrics is your positive feedback count, which measures how many four- and five-star reviews you have. This is calculated over all the reviews you’ve received, so if you have too many three-star reviews, then it lowers your overall feedback count.
However, Amazon also looks at feedback left in the last 14 days, 60 days, 90 days, 365 days and lifetime. So a few neutral reviews here and there shouldn’t affect you too much. For example, if you got one neutral feedback last week, all you have to do is ride it out for the next three weeks before your most recent score bumps up again. And since buyers place more importance on the most recent reviews, the longer away that neutral review was, the less important it becomes.
Neutral Isn’t Great, But Negative Is Still Worse
One of the downsides about neutral feedback is it stays on your account, no matter how long it’s been. That means you won’t be able to get that 100% over the lifetime of your selling history — but how many sellers with a long history do you know have a 100% score? So, don’t beat yourself up about it too much.
As well, you’ll inevitably encounter buyers who do a thorough job researching your history before making a purchase. If they go on your seller profile page, they’ll be able to see the breakdown of positive, neutral and negative reviews. They’ll be able to see that you have mostly positive reviews with a few neutral reviews scattered about. And the takeaway from that will be, ‘It seems like most people are pretty happy with this seller, so the general consensus must be that this will be a good experience for me. No seller can please all of the people all of the time.’ This is especially true if you have neutral reviews dragging your score down instead of negative ones. Buyers tend to look at the overall pattern instead of paying attention to individual reviews.
Deal With Negative and Neutral Feedback Quickly
We’ve written a lot about why you should never let negative reviews stay as they are, but instead contact the buyer and try to remedy the situation. The same is true for neutral reviews, as anything less than positive should be worked on. Your goal is to have every buyer satisfied with their experience, and a neutral review indicates you fell a little short.
Luckily, FeedbackExpress is just the tool for it, as our software will help you craft consistent and professional-looking messages that can help raise neutral reviews into positive ones. Check us out today and get started on your 14 day free trial.
Related: 2 Tested Ways to Remove Negative Feedback on Amazon
