Harness the Power of Video (by Asking Customers for Reviews)

You may have noticed that Amazon merchants usually can’t post videos on product descriptions. However, you do see some product descriptions with videos, but these are only on products sold by Amazon, or products sold by the largest sellers where exceptions have apparently been made.

Based on the chatter in user forums, regular sellers have been asking for a way to post video content to their product descriptions for years, to no avail. In fact, in addition to not being able to add videos, sellers cannot even include hyperlinks to videos on their product pages. That’s apparently a preventative measure to keep online shoppers from leaving the online retail giant to go to other sites.

The problem with this, of course, is that video is an extremely powerful selling tool that sellers can't leverage. In fact, according to one study by Animoto, consumers are 73 percent more likely to make a purchase online after viewing a video.

So what’s the point in talking about all these statistics if you can’t use video to describe the products you’re selling in the Amazon marketplace?

Ask Customers to Post Video Reviews

The point is that even though you can’t post videos with your product descriptions, you can request that customers who like your products post video reviews. These videos can be as much as 10 minutes long, and up to 100MB in size, so they can really include a lot of great information about how they use, assemble, or benefit from your product.

If your customers just can’t get enough of your products or were very satisfied with something you sold them, they might just post a great video review. You can ask them politely, educate them to make them aware that they can post video reviews in addition to written reviews. You can even provide them with instructions on how to post a video review, in case they’re not sure how to do it.

Also, give them suggestions about what to include in the videos. For example, if you sold them a chair that was super easy to put together, suggest that they take a video of the assembly process to show how simple and fast it was. If you use our FeedbackFive app to manage your customer feedback, it’s easy to include these kinds of tips in the custom email that you create to remind your customers to rate and review your products.

Be Careful Not to Break Any Rules

Just be careful not to break any rules of the Amazon marketplace, which has all kinds of restrictions on what can and can’t be included in product reviews, and also on how you can get customer reviews. For example, any kind of gift, money, or free product offered to the customer in exchange for a positive review is expressly prohibited. You can’t even offer them a discount.

Reviews definitely still matter: research has shown that 79% of consumers read Amazon reviews before making a purchase.

Some users say it takes a little longer (typically 2-3 hours) for the marketplace to approve and publish video reviews, as compared to text. However, considering the impact that videos can make on your potential customers, they are most likely worth the wait.

Get More Candid Customer Video Reviews With FeedbackFive

There's an easy way to solicit videos from customers. You can try FeedbackFive for managing your customer feedback with our free trial. Create your first custom email to remind your customers to leave feedback, and then FeedbackFive automatically handles the rest for you. It’s completely cloud-based, so there’s no software to install.