Top Inventory Practices for Improving Your Amazon Ratings

If you’re struggling with poor Amazon ratings, it may be time to take a closer look at your inventory practices. Having a strong inventory management system in place can make or break your success on any sales platform, but especially on customer-obsessed Amazon.

Here, products with higher numbers of positive reviews are rewarded with more search visibility and, subsequently, more sales. You simply must keep your buyers happy, and it all starts with the products you source and how well you can replenish them.

To help you out, we put together six inventory tips that can lead to better product reviews and seller ratings on Amazon.

amazon ratings

Sell a Great Product

It seems rather obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this is overlooked in the mad dash to start making sales. Sourcing the wrong products can be incredibly costly and damaging to your brand reputation.

Buyers are much more motivated to share their thoughts when they have an overwhelmingly positive or negative experience. If the product quality is inherently poor, chances are people are going to have a lot to say – and none of it will be very good. Today’s buyers don’t do well with disappointment.

Research the market, make test buys, and vet suppliers very, very carefully. Sourcing a quality product that you know something about is also another good rule of thumb.

Then, when it’s time to create your listing, make sure your page clearly communicates the value of your item and sets the right buyer expectations. If either of these is off the mark, your reviews will also suffer.

Don’t Stock Out

It happens to the best of us, but you have to keep in mind what a big deal this truly is. Even one day without inventory can have huge consequences on your listing’s ranking and sales. And nothing makes a shopper more unhappy than landing on your listing and seeing that awful out-of-stock message. This is an almost guaranteed way to increase your negative feedback and lose many of your hard-earned customers to competitors.

Many sellers rely on the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service because it handles the lion’s share of order fulfillment, something that can eat up a lot of your time and cause you to not keep up on inventory. But understanding how much inventory to send to Amazon can still be challenging, especially if you sell a seasonal product or have multiple suppliers for your brand.

Regularly analyzing your FBA inventory with software such as RestockPro can stop you from overbuying or not carrying enough. A thorough understanding of what to reorder and when is the key to keeping your inventory moving and your products continuously available for customers.

Ship On Time or Early

Late shipments are another leading cause of negative seller feedback. And, unfortunately, your product reviews may even be influenced by a buyer’s unhappiness with your shipping performance. This is a one-two punch that’s hard to recover from.

Amazon wants you to delight buyers at every turn, and early package arrivals are one of the best ways you can do this. Expediting your internal order processing and upgrading your shipment methods can certainly help. This may take some extra effort at first, but you’ll likely be rewarded with much better feedback.

If you’re an FBA seller, Forceget can help you start out on the right foot by fast-tracking your shipments to Amazon’s warehouses. You’ll get reliable, worry-free delivery to Amazon FBA and access to a custom shipping portal with resources to meet all of your needs.

Focus on Your Profitable Products

As you build out your brand and begin carrying more products, it’s important to periodically check in on their performance. Are any of your items (or even certain SKU variations) seeing significantly more sales and positive reviews?

These are your superstars, and you want to do everything possible to protect them. It’s not uncommon to have the majority of your order volume and ratings come from a select group of products. Some goods will just naturally rank – and sell – better than others.

Don’t be afraid to stop selling an item if it’s costing you more than it’s worth. Simplifying your inventory helps you cut down on costs and focus on the products that actually are profitable.

Before you make any big moves, it’s in your best interest to learn why these items aren’t performing well. Can you turn a bust into a bestseller?

Luckily, everything you’d ever want to know about a product is just a click or two away when you use FeedbackFive. Amazon shoppers love to share their opinions, and FeedbackFive’s review monitoring feature makes it easy to see what buyers are saying about your products and how they’ve performed over time, from order volume and refund percentage to the number of reviews received. These key trends can help deliver some much-needed context for making more informed inventory decisions.

Plan Promotions Very Carefully

Running coupons and sponsored ads are tried-and-true ways to drum up interest for your items and grow your business. However, you must ensure that you have enough inventory to account for the influx of sales. If you see too big of a spike, you could easily wipe out all of your inventory, resulting in unhappy customers and unpleasant reviews

Take care to plan your deals in advance and stop promotions for items experiencing supply chain problems or that already have markedly lower margins than your other products. In both of these cases, rapidly increasing your sales will likely end up costing you in the long run.

Better Inventory Practices Lead to Better Rating

Once you refine your inventory practices, it’s time to really ramp up your feedback and review efforts. The best way to get new ratings is to ask for them. You can do this by clicking on the Amazon Request a Review button in Seller Central, sending a request through Buyer-Seller Messaging, or by using software such as FeedbackFive.

FeedbackFive is trusted by sellers all over the world to request and manage Amazon ratings. It also sends you alerts for new feedback and reviews and helps you optimize your requests for more engagement. Find the #1 ranked feedback and reviews software on the Seller Central Partner Network today!