How to get reviews on Amazon without breaking the rules

Every Amazon seller wants more reviews, and the internet is full of ways to get them. Most of those ways break Amazon’s rules, and since April 2025 many of them break UK law too. The legitimate methods are fewer and slower, but they are the only ones that build something you can keep.

This guide covers the four methods Amazon allows, the practices it and the Competition and Markets Authority ban, why reviews matter to your advertising costs as much as to your star rating, and a weekly routine to run. It is part of our guide to selling on Amazon in the UK. For reviews as part of a new product’s launch, see our Amazon product launch guide.

Why reviews matter to profit, not just to rating

Reviews persuade shoppers. Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center found that the purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than for one with none, with the benefit diminishing quickly after the first five, and that purchase likelihood typically peaks at average ratings between 4.0 and 4.7, not at a perfect 5.0¹². That research used US retailers’ data rather than Amazon’s, but the direction matches what we see in Business Reports: unit session percentage rises as a new product collects its first reviews.

The less obvious effect is on advertising. ACoS can be written as cost per click divided by conversion rate times order value, so conversion sits directly in it. Our break-even ACoS guide explains the formula and works out a break-even ACoS of 26.5% for a £24.99 product.

At 6% conversion that click gives an ACoS of 40%. At 8% it is 30%. At 10% it is 24%, under break-even for the first time. Same bid, same keyword, same budget. Here is what each £1,000 of ad spend leaves behind after the product’s 26.5% margin:

A four-point rise in conversion turns a £338 loss into a £104 profit on the same spend. Reviews are not the only thing that moves conversion, but on a new product they are usually the biggest. That is why we treat review volume and rating as an advertising input, not a vanity metric.

The four ways Amazon allows

1. Amazon’s own requests and the Request a Review button

Amazon asks buyers for reviews automatically, which it says it does on your behalf at no cost, so you don’t have to request them at all¹. If you want to add a request for a particular order, Amazon recommends the Request a review button on the Order Details page rather than writing your own message¹:

• It works once per order, between 5 and 30 days after delivery¹.
• It asks for a product review and seller feedback in one email, in standard wording, translated into the buyer’s preferred language¹.
• Because Amazon already asks, it treats additional requests as unsolicited, and their delivery is subject to the buyer’s opt-out preferences¹.

You can automate it. Amazon’s communication guidelines allow proactive messages, including requests for product reviews and seller feedback, through its own templates, through third-party applications in its Appstore and through its API. They must be sent within 30 days of order completion and include the 17-digit order ID². If you write your own Buyer-Seller message instead, Amazon says to use that channel only where you haven’t used Request a Review for the order, and only once³².

2. Amazon Vine

Vine is the only route Amazon offers for getting free product to reviewers. Amazon chooses the reviewers, called Vine Voices, ships them a unit through FBA and badges their reviews. You need a Brand Registry role, an FBA offer and fewer than 30 published reviews, and each ASIN can be enrolled once⁶. In the UK the fee is £0, £60 or £140 per parent ASIN depending on whether you enrol 1–2, 3–10 or 11–30 units⁷. Our Amazon Vine UK guide covers eligibility, pre-launch Vine and the full cost per review.

3. Product inserts, within policy

Amazon allows you to “include a card in your product packaging to solicit reviews from customers in a neutral manner"³. The line between a compliant card and a violation is narrow, so here are Amazon’s own examples³:

Amazon also bans personal contact details in packaging and inserts, and any use of external websites or social channels to solicit reviews or divert customer service, with suspension or termination as the penalty³. The common mistake we find in audits is the “if you’re happy… if not, contact us” card, which reads as good service and is treated as diverting negative reviews⁵.

4. A product and service worth reviewing

The only method that scales without a fee. Every review request goes to people who bought what your listing promised, so the cheapest way to better reviews is closing the gap between the two: images that show the real size, bullets that state the limits as well as the strengths, and stock that arrives on time. Our listing optimisation guide covers the page.

When a review is negative, answer the problem, not the review. Amazon allows you to offer a refund or replacement through Buyer-Seller Messaging, but not to ask the buyer to change or remove the review while you do it³. In the accounts we manage, the most valuable use of reviews is as product research: the same complaint three times is a brief for your supplier.

What is prohibited: Amazon’s policy

Amazon describes its approach as zero tolerance. Its review policy lists violations including⁴⁵:

• reviewing your own or a competitor’s product, or having family or employees do so;
• offering money, discounts, free products, refunds or any other compensation in exchange for a review, including through review clubs and social media groups;
• offering a refund or reimbursement after a buyer writes a review, or to have one changed or removed;
• asking only buyers with a good experience to review, and diverting unhappy buyers to another feedback route;
• creating variation relationships between unrelated products to pool their ratings;
• putting a request for a positive review, or an incentive, in the packaging;
• manipulating the “Helpful” or “Report abuse” features.

The penalties include withdrawal of selling privileges, removal of all the product’s reviews and a block on future ones, permanent delisting, legal action and public disclosure of the seller’s name⁴. Two points are easy to miss. The rules cover your employees, business partners and any agency you hire, “even if it happened without your knowledge or consent"⁴. And Amazon is actively looking: it says it blocked more than 275 million suspected fake reviews in 2024 and took enforcement action against thousands of bad actors trying to solicit them¹¹.

What is prohibited: UK law since April 2025

In April 2025 several review practices became banned practices under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which means they are automatically treated as unfair and illegal⁹. The CMA’s guidance, published on 4 April 2025, defines the key terms⁸:

• A fake review is one that “purports to be, but is not, based on a person’s genuine experience.”
• A concealed incentivised review is one where the reviewer was commissioned and that fact is not made apparent. Commissioning “is not limited to making monetary payments”: money, discounts, vouchers and “products given free of charge” all count.
• Both submitting and commissioning banned reviews are prohibited, and so is publishing review information in a misleading way.

The guidance is also clear about what is allowed. Encouraging reviews “without predetermining the contents or sentiment expressed in the review, for example by merely emailing customers generally to ask if they wish to provide a review, is not prohibited"⁸. Where an incentivised review is permitted, it must be “clearly identifiable as incentivised” and still reflect the reviewer’s genuine experience⁸. And “encouraging just those who are satisfied to leave reviews” is listed as a form of cherry-picking that can break the law⁸.

The CMA can now decide for itself whether consumer law has been broken and fine a business up to 10% of global turnover⁹. It has already secured undertakings from Amazon, signed in May 2025 and published on 6 June 2025, to strengthen its systems against fake reviews and “catalogue abuse”, the practice of hijacking a strong product’s reviews by attaching them to a different product, with sanctions for the businesses involved¹⁰. In March 2026 it opened five more investigations into fake and misleading reviews⁹. Amazon’s policy and UK law now point the same way, and the cost of getting it wrong has gone up on both sides.

A weekly review routine

How many reviews is enough?

There is no number Amazon publishes. The Spiegel research suggests the first handful of reviews does most of the work¹², and in our experience the practical target is relative: enough reviews, and a high enough rating, that your product doesn’t look like the risky choice next to the products it appears beside in search. Check the top results for your main search terms and set your target from them.

After that, quality beats quantity. A product with fewer reviews and a rating rising because you fixed the problems buyers named will usually out-convert one with more reviews and a sliding rating. Judge the effort the same way as everything else: by what happens to conversion, ACoS and profit after advertising.