Of everything you can do about a rating problem, this has the highest chance of actually working — and it starts with buying your competitors' products.
The logic is simple. Somebody in your category is selling a similar product with thousands of reviews at 4.6. Whatever they are doing physically differently is the answer, and it is knowable.
Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty-five seconds on why this has the highest odds of working, what to ask your supplier to compare, and why you watch new reviews rather than the average.
Start this first, finish it last
It has the longest lead time of anything on the list. Buying competitor products, shipping them to your supplier, having them assessed, changing production, and manufacturing a new batch takes months.
So it begins on day one, in parallel with the same-day variation fixes and the short-term tactics — even though its results arrive long after theirs.
Pick the right competitors
Find the products with the most reviews at the highest ratings. Not the best sellers necessarily — the best rated, with enough reviews that the rating is trustworthy.
A product with 4,000 reviews at 4.6 has demonstrably solved the quality problem you have. A product with 40 reviews at 4.8 has not demonstrated anything yet.
Buy at least three. One competitor tells you about one competitor. Three tell you what the category standard is, and where the consensus differences lie.
Send them to your supplier
Ship the competitor products directly to your manufacturer, and ask a specific question: what is different between these and what you make for us?
This is the part that works, and it works because your supplier knows things you cannot see. They understand the material grades, the moulding, the stitching, the coating, the ingredient sourcing. Handed a physical competitor product, they will identify differences you would never find from photographs and reviews.
Ask them to look at, specifically:
Materials — grade, weight, composition. The single most common source of quality difference.
Construction — how it is assembled, joined, finished.
Packaging — which affects both damage in transit and the unboxing impression that colours a review.
Size and weight — whether the competitor is subtly more substantial in a way customers feel.
Taste, texture or smell, for consumables and anything applied to the body.
Then change how yours is made
Instruct the supplier to match the competitor.
That instruction sounds blunt and it is deliberate. You are not asking for incremental improvement; you are asking them to reproduce the specification of a product that thousands of customers have rated well.
This is the highest-probability fix available, because you are copying a proven outcome rather than guessing at one. The competitor has already run the experiment with real customers.
Expect it to cost more per unit. Better materials usually do. Weigh that against what the rating drop is costing — and note that a higher unit cost you can price for is a much better problem than a rating that suppresses conversion, rank and advertising efficiency at once.
Check the economics before committing
A specification change alters your landed cost, which alters your margin and possibly your price.
Work out the new cost per unit, and what it does to your margin at your current price. If the improved product needs a higher price, that is a decision to take deliberately rather than discover later.
And update your sourcing cost with Amazon afterwards, because reimbursements are calculated from it — see Reimbursements, COGS and FBA Capacity.
While you wait
The competitor products take one to two weeks to reach an overseas supplier, and the new production run takes longer.
Use that window for the content work — see Answer the Complaints in Your Content. It costs nothing, it takes about that long, and it starts working immediately.
When the new stock lands
Watch the rating on new reviews specifically, not the overall average. The overall figure moves slowly because it carries all the historical reviews; what tells you whether the fix worked is the rating of reviews arriving after the new batch reached customers.
If new reviews are clearly better, the fix worked and the average will recover over time — and this is exactly the situation where Vine on a new ASIN becomes worthwhile, because you now genuinely have a better product. See Short-Term Rating Recovery.
If new reviews are no better, the diagnosis was wrong. Go back to the complaints and check whether the issue was ever about the physical product — expectation-setting problems look identical in the rating and are solved entirely differently.
Common mistakes
Buying one competitor, and copying an idiosyncrasy rather than a standard.
Choosing best-selling rather than best-rated competitors.
Sending photographs instead of products. Your supplier needs to hold it.
Asking for "better quality" rather than for a specific comparison against a specific product.
Refusing the extra unit cost without comparing it to what the rating is costing.
Waiting for this to finish before doing anything else. It runs alongside everything.
Related
- Answer the Complaints in Your Content — the work to do while this is in transit.
- Why a Rating Drop Costs More Than It Looks — what justifies the cost.
- Designing the Offer — the same supplier conversation, run before launch.