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.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-fixproduct-explainer-765ae1c4.mp4)

*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.

![Product performance, before and after a change](/kb-assets/shot-prod-table-6c206b.png)

## **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**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/reimbursements-cogs-and-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**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/answer-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**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/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**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/answer-complaints-in-your-content) — the work to do while this is in transit.
- [**Why a Rating Drop Costs More Than It Looks**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/why-a-rating-drop-costs-more) — what justifies the cost.
- [**Designing the Offer**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/designing-the-offer) — the same supplier conversation, run before launch.