Living In the Post Incentivized Reviews Era

As you may know by now, Amazon’s TOS (Terms of Service) update last week left sellers and businesses worldwide shocked. The online giant made it clear that it was serious with the new announcement and would not tolerate incentivized reviews anymore.

For many small businesses, providing sample products to people in exchange for an honest review was a great way to promote their items, receive early feedback, and build some credibility. However, bigger players (with more available capital) were taking advantage of the practice and manipulated it by driving to their listings huge amounts of low quality 5-Star reviews; hence Amazon’s reaction to the situation.

At Golden Canary, we used this practice to launch all of the Copper Rain Chains now available. We reached out to people who wanted to participate and offered them deeply discounted items for reviewing purposes. It was a great experience as it allowed us to receive early feedback and gave us time to arrange any problems that might have occurred; it provided us with the opportunity to communicate and interact with the community and lastly, it gave potential buyers extra information about the Golden Canary rain chains, as the reviewers shared their comments and experiences with the items.

Now, for obvious reasons, we’re not continuing with this type of events; this is, we’ll not continue offering rain chains at a deep discount for reviewing purposes. Yes, it is difficult, but we’ve come with another way to compensate this change on Amazon’s TOS.

As an investment, we’re going temporarily price all Golden Canary Copper Rain Chains at 30% OFF their original price in an attempt to promote them and incentivize people (in a legal way) to leave us feedback and reviews for the items. You, as a buyer, know the importance of reviews while shopping online. You probably read several ones before making a purchase decision. That’s why, for a limited time only, we’re going to run this 30% OFF event and, as a small business, would really appreciate it if you could take advantage of the sale and leave us your honest opinion in an Amazon review.