Do Your Follow-Up Emails Violate Amazon’s Terms of Service?
You Might Be Violating Amazon Terms of Service
Amazon, like many other markets, is a giant competition. Every seller is trying to be more compelling than the other guys in their niche, so sellers naturally want to accrue as many advantages as possible.
However, this search for an advantage can lead some sellers to bend or break the rules. Someone has to draw the line in the sand; what counts as “fair” and what counts as “unfair?” In our case, Amazon holds the stick, and the line they draw is their Terms of Service (ToS).
A lot of so-called “strategies” are easy to label as unfair or unacceptable. Paying reviewers, misrepresenting the product on your page, using bots to post negative reviews on your competitors’ products… You’ve probably heard of all of these exploits, and you probably know that hundreds of sellers have gotten banned for trying them over the years.
However, some of the most popular strategies on Amazon exist in a sort of grey area. Sometimes they aren’t really mentioned in the Terms of Service, and other times their acceptability depends on your interpretation of “intent.”
Usually, a good portion of the seller community is using these strategies, because they’ve become de facto acceptable. However, the opinion of the seller community doesn’t guarantee safety. Remember what happened to incentivized reviews?
In the case of incentivized reviews, a good percentage of Amazon Sellers used them just as needed, in order to get their products off the ground. However, more and more sellers were saturating their products with hundreds of incentivized reviews, and the now-famous ReviewMeta study was the final nail in the coffin. Amazon was forced to take action.
But we’ve already talked plenty about incentivized reviews. In this article, we’ll be talking about follow-up emails, their status in the Terms of Service, and what you should and shouldn’t do to avoid violating Amazon’s ToS.
Follow-Up Emails: A Definition
A follow-up email is an automated email message sent through Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging platform. It is usually triggered to be sent a specified time after a purchase is made, almost always with the help of software. (If you’re looking for follow-up email software, try out Efficient Era’s!
The contents of a follow-up email can vary greatly depending on the types of products you’re selling. They might contain manuals, instruction guides, or frequently asked question, but the guiding line of advice is this: give the customer everything they need to have a smooth unboxing experience. The last common inclusion is usually a link to leave a review, although this is certainly the most “grey-area” item on the list.
Now, it’s time for everyone’s favorite pastime: reading Amazon’s Terms of Service!
What the Amazon Terms of Service Say
First, let’s look at Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging Guidelines. The key phrase is as follows:
In general, you may contact buyers (Amazon.com customers) only to complete orders or to respond to customer service inquiries. You may not contact buyers for marketing or promotional purposes (including via e-mail, physical mail, telephone, or otherwise).
Additionally, they include:
If you send a permitted e-mail to an Amazon.com customer, your e-mail may not include any of the following:
- Links to any website.
- Seller logos if they contain or display a link to the seller’s website.
- Any marketing message or promotion.
- Any promotions for additional products or referrals to third-party products or promotions.
On the first count, follow-up emails generally fall under the category of “completing an order,” so there should be no problems there.
Then, there’s the requirement that you shouldn’t be doing any marketing in your follow-up emails. It may be tempting to squeeze out that extra bit of publicity, but a follow-up email is not a newsletter. You should be approaching follow-up emails with the intent to help customers, not to make extra sales. If you do start adding marketing phrases or links to your follow-up emails, be prepared for a warning or even a ban.
Finally, most of the disallowed inclusions are related to the marketing clause, so there are no real surprises there. However, we do come across a little hitch that was hinted at earlier.
Review Links in Follow-Up Emails
You may have guessed the problematic bullet: “Links to any website” are not permitted in follow-up emails.
As we’ve stated before, follow-up emails are a great place to direct people to leave reviews. However, in order to do that, you need to include a link to the review creation page.
So, are review links a violation of Amazon’s ToS? We aren’t so quick to jump to that conclusion: there’s some extra information we can gather about Amazon’s motivations that make review links seem much more innocuous.
Somewhat annoyingly, Amazon doesn’t really have one comprehensive “Terms of Service” page. Instead, their requirements are spread out across multiple pages. We got the above restrictions from the Buyer-Seller Messaging Guidelines, but the more general Prohibited Seller Activities and Actions page tells us a different story.
Looking at the very first section of that page, titled Attempts to divert transactions or buyers, we can see that Amazon is chiefly concerned with “any attempt to circumvent the established Amazon sales process or to divert Amazon users to another website or sales process.” Furthermore, they say that “This may include the use of email or the inclusion of hyperlinks, URLs or web addresses within any seller-generated confirmation email messages or any product/listing description fields.”
So, the main reason that Amazon doesn’t want you including links in your follow-up emails is that they don’t want you diverting sales to your own website — they want you to keep everything on Amazon. However, a link to leave a review doesn’t really constitute “diverting a sale.” If anything, it’s sending them back to Amazon, and helping the customer access the review creation page without having to look for it themselves.
Under this interpretation, including a link to review creation in your follow-up emails is acceptable, if a bit unclear. This is also fairly common practice among Amazon sellers, and no one’s gotten banned for it yet (as far as we know).
On the other hand, I know you can already hear that parental voice in the back of your head. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?” That voice has a point: just because everyone’s doing it, doesn’t mean it’s 100% safe. Look at what happened with incentivized reviews: “everyone” was doing it, right up until Amazon pivoted and slapped a ban on it. There’s no reason that Amazon couldn’t make a similar pivot on follow-up email links. All it would take is a few too many customers getting annoyed, and their grievances going viral.
Conclusion
Here’s where my advice stands: including links to review creation pages in your follow-up emails is okay for now, but tread lightly and keep track of any developments that might push public opinion the other way.
Amazon’s Terms of Service are often inconsistent, and you can get mixed messages depending on which section you’re reading. If you wanted to be extraordinarily careful, you could avoid leaving a link by just including directions to the review creation page, but that could come off as overly pushy. For now, there’s safety in numbers, but that safety can be fleeting.