Overview

Amazon has redesigned its seller feedback system, making written comments optional and letting customers submit simple star ratings with a single click. While the change aims to boost feedback volume, it creates real challenges for sellers who depend on written explanations to diagnose problems, contest unfair ratings, and protect their account health metrics.

What's Changing

• Written comments are now optional — Customers can leave 1-to-5 star ratings without writing anything, removing the previous requirement to explain their score.
• Dropdown reasons replace free text for low ratings — Buyers giving three stars or below must pick from a preset menu of reasons, but detailed written explanations are no longer required.
• Automated product-feedback filtering — Amazon now attempts to separate product quality complaints from seller service issues so merchants aren't penalized for things outside their control.
• Higher feedback volume expected — Amazon says reducing friction will capture more ratings, especially from satisfied buyers who previously skipped the process because writing felt like too much effort.

Why Amazon Made This Change

The reasoning follows Amazon's long-standing pattern of prioritizing buyer convenience. Most customers never left seller feedback because composing a written response felt like a chore. By removing that barrier, Amazon expects to collect a much larger pool of ratings — particularly positive ones from happy customers who had no complaints but didn't want to spend time writing.

For Amazon, more data points, even shallow ones, may produce a more statistically reliable picture of seller performance than fewer detailed responses. The trade-off is that sellers lose the rich, qualitative information that written feedback once provided.

Sellers Lose a Key Diagnostic Tool

The most immediate impact is the loss of actionable detail. Previously, a three-star rating might explain that packaging arrived damaged or delivery was slower than expected. Sellers could pinpoint the root cause and fix it. Now, that same rating may only include a generic dropdown category like "shipping," leaving merchants guessing whether the issue was speed, packaging condition, carrier performance, or something else entirely.