Amazon rules, OK?

Amazon has altered its customer review rules. Some revisions appeared in late September and others came in October.

• ·        “To post a review, customers must spend at least $50.00 using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50.00 minimum. Customers in the same household cannot submit a review for the same product.”

• ·        “We updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews (a review in exchange for a free or discounted product) unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program…The above changes will apply to product categories other than books. We will continue to allow the age-old practice of providing advance review copies of books.”

• ·        Paid Reviews – We do not permit reviews or votes on the helpfulness of reviews that are posted in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment (whether in the form of money or gift certificates), bonus content, entry to a contest or sweepstakes, discounts on future purchases, extra product, or other gifts.
• 
  
• ·        “A somewhat murky area is the case of reviewers who post reviews both on Amazon and on their own blogs, with links from the blog to Amazon that result in the blogger/reviewer receiving pay if the person clicking on the link then buys the item on Amazon. It’s not entirely clear at this time, but it appears that this scenario can lead to a purge, because it violates the rule that an Amazon reviewer may not post a review on a product in which the reviewer has a financial interest. Until more is known, a blogger who has monetized his/her blog might be better off not reviewing the same product on both the blog and Amazon.”
• 
  
• ·        Promotional Reviews – In order to preserve the integrity of Customer Reviews, we do not permit artists, authors, developers, manufacturers, publishers, sellers or vendors to write Customer Reviews for their own products or services, to post negative reviews on competing products or services, or to vote on the helpfulness of reviews. For the same reason, family members or close friends of the person, group, or company selling on Amazon may not write Customer Reviews for those particular items.

I don’t know about you, but I will have to read these several times to realise the import. Author Anne Allen talks about the new rules on her blog (see right) and from reading her I understand a good deal more than I once did. Those one star reviews we’ve all suffered over? Evidently some people actually set out to trash competitors by leaving one star reviews. So there you go. The world is stacked against you!