Protecting My Reviews

I am still fairly new to product reviewing, and so I do spend much of my time reading about the experiences other product reviewers have encountered.  One reoccurring post has haunted me - having your entire bank of reviews cleared by Amazon. Your bank of reviews is your badge of experience, which is how you are selected to review more products.  Losing your reviews can set you back to the starting line when it comes to requesting products for review.

There are several scenarios in which Amazon may decide to clear your reviews. This article goes into great detail about reviewer actions that can result in an account being wiped.  It was an article that I paid thorough attention to prior to reviewing, and have followed quite well.

Recently I noticed that some of my reviews had been rejected, and that some had been removed completely.  I searched forums and asked Amazon, and learned that sometimes reviews can be removed because of the SELLER!  If a seller has given too many products for reviews, or if they have acted in a multitude of strange ways, they can have the reviews for their products pulled or rejected.  Yikes!  Additionally, reviewing too many items by the same seller is a flag that will garner unwanted attention.  Tread carefully.

A majority of the articles, blogs, and forums, indicate that the review monitoring process is automated.  I contacted Amazon about some of my deleted reviews and was told that I could write them again.  At that moment I began to realize the benefit of backing up my information.

I write my reviews in word, prior to posting to Amazon.  This gives me the opportunity to ensure spelling, grammar, and word count.  Backing up my reviews became as simple as just saving that word file, in a folder with the product images (which I had previously deleted after writing my reviews.  It is a good thing that I never clean out my recycle bin!).

I title my folders with the review date and the product description.  I then title my word documents with the same nomenclature. The benefit to the date is having a timeline for when I reviewed and purchased the product, which can be helpful when looking through my orders.  I try to use the actual product name, as it appears on Amazon, when possible. 

In addition to saving the wording of my review, I decided to screen shot the final review with title and stars.  I could easily write this into the word document, but this seemed to short-cut the process as I was going through several dozen reviews to backup at once.

A complete document with review wording and a screen shot cropped to show the stars and title of review. 

I could have just captured a screen shot of the review, and saved that as an image file along with the product photos.  The reason I opted to keep the word format is that it will allow me to quickly copy and paste in the event that I have to recreate the review.