Amazon Review Requests: Is This the Next Step Sellers Have Been Waiting For?
Anyone who has launched a product on Amazon knows the first few weeks. The listing is live, orders are coming in, and the reviews section is still empty. Amazon says it plainly too: many customers simply don't remember to leave a review.
On September 29, at unBoxed 2026, Amazon Ads' annual advertising conference, Amazon officially announced a new tool aimed right at that gap. It's called Review Requests, and Amazon published it on its own Amazon Ads site. It isn't available yet. Amazon says it opens in a US open beta in late October.
What Amazon announced
Review Requests is an ad campaign that invites recent purchasers of your product to leave a star rating or a written review while they are shopping on Amazon. The invites show on Amazon's highest-traffic pages, like the homepage. A rating takes one tap. A written review can include images or video.
It runs with the same bidding and budget controls as other Amazon Ads, through Ads Agent and the Unified API.
Who can use it:
- Registered sellers and vendors with an ad account in good standing and no active policy violations
- Products with fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews
- Eligibility is checked at creation and while the campaign runs, and the campaign pauses itself when the product reaches 1,000
Amazon reports that its closed beta in the US saw roughly three times as many ratings and reviews per week. That's Amazon's internal beta number, so read it as a reason to test, not a promise. For now it's US only, with more marketplaces planned.
Paying for the ask, not the review
This is the part worth slowing down on, because some people are already calling it "paying Amazon for reviews". It isn't.
The seller pays Amazon to put the request in front of real purchasers. The shopper gets nothing. No discount, no refund, no free product. They can leave any rating they want, including one star.
That's the same line Amazon's own guidelines have drawn for years. Compensating someone for a review is not allowed. Asking a buyer for an unbiased, un-incentivized review is. Review Requests sits on the allowed side of that line, as long as nobody stacks it with off-Amazon rebates or "happy customers only" tactics.
Where it fits next to the tools you already have
- Vine is still the tool for a launch that starts close to zero. Reviewers get the product free, and their reviews carry a clear Vine label.
- Request a Review in Seller Central is free, but it's once per order, 5 to 30 days after delivery, in Amazon's fixed wording.
- Package inserts can work, but the wording has to be very careful, with no incentive of any kind. We regularly help sellers win back accounts that pushed that line too far, and getting an account back from Amazon is never quick.
- Manage Your Customer Engagement is gone. Amazon stopped it in February 2024.
Review Requests fills the middle stretch: sales are moving, and reviews are lagging behind.
Questions to answer before you spend
Amazon hasn't spelled everything out yet. Even with the good news, before putting budget behind this, we'd want clear answers on:
- What exactly is billed, a click or a submitted review?
- Where does the invite show beyond the homepage?
- Will these reviews be labeled or badged differently on the page?
- What reporting comes with it, like cost per review or response rate?
We'll update this once Amazon answers them, or once the beta goes live and we see real numbers.
Our take
We try to be careful with anything new from Amazon, and here a little less than usual. The idea is right. Asking real buyers at the moment they're on Amazon is cleaner than most of the workarounds sellers have tried over the years.
But an ad that asks for reviews doesn't fix a product. It just brings more people to talk about it, good and bad. Get the product and the listing right first, then ask.
If you have a launch coming up and want to think through how to build those first reviews the right way, we're happy to talk. Talk to us