Amazon: Can you use customer quote customer "reviews" on you own site?

13 replies
Hi,

I am fairly new to internet marketing(6 months) and I recently started making amazon product review sites. I usually write most of the reviews and at the end of each review I will take a snippet of random customer reviews and quote them on my review page. Does anyone know if it against their policy?

It will usually be something like this in a quote box:

"XYZ product works really well because, etc..." by AmazonUsername.

At first I wasn't too worried but now that I am starting my 2nd and 3rd sites I want to do it the right way and not having to go back and fix all my old reviews.

Thanks
#amazon #customer #customer quotes #reviews #site
  • Profile picture of the author Ross Cohen
    It should be fine as it's not like someone's trademarked it, etc., but as I have no legal background, don't take my word for it. My advice would be to just not use it. Better safe than sorry, I suppose - plus, I don't know if it would help convert sales necessarily.
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  • Profile picture of the author feliciayapsl
    It's better to read through the reviews & write it in your own words to be unique. Looking at the recent major changes of Google bot, we won't know what change it will make next. You don't want a case where you'll have to go back to all your sites (what if you have 100s of them?) & make changes later on. Better to be safe than sorry.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dosty
    I do it; there are some well written reviews on Amazon. I always ensure that it is properly notated and link back to the review from my site.
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  • Profile picture of the author godinu
    You may as well just summarize the reviews yourself to get unique content.
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  • Profile picture of the author JerrickYeoh
    I believe that you can do it while lot of peoples around doing the same thing .
    If it would be best to send a email for that user to get the authorize for safety purpose.
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  • Profile picture of the author NateRivers
    I do it all the time, I just take snippets and then create a link to the actual review page and say, "click here to read the full review"

    Those links convert to sales as high as any other type of link backt to Amazon.
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  • Profile picture of the author buckeyes09
    I think I heard you are able to quote a certain percentage of Amazon product information and customer reviews. If done properly, you can make quite an impact using customer reviews. Because, well, they are customer reviews.
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    Christian

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    • Profile picture of the author tylerlam
      Interesting.. there are replies on both views.

      Yes I mainly quote the customer reviews because well.. some of them are really well written. I usually find 2 positive review quotes and 1 moderate or negative review and then at the end link directly to the review site on amazon. I was just worried that it was against policy.

      On the negative end though it does turn my 100% unique content article to about 93-95% unique on copyscape. I am sure how much it will effect my ranking in the future but at the moment those articles are ranking quite well.

      Thanks for the response everyone
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  • Profile picture of the author Long Beach Nathan
    Well, I'd never risk quoting their entire review. It probably violates Amazon's copyright terms. But I suggest just rewriting some of the reviews in your own words, as others also say.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    ACCORDING TO AMAZON TOS you cannot display or use any of the consumer reviews from Amazon unless you obtain the text through the Amazon API.

    I used to use snippets of reviews, too, without going through the API but the TOS does now very clearly state you cannot do this.
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    • Profile picture of the author Matt Ward
      Originally Posted by Sojourn View Post

      ACCORDING TO AMAZON TOS you cannot display or use any of the consumer reviews from Amazon unless you obtain the text through the Amazon API.

      I used to use snippets of reviews, too, without going through the API but the TOS does now very clearly state you cannot do this.
      Exactly. I've found it amazing that a certain high-profile Amazon WSO recommended that people do this when the TOS clearly states that it is a violation.
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      "Keep moving forward."
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  • Profile picture of the author tebor79
    I can't understand why search engines would rank copied reviews.
    I find my competition that practice this , easy to outrank.

    It would be in googles best interest to place such sites in the supplemental index to improve customer service.

    In fact I'm gonna write Matt a letter right now.
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    If you having blog problems I feel bad for you son.
    I got 99 problems but a niche ain't 1.

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  • Profile picture of the author tylerlam
    Thanks Sojourn I think I have a little project to do now this weekend to replace those quotes with some other content.

    tebor79: my content is not copied which is why I ranked well.
    I merely take a snippet, 1 sentence at most and quote the source as amazon. My reasoning was mainly for conversion purposes.

    Otherwise most of my reviews have at least 800-1000 words of original content.
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