Amazon Review Requests: Paying Amazon to Ask Your Buyers for a Rating

Review Requests is an Amazon Ads format, announced September 29, 2026, that invites people who recently bought your product to leave a star rating or written review while they shop on Amazon. It opens in beta to US advertisers in late October 2026 and runs on products with fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews, for any advertiser whose account is in good standing with no active policy violations.

Amazon reports that products in its closed beta received three times as many ratings and reviews per week as they did before the test.

Our recommendation is a capped test on products whose review count stalled after launch, run only once Request a Review is already going out on every eligible order. Judge it on cost per additional rating, measured against the weekly rate each product had before the campaign started.

AMAZON HAS CHARGED FOR THIS ASK BEFORE

Review Requests is the second time Amazon has charged brands to solicit reviews from people who already bought. The Early Reviewer Program did it until 2021, and the difference between the two designs shows what Amazon now considers acceptable.

Under Early Reviewer, a seller paid $60 to enroll a product, Amazon asked recent buyers to review it, and buyers who did received $1 to $3 in Amazon credit, up to five reviews per product. Amazon stopped accepting enrollments in early 2021 and phased the program out by April 25 of that year.

Review Requests keeps the ask and drops the reward. Nobody who answers the invitation receives anything. Your money goes to Amazon for placement, on the same terms as every other ad you buy, and that is why we expect this version to last. Amazon is selling attention, which it already sells at enormous scale, instead of paying shoppers for opinions.

THREE COMPLIANT ROUTES, THREE DIFFERENT JOBS

Sellers now have three Amazon-sanctioned ways to generate reviews, and each covers a different stage of a product's life. The Request a Review button is free. Vine is a launch tool. Review Requests is a paid accelerator for the long stretch after launch.

The button sits on the Order Details page in Seller Central and sends an Amazon-written email you cannot edit, within a fixed window after delivery. It costs nothing and reaches every eligible buyer. Its weakness is the channel. An email arrives after the buyer has moved on and competes with everything else in the inbox.

Vine reaches a different audience: invited reviewers who receive product before most shoppers have found you. Its economics turn on inventory more than on the enrollment fee, which our breakdown of what Vine costs and when it earns its place works through, and eligibility ends once a listing shows 30 reviews.

Review Requests reaches the same people the button does. They are recent buyers, and the ad meets them on Amazon with a one-click star rating and an optional written review with photos or video. Hold onto that overlap, because it defines what you are buying. The format finds no new reviewers. You are paying for the difference in response between an email and an on-site prompt, aimed at buyers you could already ask for free.

THE 1,000-RATING CEILING IS THE REAL NEWS

The threshold matters more than the beta headline. A ceiling that high makes Review Requests a tool for established products whose review count has stalled, a stage no paid Amazon review program has served before.

Picture a product with 120 ratings on a page one where the top listings carry 2,000 or more. Its conversion rate trails, its ads pay for that gap on every click, and organic review velocity alone could take a year to close it. Vine closed for that product long ago. This is the case the format was built for, and it describes far more of a typical catalog than the launch window does.

Amazon checks eligibility when you create the campaign and keeps checking while it runs, and a product that reaches 1,000 pauses automatically. Plan the handoff when a product approaches 900 ratings, so the budget moves on your schedule instead of Amazon's.

Look closely at what the invitation asks for. Amazon's own illustration shows a one-click star rating first, with the written review offered afterward as optional. We expect most of the lift to arrive as stars without text. That raises the count and steadies the average, and it adds little of the specific written detail that Alexa for Shopping reads when it decides which products to recommend.

WHAT AMAZON HAS NOT SAID YET

Two things any buyer of an ad product would ask are missing from the announcement: what the bid pays for and where the ad appears. Until Amazon publishes both, nobody can forecast cost per review, including us.

Amazon says campaigns use "the same bidding and budget controls" as its other ad campaigns, the structure laid out in our Amazon PPC management guide. That confirms there is a bid. It does not say whether the bid buys an impression, a click on the invitation, or a submitted rating, and each of those produces very different economics. Placement is described only as "Amazon's highest-traffic pages."

The beta figure deserves the same care. Amazon's footnote identifies it as internal data from a US closed beta that ran June 3 to 21, 2026, nineteen days measured against each product's own prior rate, with no control group published. A product moving from two ratings a week to six meets that headline. Read it as evidence the format works, and build your forecast from your own baseline.

HOW TO RUN THE OPEN BETA AS A TEST

Run the first campaign as an experiment on two or three products where review count is visibly holding back conversion. Measure ratings gained per week against a baseline recorded before launch, and hold everything else constant.

Start with the baseline. Record each test product's rating count weekly for four weeks before the campaign, and keep the free button running through both periods. Skip that step and you will credit the ad with ratings the free button would have produced anyway.

Choose products with between 30 and roughly 900 ratings, a conversion rate below the competitors sharing their results page, and enough stock to absorb the extra sales the ratings are meant to unlock. A listing that fails to convert for other reasons belongs in the conversion work that should come before any review spend, because ratings will not rescue a page that loses shoppers on price, images, or copy.

Set a fixed daily budget and run for at least four weeks, then divide total spend by the ratings gained above your baseline rate. If a product averaged five ratings a week before the test and fourteen during it, and four weeks of spend came to $720, you paid $20 for each of 36 additional ratings.

Whether $20 is cheap depends on where the product sits. On a listing 1,900 ratings behind its top competitor, a few dozen more move nothing a shopper notices. On a listing at 40 ratings competing against products at 150, the same few dozen change how the page reads at first glance.

FASTER REVIEWS ONLY HELP GOOD PRODUCTS

Review Requests speeds up whatever verdict buyers were already reaching. On a product with a real flaw, it delivers the bad average sooner and with more evidence behind it.

A product at 3.6 stars on 80 ratings can recover if the underlying issue gets fixed. The same product at 3.6 stars on 400 ratings faces a far steeper climb, and an ad that accelerated those extra 320 ratings made it steeper. Read your last fifty reviews and your return reasons before spending. If one complaint keeps appearing, fix it first.

Review velocity belongs inside a plan that also covers account health, inventory, and launch sequencing. The review acquisition section of our account management guide sets out the compliant mechanics every product should already be running before paid review ads enter the picture.

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FAQ

Can vendors run Review Requests, or only sellers?

Both. Amazon names registered sellers and vendors explicitly in its eligibility rules. For vendors this is new ground, because the Request a Review button is a Seller Central tool and has never been available on products Amazon sells as the retailer.

Do reviews from Review Requests carry a label like Vine reviews do?

Amazon has not said. The announcement describes the result as the same authentic reviews customers already leave, which points toward no separate marking, but the page never states it. Check the first reviews a campaign produces on your own listing before telling a client or a team either way.

Can I run Review Requests and Vine on the same product?

Amazon's announcement lists no exclusion between them. Running both in the same weeks leaves you paying for two review sources with no way to tell which one produced what, so sequence them: Vine during launch, Review Requests once Vine has closed and the product has a rating baseline to measure against.

Is Review Requests available outside the United States?

Not yet. Amazon says additional marketplaces and Amazon properties are planned for future releases and has attached no dates to either. Brands selling across several marketplaces should treat US results as the only data available for now and avoid projecting them onto categories that behave differently abroad.