The free version is one email per order, sent between day 5 and day 30 after delivery, in wording you cannot edit.
The paid version sits on the homepage.
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What Amazon announced on September 29
At unBoxed, Amazon Ads introduced Review Requests: an ad shown to people who recently bought your product, on Amazon's highest-traffic pages, inviting a star rating or a written review in a single tap. US open beta opens in late October, by Amazon's product page.
Three terms matter. A product is eligible only while it has fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews. The campaign pauses automatically at 1,000. And it is built in Amazon Ads Agent with, in Amazon's words, "the same bidding and budget controls you use for your other Amazon Ads campaigns."
Amazon's headline result: products in early testing received three times as many ratings and reviews per week as before the test.
The unit nobody published
Bids and budgets mean an auction. An auction needs a unit, and Amazon has not said what a bid buys. Three vendor write-ups from the same event give three answers: you pay when the shopper clicks to review, you pay per review submitted, you pay for the ask.
That gap is the story. Until it closes, the cost of a review on your listing is not a rate card. It is whatever the other brands chasing the same recent-buyer placement are willing to pay that week.
The 3x deserves the same care. It compares each product to its own prior weeks. The test reportedly ran June 3 to 21 — nineteen days. No product count, no category mix, no control group.
A cap that only binds the leader
The product is sold below 1,000 and switched off above it. The brand at 8,000 reviews cannot buy. The four challengers at 300 can.
A listing at 300 reviews gaining 12 a week reaches 1,000 in 58 weeks. At 36 a week it gets there in 19. The review gap that took an incumbent three years to build is now something a funded launch can close before next Prime Day.
One limit on that. The ad increases how many buyers answer. It does nothing to what they say. A product whose recent buyers are giving it three stars gets three stars, three times as often.
The Numbers
September 29 — announced at unBoxed. US open beta in late October
1,000 — eligibility ceiling, total ratings and reviews. Campaign pauses on reaching it
3x — Amazon's reported weekly lift, measured against each product's own baseline
58 → 19 weeks — 300 to 1,000 reviews at 12 a week versus 36
$200 — Vine's top enrolment fee, for up to 30 units. The one review price Amazon prints today
Translation: Amazon moved the review ask from a free email nobody opens to a placement it can charge for, and it has not told you the unit. Below 1,000 reviews you can now buy speed. Above it you cannot, and the brands behind you can. What the ad multiplies is your current rating, good or bad — so the first question is not the bid. It is what your most recent reviewers said.
The Brief
Prime Big Deal Days shrank the basket again. Numerator's early Day 1 read put the average order at $51.03, up from $48.36 a year ago, with 66% of items under $20 and 3% over $100. If your October deal was on a hero SKU above $50, judge it against that mix, not against July.
October 5 — TikTok put a checkout in the feed. Buy Direct is one-click purchase from the For You page, separate from TikTok Shop. Fees are unpublished. If your inventory is shared across channels, a product that trends there now drains the same stock your Amazon listing is ranking on.
Buy Shipping now prints LTL labels. Heavy and bulky merchant-fulfilled orders get Amazon-negotiated freight rates and late-delivery claim protection this month, with regional delivery pricing promised for early 2027. If you ship oversize yourself, quote one lane against your current carrier before peak.
Quick Win
Hand this to whoever owns your listings. Thirty minutes, three products.
Read the last forty reviews before anyone sets a bid.
Take your three highest-revenue ASINs showing fewer than 1,000 ratings. The count sits beside the stars, under the title. Skip anything above 900 — Amazon has not said whether its 1,000 is counted per variation or per family.
Open the reviews and sort by Most recent. If the product has variations, set the filter to this variation only. Stay in the United States section and leave out anything tagged Vine.
Count the 1-, 2- and 3-star reviews in the latest twenty, then in the twenty before them. For each low one in the latest twenty, write the complaint in three words.
Mark it FIX if the same complaint appears three times, or if the latest twenty hold at least four low reviews and at least twice as many as the twenty before. Otherwise GO. Fewer than forty written reviews is WAIT.
The artifact: three ASINs, each marked GO, FIX or WAIT, with both counts and the repeated complaint beside it, dated today.
What it does not tell you: this list holds written reviews only, and they run harsher than the star-only ratings that never appear in it. The two counts compare to each other, not to your rating. GO means the recent reviews are not getting worse, not that the ad will pay. Two shortcuts to avoid: the default sort is Top reviews, which surfaces old ones, and the headline star rating is calculated across every rating the product has received, so it moves too slowly to show a bad month.
A catalog's review count used to be a record of how long it had been selling.
From late October it is also a record of who paid.
See you Friday.
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— Dan
