Why Do I Get Late or Multiple Alerts for a Review?

If you have activated Alerts, sometimes, you may get notifications for product reviews that appear to be late or duplicated. In fact, they are not late, nor are they the same notification being sent multiple times. Let's look at the reasons for these seeming discrepancies.

Apparent Time Delay

Helium 10 sends new review Alerts to you as soon as Amazon posts the review on your product page. Occasionally, you may get a notification, and then look at the review, and notice that it was written days before you received notification. 

Fake reviews remain a significant concern to Amazon. When a customer writes and submits a review, Amazon often puts its publication on hold so it can examine the content before it is published to the product page. For example, a customer might write and submit a review on day one. Amazon then may tag that review for verification purposes.

This delay might add several days or, occasionally, weeks, between the time the customer writes the review and Amazon posts it. When Amazon finally publishes the review, it maintains and lists the original date of the customer's submission, not the date the review finally appears. Alerts notifies you when it is posted.

Multiple Alert Notifications for the Same Review

Helium 10's Alerts notifies you every time a review appears in each of the markets where you sell (and for which you have connected your MWS token). If you sell the same product or ASIN in multiple markets, Amazon cross posts reviews on the product pages for each of its markets. If a customer submits a review for a product in one country/marketplace, Amazon will post that review in all the other marketplaces where you sell that same product using the same ASIN.

For example, if you sell a product under a shared ASIN in Germany, Italy and France, and then a customer in Germany submits a review, Amazon publishes that single review on each of your product pages, German (amazon.de), Italian (amazon.it) and French (amazon.fr). 

Helium 10 Alerts notifies you every time any reviews are published in any single marketplace, so that you are aware that it is appearing on these separate sites. It is important to be aware that a negative or positive review is being posted across several marketplaces, even if it is the same review. You can sometimes determine which country a reviewer resides in by the language in which the review is written.