The Best Time to Send an Amazon Review Request

Quick answer: Amazon's Request a Review button works only between 5 and 30 days after delivery. Within that window, roughly day 7 to day 14 is a sensible default, but the timing effect is small and unproven. What actually moves your review count is catching every eligible order before day 30, not optimizing the send day.

Sellers spend a lot of energy debating the perfect send day and almost none on the thing that actually costs them reviews: orders that quietly age out of the window unrequested. Here's how the timing really works.

The window is fixed and narrow

Amazon allows the official Request a Review between 5 and 30 days after delivery. Before day 5, the button is inactive. After day 30, it's gone. There is no override, no support exception, and no bulk workaround that reaches outside those bounds.

That gives you a 25-day operating window per order, and it opens on a different calendar date for every order depending on when it was delivered. Managing that by eye across hundreds of orders is where the process breaks.

Timing within the window: what we actually know

The honest answer is that the evidence for an optimal send day is thin. A few reasonable principles:

• Too early (day 5–6) risks asking before the buyer has really used the product, especially for items that take time to evaluate — supplements, tools, anything worn or installed.
• Too late (day 25+) risks the order aging out if anything delays the send, and a buyer who's had the product for a month may have moved on mentally.
• The middle of the window (roughly day 7–14) is a defensible default: enough time to form an opinion, recent enough that the purchase is still salient.

Category matters more than the calendar. A phone charger can be judged in two days; a mattress topper takes a couple of weeks. If your catalog skews toward considered or slow-to-evaluate products, bias later within the window. If it's impulse or immediate-use, earlier is fine.

What you should not do is chase small timing gains by pushing sends toward day 28, because the downside — missing the window entirely — is far larger than any plausible upside.

Amazon already sent one (or two)

Before you click anything, Amazon's own system has usually already emailed the buyer a review request — around shipment and again a couple of weeks after delivery, at no cost. This is why the manual button sometimes shows "you have already requested a review for this order" on an order you've never touched: Amazon's automated request counts. Review request vs feedback request covers this overlap in detail.

The practical implication: the manual button is a supplemental nudge, not your only shot. For some orders it reaches a buyer who ignored Amazon's automatic messages. For others it's simply unavailable. You can't tell which without checking per order.

The real timing problem is coverage, not optimization

Consider a seller doing 100 orders a day. Every day, roughly 100 orders cross into their eligible window and roughly 100 age out of it. Miss a Friday, a holiday, or a busy week, and several hundred requests are gone permanently — not delayed, gone.

One kitchenware seller ran the numbers after switching from a weekly manual batch to automated per-order sends. They'd been catching about 60% of eligible orders; the rest fell into the gaps between batch days. At their review conversion rate, the missed 40% worked out to dozens of reviews a month they were simply leaving on the table — not because their timing was wrong, but because there was no timing at all for those orders.

Automation fixes this by watching each order's eligibility date and sending the official request the day the order qualifies (or a fixed offset into the window), then recording it so it never double-sends. The review request automation guide covers what's compliant here — the short version is that automating Amazon's official call is fine; custom messaging and incentives are not.

A workable default

Unless you have data of your own that says otherwise:

1. Send at a fixed point in the window — day 7 to day 10 for fast-to-evaluate products, day 12 to day 16 for considered ones.
2. Never rely on a manual batch cadence. If a person has to remember, orders will slip.
3. Don't micro-optimize the day. The measured effect is small and swamped by coverage.
4. Track what actually sent against Seller Central so you know your true coverage rate, not your intended one.

The seller who catches 100% of eligible orders at an average send day of 12 will beat the seller who catches 65% with a "perfectly optimized" day 9, every time.

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EcomSanity's review automation sends Amazon's official request for every order the moment it enters the eligible window, with a visible history you can reconcile against Seller Central — so coverage is 100%, not "however many we remembered." For how it stacks up against other review tools, see best Amazon review request software.