Amazon Review Request vs. Feedback Request: Key Differences

Quick answer: Amazon's Request a Review button sends one message asking for both a product review and seller feedback at once. They measure different things, and you only get one shot per order.

Ask five sellers what "requesting a review" means on Amazon and you'll get five slightly different answers, and at least two of them will actually be describing seller feedback. It's an easy mix-up, because Amazon itself bundles both into a single button and a single message. But they're graded on completely different things, they affect your account in different ways, and confusing them is how sellers end up either under-asking or accidentally breaking the one-request-per-order rule.

Two different questions, one message

Seller feedback rates you. Was the order accurate, did it ship on time, was the packaging fine, would they buy from this seller again. It rolls into your account health and factors into Buy Box eligibility, and it's tied to you as an entity, not to any single product.

Product review rates the item itself. Does it work, is it worth the price, does it match the listing. It shows up on the listing page and affects conversion for every future buyer, not just the one leaving it, which is why a single bad review on a slow-moving ASIN can do more lasting damage than a single bad seller-feedback rating usually does.

Amazon's "Request a Review" button doesn't make you choose between the two. It sends one standardized, Amazon-worded message that invites the buyer to leave both, a product review and seller feedback, in the same flow. You can't edit the message, and you can't split the ask into two separate requests. It's one button, one shot, both metrics at once.

The window is real, and it's tighter than people think

The button only works between 5 and 30 days after delivery, per Amazon's own help documentation on requesting a review. Outside that window, it's simply not clickable. There's no override, no manual workaround, no way to email support and get an exception. And it's a single attempt: once you've used it for an order, Amazon's system will tell you it's not eligible if you try again, full stop, regardless of how the first request went.

Here's the part that trips people up most: Amazon's own system already sends a version of this request automatically, at no cost and with no seller action required, roughly around shipment and again a couple weeks after delivery. The manual "Request a Review" button isn't your only shot. It's closer to a second, seller-triggered nudge layered on top of what Amazon already does on its own. Which raises the actual operational question most sellers never quite answer for themselves: is anyone in the business actually clicking that button, for every eligible order, inside a 25-day window, without missing any?

Why the eligibility check itself is confusing

A common source of forum confusion is seeing a message that says something like "not eligible at this time, you have already requested a review for this order" on an order the seller is certain they've never touched manually. Amazon's own automated system counts as a request too. If its automatic message already went out, the manual button can show as unavailable even though no human ever clicked anything for that order. Sellers who don't know this tend to assume the button is broken, when what's actually happened is the system did its job before they got around to checking.

This also means the practical value of the manual button varies more than people expect. For some orders, it's a genuine second chance to reach a buyer who never responded to Amazon's automatic message. For others, it's simply unavailable because the automated flow already used the order's one shot. There's no way to know which case you're in without checking per order, which is itself part of the problem.

Why this becomes a timing problem at scale

For a handful of orders a week, remembering to check eligibility and click the button by hand is annoying but doable. It stops being doable once order volume climbs. The failure mode isn't "we don't want to ask," it's "nobody caught that this specific order crossed into its eligible window three days ago and it's already day 28."

That's a fundamentally different problem than most Amazon seller advice addresses. Most guidance on getting reviews is about tactics: packaging inserts, email sequences, timing psychology, all the things sellers can theoretically control. None of that matters if the one request Amazon actually permits simply never gets sent, because it fell into a gap between someone checking the order list on a Monday and the 30-day window quietly closing on a Thursday nobody was watching.

The fix isn't a better strategy for what to say. Amazon controls what's said, down to the wording. The fix is making sure every order that becomes eligible gets caught the day it becomes eligible, not the day someone happens to notice it, and that the eligibility check itself (already sent by Amazon or not) doesn't require a person to manually look it up order by order.

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This is what EcomSanity's review automation does: every order that enters Amazon's eligible window gets its request sent automatically, within Amazon's rules, without anyone needing to check a list. For the compliance mistakes that trip up automation setups generally, see what's actually allowed when automating review requests.