Amazon Review Requests ads: are they worth paying for?

Amazon Review Requests ads are a new ad type that lets sellers pay to show a “rate this product” invitation to customers who recently bought it. Are they worth it? For a good product that is stuck with a handful of reviews, probably yes, as a short test with a clear budget. For a product with quality problems, no: you would be paying to collect proof of those problems faster.

Amazon Ads announced the format on 29 September 2026, and the open beta starts in the United States around now. Here is what it is, what we still don’t know, and how I would decide.

What Amazon actually announced

According to Amazon Ads, a Review Requests campaign reaches customers who recently bought your product and invites them to leave a star rating while they shop on Amazon. They can rate with one click and optionally add a written review with photos or video. You set it up in Amazon Ads Agent with the usual bidding and budget controls.

The rules are narrow:

• United States only for now. Amazon says more marketplaces will follow, with no dates.
• Products with fewer than 1,000 ratings and reviews. Campaigns pause automatically when a product reaches that number.
• Accounts in good standing, with no active policy violations.

Amazon’s headline claim is that products in a closed US test in June received three times as many ratings and reviews per week as before the test. That is Amazon’s own internal data, a before and after comparison, with no published method. I take it as a sign that the format does something, not as a number to plan around.

Why reviews are worth money in the first place

Anyone who has launched a product on a marketplace knows the cold start problem. A new listing with zero or three reviews converts worse than an older listing with hundreds, even when the new product is better. Shoppers read ratings as risk. So you discount, you run ads, and you wait for reviews to arrive slowly.

Most buyers never leave a review on their own. That is the gap Amazon is now selling into. On Amazon, the seller can’t offer the buyer anything in return for a review, so until now the main options were Amazon’s free “Request a Review” button in Seller Central, which sends one standard email per order, and Vine for eligible brands. Review Requests is a third option, and the first one where you pay per campaign through the ad console.

Are Amazon Review Requests ads worth it? My checklist

I would only test it if all of these are true:

1. The product is good, and you have evidence. Low return rate, few complaints, buyer messages that are mostly positive. More reviews magnify whatever the product already is. If the honest average would be 3.4 stars, faster reviews are bad news.
2. The listing is ready. Clear images, accurate title, correct size and variant information. Many negative reviews are really “this was not what I expected”, which is a listing problem.
3. You already use the free option. If you are not pressing “Request a Review” on eligible orders, or using an approved tool that does it, start there. It costs nothing.
4. Reviews are the actual bottleneck. If traffic is the problem, more reviews on a page nobody visits won’t change much.

How I would measure it

Amazon has not said how Review Requests is priced, what the placements look like, or how long after purchase a buyer counts as “recent”. So I would treat the first run as an experiment, not a channel:

• Pick a few comparable products with similar traffic and review counts. Run the campaign on some, not others.
• Set a fixed test budget and window, for example a few weeks, decided before you start.
• Track cost per new rating, then the thing you actually care about: conversion rate and organic sales over the following weeks.
• Read every new review. The point is not only the count. Fresh reviews are free product research.

If the cost per rating is lower than what you would spend in discounts or extra ad budget to sell your way to the same number, it is a good deal. If not, stop.

What makes me a little uneasy

There is a structural point here. Reviews used to come mostly from the product and the free tools around it. Now part of review volume can be bought by those with an ad budget. The buyers are verified and nobody is paying them, so this is not the same as fake reviews. But it does tilt the field a bit further toward sellers who can spend, and it adds one more line to the ad bill.

That is the same lesson I wrote about in what marketplaces taught me: the platform changes the tools, but customers still decide. Review Requests can make the truth about your product visible faster. It can’t make the truth better.

If you sell outside the US, there is nothing to do yet. It is still worth watching, because Amazon says other marketplaces are planned, and it is better to have your checklist ready before it arrives.

Sources

• Amazon Ads: Accelerate authentic reviews with Review Requests (29 September 2026)
• Amazon Ads: Introducing Branded Conversations and Review Requests
• PPC Land: Amazon to sell ads asking buyers to review products under 1,000 ratings (12 October 2026)