Amazon is about to start selling you review requests. You already have a free one.

What Amazon has actually built

Amazon Ads announced a new campaign type called Review Requests at unBoxed on 29 September 2026. Its own description of the mechanic is short: "This new advertising solution reaches customers who recently purchased your product" and "invites them to submit a star rating or written review while they are shopping on Amazon." The announcement post adds where the invitation appears — "inviting verified buyers to leave a review from Amazon's busiest pages, like the homepage, with a single tap."

Read that placement twice, because it is the whole product. Review solicitation has always been an email problem: you send a message to an inbox and compete with everything else in it. This moves the ask onto pages the customer is already on, at the moment they are already shopping. The surface is the innovation, not the request.

The eligibility rule is specific and it is the number to write down. Amazon states that "Products are eligible when they have fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews," that "Eligibility is checked when you create your campaign and while your campaign runs," and that "Review Requests for a product pause automatically once it reaches the ratings threshold of 1,000 reviews." Note that the threshold counts ratings and reviews together, not written reviews alone — a product sitting on 900 star-only ratings and 150 written reviews is already past it.

Operationally it behaves like the rest of the platform. "You create and manage campaigns in Amazon Ads Agent" — the renamed console — "using the same bidding and budget controls you use for your other Amazon Ads campaigns," and the campaigns are "an extension of the existing Unified Campaign Management API endpoints." Launch is United States only, with "additional marketplaces and Amazon properties planned for future releases."

Two Amazon pages, published the same day, disagree on when it lands

Amazon's product page says: "Review Requests launches in open beta in the United States in late October 2026." Amazon's own announcement post says: "Review Requests will launch in November 2026." Both pages are dated 29 September 2026. Both are Amazon's.

We are not going to resolve that for you by picking the one that makes a better headline, and you should be suspicious of any write-up that does. When the vendor contradicts itself on a date, the honest position is that the date is not known, and the practical position is that it could appear in your account any day between now and the end of November.

That has a real consequence for how you prepare. Do not diary this for a specific week and do not budget against a launch date. Instead, decide now what you would do if the campaign type showed up in your console on Monday — because in the middle of Q4, a new line item appearing in a console is exactly the kind of thing that gets switched on by whoever opens the account first and gets reviewed by nobody.

Check what you are already entitled to before you budget for this

There are two existing routes to reviews and most sellers are under-using at least one of them. The first is free and sitting in your account right now: Amazon's seller page describes it as "Send automated review requests to customers by clicking Request a Review on the Order details page," and quotes no charge for it. Access to the broader Customer Reviews tool needs a Professional selling account and, for brand features, a Brand Representative role on a brand enrolled in Brand Registry.

The second is Amazon Vine, which is for the other end of the lifecycle. Vine requires "fewer than 30 reviews on its product detail page" to enrol an existing product, needs FBA as the fulfilment method, and carries "an enrollment cost per parent product" — Amazon publishes the tiers as $0 for up to 2 units, $75 for 3 to 10 units, and $200 for 11 to 30 units, with up to 30 units per enrolment. You are not billed "until 30 days after enrollment and after your first review is published," and "if you don't receive a Vine review within 90 days, you won't be charged."

Lay those three against each other and the gap Review Requests fills becomes obvious. Vine stops being available at 30 reviews. Review Requests stops at 1,000 ratings and reviews. The long, unglamorous middle — the product with 60 reviews that needs 300 to stop looking risky next to a competitor — has never had a scalable paid option, and that is precisely the stretch this is aimed at. If your catalogue has nothing in that band, this announcement is not for you.

So the first job is an inventory, not a budget. Pull your ASINs, note the total ratings-plus-reviews count on each, and sort them into three buckets: under 30 where Vine is the cheaper tool and you may already be eligible, between 30 and 1,000 where this new campaign type would apply, and over 1,000 where it will never run. Most sellers discover they have fewer ASINs in the middle bucket than they assumed.

The 3x figure is real, published, and not a forecast

Amazon reports that "early test results show that products received three times as many ratings and reviews per week compared to before the test." We are quoting that accurately because Amazon published it. Now read the footnote, which Amazon also published: "Internal Amazon data, Closed Beta, US, June 3-21, 2026."

That is an eighteen-day internal test. Each product is being compared against its own earlier pace rather than against a control group, and Amazon has not published the number of products, the categories, the spend levels or the bids behind it. Trade coverage of the launch makes the same observation — that no minimum bid, pricing benchmark or expected invitation volume has been published, which is what you would actually need to estimate a cost per rating.

None of that makes the figure dishonest. A product-vs-its-own-prior-pace comparison is a reasonable thing to measure in a closed beta, and tripling a review rate is plausible if you move the ask from an inbox to the Amazon homepage. But "3x" is the ceiling of a short internal test on an unknown sample, not a number to put in a plan. If you test this, define success against your own current reviews-per-week, measured over at least a month, and ignore the headline.

The constraint almost nobody is mentioning: not every buyer can review

Here is the detail that should shape your expectations more than the 3x claim does. Amazon's Community Guidelines set a spending floor on who may leave a review at all: "You must have spent $50 on Amazon.com, using a credit or debit card, in the past 12 months, to: Create reviews (including star ratings)." The same page adds that "promotional discounts don't count towards the $50 minimum spending requirement."

Think about what that means for a campaign that targets your recent verified buyers. Some share of the people who bought from you are not eligible to rate anything on Amazon, and the rule covers star ratings as well as written reviews, so the one-tap path is gated too. Nothing in Amazon's Review Requests material addresses how that interacts with the ad — whether ineligible customers are filtered out of the audience before an invitation is served, or whether they can be shown an invitation they cannot act on.

That is not a reason to avoid the product. It is a reason to insist on seeing the mechanics before you scale. The question to put to Amazon support, or to find in the campaign setup when it appears, is simple: is the audience filtered for review eligibility? Until you know, assume your conversion from invitation to rating will be worse than a naive read of your buyer count suggests, and size the first test accordingly.

It also explains why the billable event matters so much and why you should not guess at it. Amazon says the bidding and budget controls are the same as your other campaigns, but it has not published what triggers a charge, and third-party write-ups do not agree on whether you pay when an invitation is clicked or on some other event. A product where you pay per interaction but a meaningful slice of the audience cannot complete the action is a very different purchase from one where you pay per published rating. Find out which you are buying.

You are buying volume, not sentiment, and that cuts both ways

The compliance picture here is cleaner than the instinctive reaction suggests. Amazon's Community Guidelines explicitly permit a customer to "post a product review, if a seller encourages you to leave an unbiased, un-incentivized review," and even give the example message: "Please share your honest feedback experience with our product by leaving a review!" Asking has always been allowed. What is prohibited is creating, editing or removing "a review in exchange for compensation, including payments, refunds, discounts, products, gift cards, warranties, or services."

Review Requests sits on the right side of that line by design: the money moves from you to Amazon, not from you to the customer, and the customer is offered nothing for their opinion. You are paying for the invitation, not the verdict. Which means — and this is the part worth sitting with before you spend — the product does nothing whatsoever to improve what people think of your product. It accelerates the arrival of the rating you have already earned.

If your genuine sentiment is 4.6 stars and your review count is thin, accelerating it is straightforwardly good: you get to your true rating faster and stop losing conversions to a product that merely looks more established. If your genuine sentiment is 3.6, you have just bought a faster route to a visible 3.6, on more units, at your own expense, during the quarter when the most strangers are looking at your listing.

So the honest prerequisite is knowing your own number before you buy volume. Read the reviews you already have and the returns reasons behind them. If there is a recurring complaint — sizing, a fragile part, a misleading main image — fix that first and advertise reviews afterwards. A campaign that triples the rate at which customers tell the world about a defect is working exactly as designed.

What to do this week

First, do the inventory. Export your ASINs with their total ratings-plus-reviews count and bucket them: under 30 for Vine, 30 to 1,000 for this, over 1,000 for neither. If you have eligible products sitting under 30 reviews and have never enrolled them in Vine, that is a cheaper and better-understood action available to you today, and you do not need to wait for a launch date to take it.

Second, use the free tool properly in the meantime. If nobody in your operation is clicking Request a Review on orders, you are proposing to pay for a channel while leaving a free one idle. Work out whether it is being used at all, and on what proportion of orders, because that number is also your honest baseline for judging any paid test later.

Third, write down the three things you will check in the campaign setup before you spend anything: what event you are charged for, whether the audience is filtered for review eligibility, and what reporting you get — specifically whether you can see invitations served and ratings produced, rather than only clicks and spend. If the setup does not answer those, that is a reason to wait, not a reason to guess.

Fourth, do not fund this out of working campaigns during peak. The same discipline applies as to any new campaign type arriving in Q4: if you want to learn something, fund it with incremental money you can afford to lose, keep it on two or three ASINs where the review count is genuinely holding back conversion, and judge it against your own reviews-per-week over a month rather than against a number from an eighteen-day internal beta. And read the rating that comes back before you scale the spend behind it.