Amazon reviews: what you can and cannot legally do in the UK

What are UK sellers actually allowed to do?

Four mechanisms are permitted without qualification, because Amazon provides them.

What breaches Amazon's rules?

Six practices are prohibited under the Amazon Community Guidelines, and enforcement has moved from removing the review to suspending the account.

• Paying for reviews, through any network, agency or "verified buyer" service.
• Offering anything in exchange — free products, discounts, gift cards, prize draws, extended warranties.
• Review gating: asking only satisfied customers, or routing dissatisfied ones elsewhere first.
• Asking for a positive review rather than an honest one, including any mention of a star rating.
• Reviewing your own products, or having family, staff or connected businesses do it.
• Trading reviews with another seller.

What does UK law add on top of Amazon's rules?

This is the part most guidance written for Amazon.com misses entirely.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought fake reviews into UK consumer protection law, and the Competition and Markets Authority gained direct enforcement powers under it. Submitting fake reviews, commissioning them, or publishing consumer reviews without taking reasonable steps to check they are genuine are treated as banned practices.

The practical consequence for a UK seller: buying reviews is no longer only a platform policy problem that costs you a listing. It is a consumer protection matter with a regulator attached. The CMA has published its position in Unfair commercial practices (CMA207), which sets out what the Act's banned practices mean in operational terms.

Two duties in that guidance catch sellers who have never bought a review in their lives. The first is the duty on anyone publishing consumer reviews to take reasonable and proportionate steps to check they are genuine — which reaches your own website's testimonials, not only Amazon's review box. The second is the rule on concealed incentives: a review obtained in exchange for anything must be disclosed as such, and burying that disclosure is treated as concealing it. If you run any kind of seeding, sampling or brand-ambassador programme off Amazon, that is the paragraph to read.

Enforcement detail under the Act has been phased in, so check the version of CMA207 current at the time you are reading rather than relying on a summary — including this one.

What makes a packaging insert compliant?

Inserts are where most sellers cross the line without meaning to, usually while trying to be helpful.

You can check your own wording against these patterns with our free review compliance checker — it runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

What can you do about a negative review?

Three legitimate responses, in order of how often they apply.

1. Respond publicly. Useful, specific, unemotional. Other buyers read the response more than the review.
2. Fix the underlying cause. Count the themes across your one and two-star reviews. If a third mention the same fault, that is a product or listing problem, not a review problem.
3. Report genuine policy breaches. Profanity, reviews of the seller or delivery rather than the product, and obvious competitor sabotage can be reported for removal.

What you cannot do is get an honest negative review removed because you disagree with it, and no agency can do that for you either. Where a pattern of negative reviews is the real problem rather than a single one, that is reputation work — reading what the reviews have in common and fixing the cause — not review removal. There is a practical guide to building volume back up in how to get more reviews without breaking the rules.

Do these rules apply to reviews outside Amazon?

Amazon's Community Guidelines govern reviews on Amazon; UK consumer law governs reviews anywhere you publish them. If you show testimonials on your own website, run an ambassador programme, or send free product to creators, the second set applies to you whether or not a single Amazon review is involved.

Three rules travel with you off the platform:

• Incentives must be disclosed clearly. A gifted product, a discount or a payment behind a review has to be visible to the reader at the point they read it, not in a footer or a hashtag stack.
• You cannot publish reviews you have not checked. The duty is to take reasonable and proportionate steps to establish they are genuine before publishing.
• Selection is a form of misleading. Publishing only the positive responses from a set you collected is treated as an unfair practice, in the same way review gating is on Amazon.

For advertising claims specifically, the CAP Code's section on misleading advertising covers endorsements and testimonials, and the ASA applies it to a brand's own website and social posts as readily as to paid media. The practical upshot for most brands is unglamorous: keep a record of where each testimonial came from and what, if anything, was given for it.

The same logic applies to how you present aggregate ratings. If you quote an average, quote the number of reviews it is drawn from — a 5.0 from three reviews and a 4.6 from four hundred are not comparable, and presenting the first as if it were the second is exactly the kind of impression the rules are aimed at. Our review rating calculator shows how far an average moves with volume, which makes the point faster than an argument does.

What actually happens if you are caught?

Amazon's responses escalate, and the order is roughly:

1. Reviews removed and the listing's rating recalculated.
2. A policy warning on your account health dashboard.
3. The listing suppressed.
4. Selling privileges suspended, with funds held.
5. Account deactivated under Section 3 of the Business Solutions Agreement.

Detection is not limited to the reviews themselves — Amazon correlates reviewer accounts, delivery addresses, insert designs and refund patterns. Enforcement often arrives months after the insert shipped, which is why "it has worked so far" is a poor test. If you are already at step three or beyond, the suspension guide is the next thing to read.

Questions people also ask

Last reviewed 8 August 2026. We update articles in place rather than republishing at a new URL, so the link you have keeps working.