I’m having a bit of a moral dilemma dealing with Amazon merchants.

I’m certainly contributing to the demise of small brick and mortar businesses by ordering nearly everything on Amazon. This I know and accept. But to the extent I can help small businesses that do sell on Amazon, I should be happy to. Yet I find myself rarely rating products, and when emailed by the merchants following an order, I find myself only getting annoyed, and never going to rate the product. I don’t know if this is a problem with incentives or presentation on Amazon’s part, or if I am just an evil person. I wouldn’t have a problem rating the products if it were simpler and more part of my usual Amazon process. But the emails just drive me nuts.

A typical email is this one from Brain Power Plus:

Hey Charlie,

It’s been a little over a week since you received your Ultimate Brain Boost Formula. Just checking in to make sure you are happy with our product. We stand by our products as well as our customers to ensure complete satisfaction so if you have any issues just contact us here, and we’ll be glad to work with you until you’re happy.

If not, we’d like to ask you for a small favor. Since you know we love hearing from you, if you haven’t already, we’d really appreciate if you could take a second to leave us a quick review on our listing. As you may know, reviews are the lifeblood of Amazon businesses. It levels the playing field so us little guys - the family owned smaller businesses of Amazon - have a chance to compete against the “big guys” who run their businesses like thoughtless machines as opposed to a more involved customer satisfaction based business like ours. Reviews LITERALLY help take small businesses from total obscurity to thriving success - something we desperately need to help create abundant opportunities for everyone. As you may already know, we are an American made product so your money is only helping fuel this beautiful country we live in. :)

As you can see from the screenshot below, I get dozens of these emails every month or two. I’m almost to the point of autofiltering them. Note this is in addition to the standard order confirmation and order shipped emails that go out for every order, sometimes for every item.

Amazon Marketplace emails asking for product ratings

On a related note, if you do give in and rate your purchases on Amazon, they can apparently aggregate into a possibly embarrassing profile. I’m not sure if the ratings are public by default, but it’s something to look into. For instance, I noticed this user posted a photo wearing the boxer swimsuit I bought:

Amazon review photo

You can see by clicking through to his profile that he has a passion for lubes that “will stain your sheets” and “Pipping Fashion” jockstraps and Gary Majdell bikinis featuring pouches with a “good fit for the goods.”

Amazon reviews on public profile

Update: I’ve checked my own public profile, and it looks like the reviews submitted through the orders ratings page are different than when you go to a product page and rate the item. My public profile seems to only show a few items (crappy electronics), and not the many items I have rated after buying on the marketplace.