A reader told us they were no longer able to access a "Customer Questions & Answers" feature on Amazon product pages that they had found useful when shopping. "I'm a customer who shops Amazon often. I found reading the Q&A to be very helpful and I asked and answered a few questions. There are really good tips in there and the users were very active."
The reader said that at the top of product pages, Amazon still displays a hyperlink to the Q&A feature but said the link just takes them down the page. For example, we viewed a listing for an
Ambimall Floor Lamp that displayed "1,553 ratings - 46 answered questions" at the top of the page (under the title).
- Clicking on "1,553 ratings" brings visitors down the page to the product reviews section.
- Clicking on "46 answered questions" brings visitors down the page to a search box titled, "Looking for specific info?" (it's easy to pass over, located right above the product reviews section).
Above: Screenshot showing the "Looking for specific info?" search box.
"It is very frustrating that customers lost this valuable communication tool," the reader told us. "The questions and answers were often much more informative than product reviews."
It turns out there is a way to access the questions and answers that shoppers have asked and answered: conduct a search in the "Looking for specific info?" search box.
Type in a word such as "bulb," and magically the questions and answers appear with a header naming the following sections:
- All
- Product Information
- Customer Q&As
- Customer Reviews
A question asked last year about the Ambimall floor lamp shows how helpful the Q&A feature could be for those shoppers who find it, going beyond what product reviews might reveal:
Question: "What kind of light bulbs fit this lamp?"
Answer: "I have 60 watt lightbulbs in mine. The normal shape ones. Nothing special."
An Amazon spokesperson said receiving information from Q&As is a valuable feature for customers and it is continuously experimenting with how to make the feature more helpful for customers.
Customers can use the search feature to search for topics or questions they have, and they will see all relevant Q&A on that product, as well as answers from Product Information and Customer Reviews - all in one place. Customers can also post their own questions via the search bar, and they will still receive answers via e-mail.
We don't know when exactly the Q&A section was made less accessible as the reader described it (the spokesperson for the company said Amazon was continuously innovating and improving the customer shopping experience), but the Amazon help page (amazon.com/ask/guidelines/qa) still states:
How do I ask a question?
On a product page, scroll to the "Customer Questions & Answers" feature. Enter your question in the text box and click "Ask".
How do I answer a question?
To answer questions, click "See all questions & answers" and choose questions you can answer from the "Unanswered questions" feature in the right column.
Note that you can directly access the Customer Questions & Answers section for a particular product page if you use this convention for the URL (a hack provided by the reader): add product number at the end of the string "
amazon.com/ask/questions/asin" - in the case of the floor lamp,
this link will take you to the first of five pages of Q&As. Or, as we explained above, find the search box above the reviews section and do a search to make the section appear.
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Buyer Seeks Customer Q&A Feature on Amazon Product Pages
by: COVID-19