ePRICE review requests: how to automate the ask

Automate review requests on ePRICE.

ePRICE is one of Italy's established online electronics and home-appliance marketplaces, running on Mirakl. It is a smaller and more focused storefront than the pan-European giants, and that scale is an advantage for a seller: on a thinner listing, each review you collect moves the needle further than it would on a marketplace with a hundred competitors per product.

A smaller marketplace is an easier one to win

The instinct is to chase the biggest marketplace available. For review strategy the opposite often pays better. On a listing where four sellers compete, the one with twenty reviews and the one with two are visibly different propositions. On a listing where sixty sellers compete, twenty reviews is unremarkable.

ePRICE sits in the first category. It is a serious Italian marketplace with real traffic, but the per-listing competition is nothing like Amazon's, which means a deliberate review programme shows up in your position quickly rather than slowly.

Write to Italian buyers in Italian, properly

This sounds obvious and is routinely got wrong. Sellers running a pan-European operation frequently send one English template everywhere, or a machine translation that reads like one.

An Italian buyer who receives a stilted, obviously-translated message does not think "international seller". They think "this is automated", and an ask that reads as automated is an ask that gets ignored. The message has to read like something a person at your company wrote — which, for the version we send, is exactly what it is.

Large appliances change the timing

ePRICE carries a lot of white goods and large home appliances, and those have a delivery pattern nothing like a parcel. A washing machine is delivered on a scheduled slot, frequently needs installing, and cannot be assessed until it has run a few cycles.

Timing a review request off dispatch here is close to useless. Timing it off delivery is better. Timing it off delivery plus enough days for the appliance to have actually been installed and used is what produces a review that mentions how quiet it is — the detail that sells the next one.

What Merita does

We watch your ePRICE orders for the delivery event, wait for the category to make sense, and send one message in Italian through the marketplace's own buyer messaging. One message per order, nothing offered in return, and any order carrying a complaint, a refund or an open return excluded before anything is sent.

What Merita does on ePRICE

We watch your ePRICE orders for the moment each one is actually delivered, then send one polite message through the marketplace’s own buyer messaging asking the buyer for an honest review. Nothing is offered in return and nothing is incentivised, so the ask stays inside the marketplace’s rules. Orders with a complaint or an open return are skipped automatically. On our live client this took the rate of review collection from roughly 1 in 100 delivered orders to about 5.2 in 100 — a 5.2× lift.

ePRICE — common questions

Can sellers on ePRICE ask buyers for reviews?

Yes. A single non-incentivised request for an honest review, sent through the marketplace's own buyer messaging after the order is delivered, is standard seller communication. What is not allowed is offering anything in return, or asking specifically for a positive rating rather than an honest one.

Does the review request go out in Italian?

Yes. Merita sends in the buyer's own language, and on ePRICE that means Italian written to read naturally rather than machine-translated from an English template. A message that reads as translated reads as automated, and automated messages get ignored.

How does this work for large appliances that need installation?

The request is timed from the delivery event plus a delay appropriate to the category, not from dispatch. A washing machine or oven cannot be reviewed until it has been installed and run, so asking a few days after delivery produces a real review of the appliance rather than a review of the courier.