From February 2026, review sharing will tighten – making variation accuracy more important than ever for Vendors…
From 12 February 2026, Amazon is rolling out an update to how customer reviews are shared across Vendor product variations; a change that will put greater emphasis on how well Vendor catalogues are structured and products defined.
What’s happening?
This update isn’t a removal of review sharing, but it is a narrowing of when it will apply.
From the rollout date through to an estimated completion in May 2026, reviews will only carry forward across variations that differ in minor, non-functional ways, while products with meaningful differences will stand alone.
Why this matters
Obviously, reviews are one of the strongest drivers of conversion on Amazon, and for Vendors with complex catalogues?
This is an update that could have a real impact on how trust signals appear across your range, with the potential to affect star ratings, review volumes and performance across Buy Box, advertising and conversions.
And because this change is being applied progressively by category, Vendors may see performance move unevenly across their catalogue.
What Vendors can do now
What Amazon is signalling is that variation structure has to reflect real product equivalence – not a Vendor’s commercial preferences.
Our Vendor experts have flagged 4 key areas where ASINs are likely to be most exposed:
- Where variations combine products with functional differences.
- Where child ASINs differ materially in size, formulation, capacity or usage.
- Where variation families were built for convenience rather than accuracy.
- And where review aggregation has been propping up weaker SKUs.
It will pay to act proactively now, so our team suggests that, ahead of your category’s rollout window, you should:
- Audit your variation families for functional consistency.
- Separate materially different products into standalone ASINs where needed.
- Make sure attributes clearly reflect real product differences.
- Align your internal teams on which SKUs are genuinely equivalent to others.
- Prepare for potential shifts in your review counts and conversion metrics.
The Bottom Line
Marking another step toward stricter catalogue discipline, the ultimate aim for Vendors now is to make sure your catalogue is structurally sound and compliant as Amazon tightens the rules.
Given its power to reshape conversions across your range, we see the brands that review and clean up their variation structures early will be the ones far better placed to protect their performance as this change rolls out.
If you’d like expert support to audit your catalogue, restructure your variations or anything else Vendor related, our Vendor team is here to help – click here to book a call today.