Across a substantial share of top-selling products on Amazon US, the retailer has seemingly decoupled parent review counts from associated child products as part of an experiment that began on August 1.

As one example of how this is manifesting on the site, you can see the below Yeti tumbler with a new, textured finish with just 26 reviews, versus the parent product and other varieties sporting over 102,000 reviews. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9ZXFN2J?th=1) 

As we’ve seen previously with short-lived removals of visible review counts on search results pages, Amazon is no stranger to running experiments that can completely upend how brands look to differentiate their products on the retail site. While we expect this experiment to end in a manner of weeks, brands that are experiencing this ‘review decoupling’ in the interim have to dramatically adjust their merchandising and advertising strategies to compensate.

In the coming days, we’ll dive into how this change is manifesting within different categories, along with the likely reasons driving this experiment on Amazon’s end.