The reviews on your listing may not be from your marketplace

What Amazon calls Global Review Sharing

Amazon’s help text for customer reviews, as Amazon’s own forum moderators quote it, says this: Amazon shares reviews written by verified purchasers of the same product in other countries.

The internal name is Global Review Sharing, sometimes abbreviated GRS. One Amazon moderator describes it as “intended catalog level behavior” and says the matching depends on the product identifier — not on whether you sell in that marketplace, and not on which region it sits in.

That last part matters, because the way sellers usually picture it is wrong. There is no “EU pool” and no separate “North America pool”. There is one catalogue, and reviews follow product identity across it. We have seen moderators handle cases of reviews from amazon.in appearing on an amazon.com listing, which no regional model would explain.

When it applies — and when it does not

It is not automatic, and it has not been automatic since 2021.

According to an Amazon support answer relayed in the seller forums, Global Reviews Sharing was switched off by default for most physical-goods categories that year, after a surge in listing hijacking that exploited globally submitted reviews. Since then, what Amazon staff describe as the conditions is roughly this:

• The brand is enrolled in Brand Registry.
• The product carries the same brand name across all the stores involved.
• Amazon’s catalogue actually recognises the listings as the same product. Moderators specifically flag that this often fails when ASINs were created manually in each marketplace.

Even then one moderator says it happens “in some cases”, which is as close to a guarantee as Amazon gets. Treat it as something to check on your own listings rather than something to assume.

Where the foreign reviews actually show up

They appear in their own block near the bottom of the detail page, headed “Top reviews from other countries” — on amazon.de, “Spitzenrezensionen aus anderen Ländern”. Each one is labelled with the country it was written in.

They arrive in their original language. Amazon machine-translates them and offers a toggle to translate the review block, which is why a German one-star review can show up in readable English on your .com listing.

One thing this is not: Build International Listings. BIL copies and translates your listing content between marketplaces. It does not move reviews, and it is not what triggers sharing. Sellers mix the two up constantly, including in the forums.

Because the block sits low on the page, it is easy to miss when you are checking a listing quickly. Scroll past the local reviews before you conclude a listing is clean.

What it does to your star rating, and what nobody can promise you

Here is where most articles on this topic overreach, so let us be precise.

An Amazon moderator has said that Amazon shares reviews and ratings from other countries. Another has said the .com rating is “weighted toward the local market, not a raw global average”. Sellers meanwhile report parent listings with 1,770 reviews in one store showing a few hundred in another. All three can be true at once, because of something Amazon states directly:

So the displayed number is not a sum divided by a count, and it cannot be reverse-engineered from the reviews you can see. Which means nobody — us included — can tell you that removing one cross-border review will move your local average by a specific amount. If a provider gives you that number, they made it up.

A related trap while you are counting: the ratings count and the review count are different numbers. The ratings count includes one-tap star ratings with no text. The review block shows only reviews that have text, an image or a video. Sellers routinely read that gap as a sync failure when it is just two different things being counted.

Why auditing one marketplace audits the wrong thing

This is the practical consequence, and it is the reason the guide exists.

If you sell the same product in five stores and you only ever look at the one you are based in, you are looking at a subset of what your buyers see. A shopper on amazon.fr may be reading a review written in Germany that you have never opened, in a language you did not search, in a block you scrolled past.

The fix is unglamorous: open the same ASIN on each marketplace you sell in, and check the “from other countries” block on each. The fastest way to jump between them is the ASIN shortcut — amazon.de/dp/ASIN, amazon.fr/dp/ASIN and so on, swapping only the domain. We walk through that in how to check whether a review was removed.

What you are looking for is the same thing you would look for at home: reviews that break a published guideline rather than reviews you dislike. Which ones qualify is covered in which Amazon reviews can actually be removed.

Does a removal travel? Amazon has never said.

We looked hard for an answer to this and there is not one. No Amazon help page, no moderator post, no competitor’s guide states whether removing a review in one marketplace removes it everywhere it is shared. The question simply is not addressed.

What Amazon does say points away from a clean yes. The same help text that describes sharing adds that reviews may not be shared if they do not meet Amazon’s policy guidelines for that country. That is Amazon describing per-country visibility filtering — which means a review being invisible in one store does not prove it was removed globally. It may simply not be shown there.

Reporting works the same way: Amazon’s own forum guide to reporting a review describes the Report control on the review itself, on a detail page. Nothing in it mentions marketplace scope.

So the honest position, and ours: treat each marketplace as its own check. After a removal, verify the ASIN on every store where you saw the review, not just the one you reported from. If it is gone everywhere, excellent. If it is not, you now know something specific instead of assuming something general.

Seller feedback works the other way round

Worth separating, because the two get confused and the removal routes are completely different.

• Product reviews attach to the ASIN. Every seller of that product shares them, and they can travel between countries under the conditions above.
• Seller feedback attaches to your storefront and to one specific order. Only the buyer on that order can leave it, and it stays in the marketplace where the order happened. A US rating and a Canadian rating are separate numbers.

The removal route is different too: seller feedback goes through Feedback Manager, with a request window measured in weeks rather than through the review Report flow. The grounds are different as well — obscenity, your personal information, content that is entirely a product review, and fulfilment complaints on Amazon-fulfilled orders. We cover that separately in negative Amazon seller feedback.

One honest note on sourcing: the per-marketplace scope of seller feedback is uncontradicted practitioner consensus and follows from how orders work, but we could not find an Amazon help page stating it in so many words.

This is not the January 2026 variation change

If you search this topic right now, half the results will be about something else, and the headlines make them look identical.

In January 2026 Amazon announced a change to how reviews are shared between variations of the same listing — parent and child ASINs — rolled out by category through the first half of the year. Reviews are now shared only among variations whose differences are minor and do not affect how the product functions: colour, pattern, pack quantity, sizes with the same function.

That is a change within one marketplace, about variation trees. It has nothing to do with sharing between countries, and no coverage we found connects the two. Many 2026 trade posts are headlined “Amazon review sharing is changing”, which is how the confusion starts.

Both matter to you, for different reasons. The variation change decides which reviews sit on your listing from your own catalogue. Global Review Sharing decides which ones arrive from abroad.

Frequently asked questions

Sources