Are Amazon product review counts a ranking factor for SEO?

Sammy

Anyone know this..
Do higher amounts of reviews, or higher average ratings of a products reviews directly affect the search engine ranking of a product in Amazon's listings?

Or do they just help increase conversion, which then increases sales, and in turn increases search engine rankings indirectly....

I know they are correlated, and have heard opinions either way - personally I think it's the latter but I'm not sure.
Cheers

Travis_Jamison

I don't know if anyone actually knows besides the A9 engineers. My opinions go back and forth. I do think that SALES are the #1 factor out of this, with reviews being secondary.

I do feel like there are certain levels of reviews that after they are breached the rankings go higher. Again though, it might just be a conversion rate thing so who knows.