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Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Fighting Fake Reviews: How Shane Barker and TraceFuse Are Protecting Amazon Sellers
00:29:37
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- [00:00]
Shane Barker
99% of the sellers didn't even know that you could remove critical reviews or file on that to be able to make that happen. And some have tried it and said, hey, it's just not worth it. You know, it's not something we can do. And so we like to take that headache. The reviews on Amazon is the core of Amazon, right? I mean, that affects your pricing, that affects your PPC costs. That affects everything. If you have bad reviews, everything else is going to be more expensive. It's going to really affect your profitability. We've seen anybody, they have like a 4.3 star rating drop down to 4.2, they lose that half a star that you can see, the physical half a star. We've seen some of our clients lose anywhere from 10 to 50% of their sales because of that drop. Hey.
- [00:43]
Keith
This episode is brought to you by the outstanding team at Compass Strategic Advisors, your trusted partner in driving strategic growth. Whether it's expanding into new territories, launching products, rebranding, or hiring key staff and board members, they offer the expert guidance every step of the way. With a versatile approach and a proven track record, Compass is the go to resource for both startups and established companies looking to scale with confidence. Thanks and show your support for this podcast by sharing some sponsor appreciation. Check these guys out at www.compass-strategic-advisors.com. all right, here we are, the liftoff. And I get to welcome Shane Barker, who's the CEO, founder of Trace Fuse, the first Amazon Terms of Service compliant negative review removal system. And I, I tell you what, somebody who's had a career in media and marketing and dotted line to E commerce, have run a few e commerce companies and consulted with a few e commerce companies. Shane, I think I have experienced this problem of how do we get more reviews? Oh, shoot. Look what our competition's doing. Oh, what are all these fake reviews? What are all these negative reviews? How do I manage this? Because people don't realize 30% of all online reviews are reportedly fake. I'll get your feedback that too. 47% are suspicious. So now you're talking about half the influence of a $787 billion industry called consumer spending over E commerce. So that's a huge, those are some huge numbers. So the terms of the setup of the problem, if you think I've addressed it quickly, I'd like, you know, accurately, please share that with me. But you're going to share with us really, really the scale of the problem and how you suggest e commerce companies and really maybe even reviewers Address it.
- [02:38]
Shane Barker
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having us on the, on the podcast, man. I really appreciate. Keith. This is, this is awesome. Not to mention, we also found out that we're both 49ers fans, so you're automatically. I already thought you were an amazing person and now you've just tenfolded that I didn't. That was possible, but here you are. So, yeah, really, at the end of the day, reviews, I mean, I think whether, even, even if you're talking the Amazon space or even outside of the Amazon space, what happens is, is once people start to realize, you look at, you know, reviews are things used for social proof for people to validate whether they want to buy a product or not, we've seen a huge turn over the last few years, right? Whereas a lot of people really, you know, you go online to be able to. There's a lot of websites that talk about reviews and where you can get reviews like trustpilot and those types of things. People start to really rely on those. And what we've seen over the last few years is a lot of people really looked at the reviews on Amazon to make decisions, like for brick and mortar stuff, right? Like, like I give you an example. We had a client that they had Amazon and some other big, you know, brick and mortar places that were looking at our Amazon reviews to decide whether they wanted to take on the product for their. For their. The brick and mortar. So that's a big deal, right? I mean, obviously that plays into a lot of different things. So I. When anytime you have something that can make it so you can make more money or less money, there's always going to be people out there that want to game the system, right? I mean, that whether you talk about SEO or anything, right? Anything out there. So the hard part for us as consumers is like, how do we validate whether these reviews are true or not, right? And there was Fake Spot that is no longer. Actually Mozilla bought Fake Spot a few years ago and they just decided to discontinue it and to work on other things. Working on other things in the end. And obviously the browser and all the other things that they, that they invest their time into. But that, you know, the review thing has become a big thing because we all online, we look for reviews, right? And if we're going to go figure out what people feel about a certain product, we can go to Google, you can go take a look at it, or you can go.
- [04:26]
Keith
Shane, not interrupt. But I mean, in the world of influence and shopping and marketing and media. It's all about word of mouth.
- [04:34]
Shane Barker
Absolutely.
- [04:34]
Keith
It's like the number one way that buyers are influenced in terms of what product or brand or they choose. A lot of people assume it's a feature or availability or price. Word of mouth and influence is the number one?
- [04:49]
Shane Barker
Yeah, I mean, I used to do influencer marketing. In fact, I actually created the quarters at UCLA for influencer marketing with a friend of mine, Amanda. So I, I definitely understand the influence side of things. And, and what's gonna. You have influencers that vouch for products and talk about them, but the reviews is really the. As you're talking about your peers, right. People that you trust that you said, hey, have you tried this product? Have you seen this product? And they go, and they want to look at that, they want to make that decision. We, whether you realize it or not, when you go to Amazon, the first thing you do is you look at the reviews, which is whether you consciously know that you're doing that. Next time you go to Amazon, just think about where you look. You probably look at the product real quick and you look at the reviews and that's just something that we do. And guess what? If you've got bad reviews and people assume that you've got a bad product, and sometimes that is true, right? Sometimes you have bad reviews and you got a bad product. I mean, we all start off with product A, and then guess what? Over time you're going to iterate make a better product. And so there's things that, you know, the, the constructive criticism that happens there can be good. Right. I'm not against all critical reviews or all bad reviews. I mean, it happens. And I think it's a valuable lesson as well to be able to improve things. What we really look at is really like fraudulent stuff. People that are doing things that are illegal, that you know, coming after you, that you know. So we're looking to even the playing field there. And then really with the stuff we do on Amazon, we're just filing on stuff that violates Amazon's own rules. So Amazon says you can't cuss this person. Cussed. Well, guess what? That makes it so this review should be removed. So that's kind of our specialty. When we do in the Amazon space.
- [06:10]
Keith
And let's go into trace views, then let's talk a little bit about what the product does, how it does it, and where you are in that product journey as an entrepreneur.
- [06:19]
Shane Barker
Yeah, I'll give you a little backstory. I'll kind of tell you how we started it. Right. And so I started Trace Shoes about five years ago. And the reason why I started it was we were working with quite a few direct to consumer brands, right. Dtc and I have my own brand, Shane Barker Dot com. Right. That's the good old logo up here. And that's. We had some clients that we were working with and I really asked him, hey, what are your guys's biggest pain points with Amazon? They said, hey, really it's the reviews. And so I was a little too cocky at the time. I said, you know, here, hold my beer, I'm gonna go figure it out. Give me a few weeks, you know, and then I'll, I'll be back. It only it took two years, so I was humbled very quickly. You know, as an entrepreneur that's like, I can just work longer hours. What's that?
- [06:57]
Keith
Maybe a few more beers too?
- [06:58]
Shane Barker
Yeah, well, those beers always help. I'm Irish, so that's. It always helps. I don't know if it, you know, anyways, I don't know what that does, but it does, it helps. And you know, at the end of the day it's always a good thing. Or at least that's what I tell people.
- [07:07]
Keith
So.
- [07:07]
Shane Barker
Yeah. So you know, for us we looked at this and said, okay, there's a huge problem here. Finally crack the code after two years and now we have 600 brands and work with over, we've removed over 14,000 reviews. Now with that being said, right? That's, yeah, so we have our, the actual software. We actually have a free review checker on the website that anybody who's an Amazon seller can put in an ASIN or a SKU and they'll get a report on which ones are in violation and they can file for free. So we do that as a, as well. Yeah, I want to help sellers, but at the end of the day, the reason why we jumped into this is because of the amount of, you know, stuff that we saw on Amazon. A lot of, you know, reviews that weren't being caught by Amazon's AI and their machine learning that were coming through. And it really affects people's bottom line, right? I mean it affects the reviews on Amazon is the core of Amazon, right? I mean that affects your pricing, that affects your PPC costs, that affects everything. If you have bad reviews, everything else is going to be more expensive. It's going to really affect your profitability. We've seen anybody, they have like a 4.3 star rating, drop down to a 4.2, they lose that half a star. That you can see the physical half a star. We've seen some of our clients lose anywhere from 10 to 50% of their sales because of that drop. So that's a very pivotal point for us. That's one thing that we look at as a major pain point. And I talked to, I've talked to thousands of sellers. I can tell you that 99% of the sellers didn't even know that you could remove critical reviews or, or, or file on that to be able to make that happen. And some have tried it and said, hey, it's just not worth it. You know, it's not something we can do. And so we like to take that headache on for them.
- [08:34]
Keith
So we've talked mostly about Amazon. How hard are they trying to clean up and police their own, their own store? How much are they tracking fake reviews? Because maybe that's the assumption. Hey, you know, they're going to knock those things out. They'll find them sooner or later.
- [08:50]
Shane Barker
Yeah, I mean, I think it's always hard to say, right? Because Amazon says, hey, we collect, you know, we grab whatever out of 100 reviews. Maybe they grab 90 of them, let's say as an example. It's hard to say because we don't see when they come through. Right. So it's like the, it's like the, you know, like the United States saying, hey, we stop 80 of the drug people that bring drugs across the border. Well, we don't know how many people we're coming across anyways. I don't as a consumer. Right. So my point is, is, you know, I believe that Amazon's doing everything they can to clean up the, you know, the reviews. I believe that they stop a lot of them before they even get on the platform. What we are, we're like that second. I call it like the second layer of protection, where those ones, if they get through Amazon for whatever reason, then great, then we're the ones that take a look at them. And once again, if they mention pricing, cussing, mentioning competitors, those are all things that we look for, that we've trained AI to look for. And then great, then we go and take a look at that. And then also fraudulent stuff. So if anybody comes through, the fraudulent stuff is a little harder to find. And Amazon obviously has tools to do that. But you also have to talk about a platform that has what millions and millions and millions of people on a daily basis.
- [09:49]
Keith
It's similar in a way to what we had with Facebook during some of the presidential elections. Right?
- [09:54]
Shane Barker
Yeah.
- [09:54]
Keith
It was supposedly doing all this Fact checking and error checking. And, you know, people were saying things that were definitely outside their code of conduct or whatever the term was, and they would start deleting and then they said, you know what? We can't do it anymore.
- [10:09]
Shane Barker
We're going to stop.
- [10:10]
Keith
Is that right? So it's similar.
- [10:13]
Shane Barker
It is, it is for Amazon. Once again, it's their own rules, right? So they're there. And that's what we're doing, is we're going in and saying, hey, this review has the F word. We're not supposed to have the F word on the platform. Let's get this removed. And Amazon really has to. I mean, if, if people don't believe in the review system at Amazon, Amazon, I'm not saying they're done, but it's, it's a huge point for us because once again, we look, we go look at the reviews. We say, okay. In our mind, we go, well, it's a 4.3 out of 5. We know that's good. It's got a thousand reviews. We're good there. Amazon has a thing that says, hey, this is a, you know, a product that everybody likes. Awesome. Now I feel now my, my issues of potentially buying it have gone down because I'm like, okay, great, this is a good product. The other side of this is when I buy that product, I also know that if I want to return it, Amazon makes it stupid easy, right? Because guess what? If it became a hassle, like, we've all done it, I go to buy something like, oh, but then if I have to return enough to do this, oh, man, what a nightmare. I won't do it. I, like, I won't buy stuff because I might have to return it. My wife, on the other hand, is amazing at returning stuff. She's got sit down to a science like she was taught by my mom. That's exactly it. She's like, oh, I know how to do that. I'm like, I don't even know how to return something because I'll just keep it. Like it's not even worth it. But, you know, at the end of the day, it really does come down to that, right? It comes down to, you know, the, you know, it makes. They make it so easy. And the other side of thing that Amazon's in, which is interesting, is also made it so they're extremely consumer focused. So. And sellers need to know that, right? What happened in the beginning is Amazon's like, hey, we're. It's like a dating app. You're trying to get men and women on this thing to try to, you know, do. What happened was Amazon got all kinds of great sellers on there and, you know, treating them right. And then all of a sudden all the buyers start coming. Now Amazon's at a point where, guess what, if I sell a blue widget and, and I start doing weird stuff on Amazon, they'll just get rid of you because they have 400 other people that sell blue widgets. Right. So, and, and that's, and so that's where things become interesting. So they could change that from, hey, we need tons of, you know, great sellers now. It's like we got so many great sellers. Guess what? Now we're customer focused and sellers. If you don't do this, we have somebody else that's going to come and replace you. And that's just the way they do things, which is okay.
- [12:12]
Keith
Which seems a little bit more similar to Walmart and maybe how they. For sure, brick and mortar. So, Shane, what if I really understand the whole game now and I, and I know how to check reviews, what's the best way for me to garner more positive reviews besides building a great product? And on the marketing side, are there some things I should do that you're seeing?
- [12:36]
Shane Barker
Yeah, there's a, there's a number of ways to do that. I mean, one thing is that Amazon has an, it's an actual tool that it'll go in and ask you, what did you like about the product. The problem with that tool is it doesn't go out every single time you get a purchase. Right. So there are tools out there, like Ecomengine is one of them. There's quite a few out there. And what they'll do is they'll make sure that every time a product gets purchased that something goes out to them to write a review for the product, which will help you bolster, obviously more positive reviews. I always, you know, for us, we take care of critical reviews which are 1, twos and 3 stars. Yeah. We always encourage people to get more fours and five stars. And the analogy I always use is it's like a diet, right? Like if you work out and eat right, you could shed weight. Well, I'm 50, so I don't, I can't shed anything at this point. But when you're, you know, when I was in my 20s, I could burp and lose £2. Right. My wife hated it. But my, the point is, is so great. You do both things now. If you just eat right, you don't work out, results are going to come slower or if you just work out and you don't eat right, it's going to be slower. So the, the analogy I use there is great. We're going to be knocking down your one, twos and three stars and you get your fours and fives. That will help you what we call the bsr, your bestseller ranking or in your star ratings. Because guess what? You have good things happening here. We're knocking down the bad ones here. The goal is to get you to, to, to be able to, you know, get over to that next star rating.
- [13:48]
Keith
I like it. I, I feel like Amazon's doing a great job, but I feel like there's going to be another level of performance. I think the web's getting faster, shopping's getting smarter. Here comes AI, higher bandwidth. Amazon's got this prime service. I'm waiting for something new to come out of this. What do you think?
- [14:09]
Shane Barker
Well, I, I, Last week I was just at Amazon Accelerate, which is their big conference, and seeing all the different tools that they're coming out with, which is awesome. And there's some great stuff. Yeah, I mean, AI is changing things, right? I mean, just in an extremely fast rate. The minute you learn this AI, great, There's Nana Banana or there's something else that just came out. Like there are going to be things. This is going to make it so we're going to be able to be more efficient on a number of different things. Right. Creating content. There's so many things that this is going to play a factor into. But also reviews, I think it's also going to have a factor, you know, because if you're depending on what kind of reviews you're putting out there. For us, evaluating reviews is a big thing. We, we didn't use AI in the beginning. We were using humans and eyeballs and stuff. So about three and a half years ago, we created our AI, our own AI that we can run through what it does. We just go, we grab the reviews, we run it through the AI and it just tells us whether it's compliant with Amazon's guidelines or not compliant. So pretty.
- [15:00]
Keith
Yeah. Who needs to work with you then, Shane? Which companies? The biggest sellers now, really?
- [15:05]
Shane Barker
Any Amazon sellers? I mean, my, I'm, I'm a bleeding heart for the small entrepreneurs as well. I mean, we, we have some huge companies that we work with. Like, I can't tell you some of them, but anyways, we have some big ones. I mean, we have about 600 brands we work with, so there's some, some huge ones. The small ones we used to make it so you don't, you have to have 500 critical reviews over all of your products. Because the reason why we did it at the beginning is we felt like that was somebody that probably understood their numbers a little better because they've been in the game for a few years. Yeah, we lowered that. And guess what? Now we're actually taking on really anybody that's an Amazon seller. Because you can be an Amazon seller if you only have 10 critical reviews, we remove one that can absolutely double your sales. I mean, it's like that big of an impact. So I didn't want to leave those people out. I don't make any money on that necessarily. But it's not always about money. It's about trying to help sellers. And so we lowered that, and so now we can really help any seller on Amazon.
- [15:53]
Keith
That's great. Hey, let me turn. Because we focus so much on Amazon, and I know there are others out there. Let's talk about Yelp for a second. Yeah, that's a company that's been around forever. Right. I used to be somewhat active on Yelp. I'm a kind of a foodie, retired foodie, really. And I just used to love that app, especially when it first came out, because it was like, wow, this is really different. 1.0 is really, you know, providing some. Some cool value here. I've talked to a couple people lately that's just say they hate Yelp, that they say they always get like, one's a restaurant owner who says, we get all these fake reviews about us. It's so negative. It's a cesspool. And he doesn't support it anymore in any which way. And I. And just from a consumer standpoint, I don't hear as many people saying, I read this on Yelp. Where are they at in. In terms of how do they manage? Is that a different experience? Is that something you've studied?
- [16:48]
Shane Barker
So. Absolutely. So I used to the way even before I did Amazon reviews, I would help restaurants, I would help a lot of people for online reputation. Right. And so I used to work with celebrities and all this stuff. But with the Yelp thing, I'm going to give you my honest opinion about Yelp. I'm not a huge fan of Yelp. It's funny. I'll use the app to look at things. My issue with Yelp is, is kind of their business model and how they. They put it together. What I mean by that, is it because I know, once again, businesses that. That friends of mine that own businesses, clients of Ours. And they'll go to them and say, hey, you're having a problem with that negative review. Well, hey, I can take care of that if you guys sign up with us. And. Right. Which is very, like. What you're really saying, which really bothers me is, like, this is how you feed your family. And I'm saying, hey, if you want to continue and, you know, have good results, you have to pay us to be able to feed your family. And I used to. This is terrible. Hopefully Yelp's not listening to this term.
- [17:39]
Keith
Pay for play comes to mind.
- [17:41]
Shane Barker
Yeah. And it's. But it's brutal. Like, you're saying, like, I can make this right if you give me cash. And what it really reminds me of. And let's get. Please, if any Yelp executives, please don't be mad at me for this. I feel like it's almost like the mob. It's almost like, hey, you want protection? Like, you got to give us money. And. And I've never felt good about that, because at the end of the day, I think Yelp's a great platform. I think overall, what they do, they broke out of restaurants, do all kinds of stuff, plumbing. And you can see that there's true value in that. I true believe that if I want to go to a new area, you know, right now I'm in Reno, Nevada. If I want to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, I can look at that, and I get a. I think a good assessment of what food I want to try. How many reviews are being done there? I just didn't like it on the other side, how they were selling it to businesses and restaurants and to other people. I just. Reviews are. I don't think people really understand the magnitude of a review. Like, when you write a review, it can really slam a restaurant.
- [18:33]
Keith
I'm thinking like, Google right now, right? When. When you pay to get placed on the Google search results, there's a way for those sponsored listings to pop on top, and they clearly mark, these are sponsored.
- [18:45]
Shane Barker
Sponsored.
- [18:45]
Keith
And maybe that's a false equivalent. So Google does it, right. Maybe. Even though it's a pain in the ass to go through all those sponsored links sometimes. But. But maybe Yelp should learn from that. Why haven't they by now? Because I don't think it would undermine their credibility if I go onto their review site. I know, hey, it's pay to play these well.
- [19:04]
Shane Barker
And that's. And that's the problem. I mean, and that's what Amazon doesn't want to happen. Right. Because if people start to lose respect for the platform, the review system. So if I go into Yelp and I go, what. I'm starting to kind of question whether. Yeah, you know, I mean, are these, Are these, I mean, seen. Do I get to see these ads because they were hustled into this and they were kind of forced into it, or is this naturally the next next best option for where I'm at in Charlotte, North Carolina, when it comes to food, like, I don't know. And you start to, you don't want to start to lose. Once you lose credibility and the trust, everything really starts to diminish. And so I know Amazon's done everything they can to really keep the consumer make it easy. One click purchase. They have all kinds of things that they've done to make it easier for a consumer. And we all know that because, you know, I mean, you can get sent a present or anything in one second. You can go and click on, I want that. And there you go. Right, like, and so Yelp, I do believe, I don't think it's something they can't fix or improve, but I, I do believe that their overall reputation over the years has diminished, especially with business owners.
- [20:01]
Keith
Like, hands down, they've been around forever. I'd be curious to have them on the podcast and ask them this very question. Yeah, you, you study this industry. What have they said?
- [20:11]
Shane Barker
Well, I mean, at the end of the day, I think Yelp feels like the business model they have, the way that they handle it is a good way because they haven't really switched it up from what I understand, from what I've seen, which is kind of disheartening because once again, once you start to go down that hill, it becomes very hard to get back up that hill. Building trust is one thing. To lose the trust doesn't take long to do so.
- [20:31]
Keith
Space is hugely popular, whether we're talking about consumer, and we could even talk about some of the enterprise businesses that are focusing on reviews. Is there anybody else that's doing something right or particularly unique, different than what we've talked about here is so far, which has been primarily Amazon to some extent Google. We know they do what they can to try to police their platform and, and the browsers. But, but beyond that, any of the e commerce companies or the other, you know.
- [20:56]
Shane Barker
Yeah, like, we've seen trustpilot. I think overall, I think they've done some good stuff. Some people might have an opinion either way on that. I, I've seen some good stuff with them in regards to how they do Things they try to be very compliant and really looking at reviews and doing stuff. I think the other thing is too, is when you start getting tons of reviews, it really gets very complicated. Right. And what I mean by that is you have different cultures, you have different things. There's just a lot of things that play into that. It's not just a review. It's, you know, certain reviews that maybe somebody might see might be offensive to somebody. Right. Or somebody will attack somebody online because of their political views. Right. That could be. That's another thing where, I mean, we just were talking with Amazon and they talked about, you know, with the thing with Charlie Kirk, obviously that happened. There was a lot of people that would go after products that knew that he liked and would say certain things about that. We had nothing to do with the product. Right. So they, they deal with things. It's not just reviews, but there's political. So there's other things that gets kind of get tied in there and stuff when you're like, you think it's reviews, but it's a lot more complicated than that. So it just becomes, you know, a little harder to manage. I would say once you start getting a lot and lot, especially different cultures, different countries, that kind of stuff becomes a little bit of a, a challenge, I would say.
- [22:02]
Keith
So tell me how you work with a client. So I, I bring a, bring my brand over. And how would we work together?
- [22:11]
Shane Barker
Yeah, the way that we do it is we actually. So if somebody wants to sign up with us, obviously they can come over. What happens is, is we have a monitoring, right. So what we do is we, they come in, they give us their ASIN or their skew, right. And so that comes in and then what we do is they can go in the back end. What do is we monitor those asin. So in the back and they can see it, they activate the asin, which just means, hey, Shane, I want you guys to look at all my reviews and I want you guys to run them through your AI software and tell us which ones are compliant with Amazon's guidelines and which ones are not. If they are compliant, then we don't do anything with them. There's nothing. We're not going to file anything. We're looking at ones that clearly violate Amazon's guidelines. Cussing, pricing, mentioning competitors, hate speech, anything FBA related. So if Amazon shipped it out and somebody said, hey, this was two weeks late, I hate this hair dryer. Well, but that's not the hair dryer, that's. You didn't like the Shipping. So that's another thing that we go after. It's anything fba, which means that it's shipped by Amazon. So if anything was late, broken or used, and those are the things that we go after as well. So great, we take a look at that. We start filing cases on the client's behalf. Client can look at all that in the software and has full transparency and what's going on there. And they only pay for reviews that actually get removed. So we don't. There's no monthly fee. There's no, you know, there don't have cost for us filing cases. If we file cases and no reviews get removed, then they don't pay anything. So we did that on purpose because it was in the beginning, it was hard to get people on because they said, oh, reviews, I've heard this is black hat. I've heard this is like weird illegal in China, blah, blah, blah. And so I put my face in the company and said, hey, you know, I'm not from China. Not that people from China are bad at all. I'm just saying, I'm like, look at, I'm here in the United States and used to teach at ucla and I've done this and done that and, you know, I really put my face on it and said, hey, listen, why would I go mess up my whole brand that I built up for 30 years to come and, you know, screw you out of $250? I guess it's not what we do.
- [23:55]
Keith
Yeah, I think you're probably helping them in a way, right? I mean.
- [23:59]
Shane Barker
Oh, of course.
- [24:01]
Keith
So how hard is it to review, to remove a review once you flagged it? What's that process like?
- [24:09]
Shane Barker
Yeah, I mean, usually what happens is, you know, we're filing a case with Amazon, so we go in, we file the case on the client's behalf. And so what we do is just tell Amazon, hey, this person used the F word. Obviously, it goes. Your guys's guidelines. You guys can't mention or you can't, you know, customer review. Great. We send that over to them. Most of the time, the review does not get removed on our first try. It's usually going to take multiple case filings. I think that's due to maybe the magnitude of the reviews that are going through and people that are filing cases. We are fully compliant with Amazon, which means that we know the rules to how to file cases, how long to wait to get an update, which departments to file with. It's not as easy as just clicking. They'll tell you to click the Report button, which you can do. But that's not the end all, be all. That doesn't, I don't know how many reviews have been removed because of that. That's a starting point where I did talk to Amazon and they did say a physical human does take a look at that when you report it. Now if you click report 10 times they'll just ignore it. Right? They're not here. They don't want you to waste their time. So you know, at the end of the day, I mean we have, sometimes we have to file 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 cases.
- [25:12]
Keith
There's some way they escalate. Like if it's particularly erroneous or particularly.
- [25:17]
Shane Barker
Absolutely, there's an own, there's, they have a department for that. What it is, is we do escalation emails. So when we file escalation emails that's going to be if we see fraud. So give me an example of that. Yeah, let's say you have a product and you know somebody gave you five one star reviews over the last two months, the same seller or same buyer, then what we do is that flags in our system and then we'll go and take a look at that. Are humans not AI Humans will go take a look at that and say wait a second, I'm looking at this. And they also happen to buy your competitors products. So let's say you have two cups, identical cups or just competitors. Well wait, this cup you absolutely hated, you drank out of it, you chipped your tooth, you cut yourself, your kid almost died because he drank out of it. Like oh my gosh. And this one over here, best cup I've ever used. Oh my God, I lost ten pounds. Like you're like wait a second, I'm being a little egregious. But you get my point is like all of a sudden we look at that and we go, wait a second, if these products are almost identical, why did they absolutely love that five times and absolutely hated ours five times. Then we file an escalation case and go, hey, I think there's fraud going on here. I think this is what we call a sock puppet account or a fake buyer's account.
- [26:16]
Keith
Well, it feels like you're telling me a story and I'm trying to wonder why I would not use Trace views before I brought my product at Amazon or once I got to a certain scale and size, why wouldn't run this through because you're only charging me if you find some, some bad reviews. And we're trying to have as clean and, and confident of a buying experience as possible.
- [26:41]
Shane Barker
Well, this is, this is what I would recommend. I mean for us, obviously we love to have clients that are well established that have a lot of reviews. I mean that's where, that's how we make our money. Right? But if I was, if I was a brand listening to this and they're jumping on Amazon, I would sign up with us. And the reason why that is is because we monitor the ASINs. And so what happens is if you've been selling for 10 years and you come to us and say, hey, we've got 10,000 reviews, I need you to clean those up. Well, guess what, that's going to cost some money, right? We're going to be cleaning those reviews up. We could, you know, we can clean up five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. Right? So if you're a brand new seller, if you start monitoring now, when those reviews come in, we're going to be proactive and going and knocking those down so that you don't get all these crazy numbers over here, all these crazy reviews that are just going to be sitting in the hamper. But the problem is most sellers don't know that. Right? So I don't make really any money if I'm just monitoring. Right. And if they don't get a lot of reviews, that's really not a lot of money in my pocket. But I'm okay with that because if we can, if we knock down one review that comes in, they only have five critical reviews, right? And we knock down one, that's 20% of their reviews. Like crazy, right?
- [27:42]
Keith
You take it.
- [27:43]
Shane Barker
Oh my God. It's a credit gift. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
- [27:46]
Keith
Real money. This has been really fun chatting about this. Shane, what haven't I asked you? That would be a good, a good point to add. I feel like the world is a big place too. Are you only focused in us? Are you starting to branch out to other English speaking or other languages? AI has got to be facilitating perhaps some of that as well.
- [28:04]
Shane Barker
Of course, yeah, we actually right now we do the us, Canada and UK because those are, the filing system is very similar there. The EU and Denmark and Germany, those are different. The way they file and the way they do things, almost like starting another business. We are looking into that, trying to, to crack the code there. But right now we have 600 brands and there's 1.9 million sellers on Amazon just in the US platform. So we have plenty of room for growth. The one thing that I do want to bring up and you actually touched on it. And what I really want to push people towards is the Amazon review checker on our website. It's a free tool. They can go and put in their ace and they can go in it. They have to verify their email address and then they actually get a report that talks about the reviews that are in violation and why they're in violation. They should be able to take that and be able to put a case together and file that with Amazon. That is free. No cost to that whatsoever. My goal there is just hopefully they can go get some reviews removed without having to use us, which, you know, doesn't mean so I make any money, but I'm okay with that. I really am. So they should go check that out.
- [29:01]
Keith
Yeah. I mean, we're talking about a frictionless commerce experience. Unless, you know, you. You want to escalate that. But this is where the game is. Is won and lost.
- [29:09]
Shane Barker
This is true. Very true.
- [29:11]
Keith
We're going full circle as I leave you with a go Ners.
- [29:15]
Shane Barker
Yes. I'm talking about four zero, baby. Let's get it today, this weekend.
- [29:18]
Keith
I look forward to a change. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining the liftoff. And you know, you, your logo has a little bit of similarity to mine with our liftoff themes, too. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much. Good luck with everything.
- [29:32]
Shane Barker
All right. Thank you so much, my friend.