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The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast With Steve Chou
621: How Amazon Sellers Are Still Gaming Reviews Without Getting Banned With Dave Bryant
00:44:10
In this episode Dave Bryant from EcomCrew and I expose how sellers are still flooding Amazon with fake reviews even after the major crackdowns you've been hearing about in the news. - I'll show you the exact loopholes they're exploiting right now and...
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- [00:00]
Steve Chou
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to E commerce and online business. Now, in this episode, Dave Bryant from E. Com Crew and I exposed how sellers are still flooding Amazon with fake reviews even after the major crackdowns you've been hearing about in the news. I'll show you the exact loopholes they're exploiting right now and why Amazon's detection systems just keep missing them. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over@sellersummit.com and if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step by step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches. People who are running their own e commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It's happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And if you're doing over 250k or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they're ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.
- [01:32]
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podc. Today I am excited to have Dave Bryant on the show. Now I've known Dave for over a decade now. He is one of the founders of Ecom Crew, which was started in 2015. I think we met in 2014. It's one of the top blogs and one of the top podcasts in the space and he also has a YouTube channel which is pretty amazing. Also, Dave has bought and sold several e commerce companies at this point and he's an expert at selling on Amazon. But in my mind, what sets the guy apart is that he doesn't hold back on anything and he'll talk about like the shady stuff that's going on Amazon and he'll literally physically travel to China to visit the epicenter where all the large Amazon sellers live. And today we're going to talk about Dave's businesses and his advice for how to grow your E commerce business today. How's it going?
- [02:27]
Dave Bryant
Cool. Thanks, Steve. I. I love the glowing endorsement, so thank you very much.
- [02:32]
Steve Chou
I did like that other video too, I wanted to say. But I just wanted to say though, your last video that I just watched, I really enjoyed it. It was about how Amazon sellers are getting illegal reviews on Amazon. I will link up that video actually in the show notes here. But you spent a lot of time on it. It was very well done.
- [02:51]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah. Well. And just to give a quick summary of it. So. So basically Amazon had claimed to shut down a bunch of fake review brokers. And it turns out they didn't actually shut them down. So they had kind of filed frivolous lawsuits against these guys and they'd won default judgments, I shouldn't say frivolous lawsuits, but they basically won a bunch of default judgments against these fake review brokers. But these guys are all based in countries like India and Bangladesh and really there's no way to enforce a US Judgment in these countries. So these fake review brokers are continuing to operate. You can go onto their websites right now, today, buy fake reviews for four to five dollars per review. I did actually buy one of these fake reviews and they actually do a really good job of getting you reviews quickly. They look completely legitimate. And if you wanted to, you could buy 100 of these reviews, you could buy thousand of these fake reviews for your product. And very, very, very hard for Amazon to trace.
- [03:48]
Steve Chou
We'll get back to that actually, Dave, because I'm pretty sure the listeners are interested in it. I want to talk about you first though. Now here's my first question to you, actually. I want to say about four or five years ago, I remember you and Mike were on an episode of Ecom Crew where you guys are both giving your own recommendations for E commerce. And I distinctly remember that you recommended, and I think you and Mike differed on this, you recommend just going to all in on Amazon because Amazon was just growing so quickly and your opinion was that websites would just get crushed and Amazon would just start dominating everything. Now fast forward, what four or five years later would you still. Do you still believe that recommendation today?
- [04:33]
Dave Bryant
I would believe half of it. So yes, I believe your own website will be crushed for the most part. And there are exceptions to this. There are like the ridge wallets of the world, the vessel shoes of the world, who are absolutely dominate it just with their DTC websites. So yes, I do think your own website will be crushed. But I do think there is an alternative now to Amazon and I think getting back to China. You talked about me going over to China and seeing what the e commerce sellers over there are doing. And in China, anybody who follows e commerce in Asia overall, whether it's China or Japan, Korea, they know that live selling and social selling is a huge, huge thing now. And I think it's making its way to North America now. And the biggest reflection of that are TikTok shops. So I think that that is now a viable alternative to Amazon is social selling. I don't think live selling is quite here just yet, but I think TikTok shop is a really good example of how you can succeed outside of Amazon and not necessarily with your own Shopify store. And of course you do need to still have your own Shopify store. I just don't think it will ever be, I shouldn't say ever, but the vast majority of the time I don't think it can be sustainable alone to sustain your e commerce.
- [05:46]
Steve Chou
That is very interesting. I mean that's where we differ. Like I have like almost the complete opposite philosophy because we make almost all of our revenue from our own store. Right. But I do want to talk about live. Well, did you want to say something before? No.
- [06:01]
Dave Bryant
I mean there's definitely situations where you can succeed having your own DTC website. And I think you guys are a great example of Bumblebee Bumblebee linens where I imagine there's a fairly high touch with the customer where you're doing a lot of back and forth with them in terms of their orders and customization. And I think when you get into the situations like that, it definitely makes sense and there's a ton of other examples too. But for the vast majority of people, I think on its own it's very, very tough to succeed in most niches.
- [06:33]
Steve Chou
I would argue that like you mentioned TikTok Shop, like a lot of products do not fall under tick tock shoppable territory in my opinion.
- [06:43]
Dave Bryant
Right.
- [06:43]
Steve Chou
In terms of the type of products, it's almost like you need to sell something that's super high margin to begin with. Beauty supplements, anything just kind of unique, Right?
- [06:54]
Dave Bryant
Yes. Yeah, there's no, there's no search intent with TikTok. It's all discoverability. So if you have a product that somebody discovers and goes, oh wow, I need this. Yes, works great with TikTok shops if you're selling a boat anchor. Yeah. Probably not the best for TikTok shops.
- [07:11]
Steve Chou
You know, Amazon, I want to say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but Didn't Amazon cancel their live selling platform?
- [07:18]
Dave Bryant
I don't know if they still have live selling on Amazon or not. I mean they were going all in with Amazon Live, but with Amazon, whatever way the wind is blowing that day, they could kill a project or start a new project. So I'm not sure how Amazon Live is doing right now. Regardless, it never took off the way they imagine whether it's still around or not. And that's where I don't think live selling is quite here just yet in North America. I think we're seeing like the effects of social selling overall just through things like TikTok shops and influencers hawking products. But the whole live selling component, I don't, it's no, without a doubt it's nowhere near like it is in Asia right now. Actually.
- [07:55]
Steve Chou
Can we talk about that? Because when you were there you kind of witnessed this craze firsthand, right? Like what is it like over in China right now?
- [08:02]
Dave Bryant
Yeah. So Stephen mentioned a video that I put out, basically going to the mecca of Chinese e commerce sellers and basically what this mecca was, it's a giant office building. And by office building really is it kind of rivals the Pentagon in size. And it's basically almost every major Chinese e commerce seller is based in this one office building. So either they have their main headquarters there or they have branches there. But basically almost every single major Chinese seller is based there. And a lot of the office space there was being repurposed from you know, just their marketing offices and doing the day to day operations to now a big chunk of that office space was being repurposed into live selling studios. So you could go rent out a live selling studio within this office building and just do your live selling right there. And they had different scenes for everything they had. They'd have a Christmas scene if you were selling Christmas trees. And so you could live sell in a Christmas background, you could live sell in a Thanksgiving background, you could live sell in a forest background. And so there are just a ton of different variants for how you could sell. Like the scenes that you could sell in. And it was just basically overtaking this office building in terms of live selling. And they were all curious in this office building. Everyone I talked to is like, look Dave, we're killing it here in China with live selling. We have no idea how we could ever do it in America because language is a big issue, cultural differences a big issue. So it's really easy for a Chinese seller to sell on Amazon, but they hadn't quite cracked how to Sell through live selling in North America.
- [09:38]
Steve Chou
You know, I want to say I saw a YouTube video not too long ago where there's this street in Shenzhen where it's literally just littered with people with a ring light and they're just live selling, like street full of them.
- [09:49]
Dave Bryant
Yeah.
- [09:49]
Steve Chou
Did you witness that firsthand?
- [09:52]
Dave Bryant
I never seen live selling on the street. So this mecca is just on the outskirts of Shenzhen.
- [09:58]
Steve Chou
Okay.
- [09:58]
Dave Bryant
I don't know why you would sell on the street when you could just go to this office building and rent out like this nice warm instead. It's free office. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I could see it, of course. I mean if you're selling, if you're selling a food product or something, or some running shoes, maybe it makes sense. But I didn't see it firsthand, but I definitely did see it within this office building.
- [10:18]
Steve Chou
That's nuts. And typically, I want to say the US is like a couple of years behind China. Right. So we're probably due for that wave coming pretty soon.
- [10:26]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we see it though in a small, very small little trickle with the sudden like dominance of influencer LED brands. So whether it's like the rocks, whatever you're selling now, vodka, tequila or whatever, all the Kim Kardashian's beauty line, all these influencers, obviously Logan Paul with Prime, like a lot of new, very successful brands are being driven by Internet influencers. And I think this is kind of like the first baby steps towards getting to the point of live selling. Yeah. And where the average guy where Steve Chu can all of a sudden launch a vodka or a whiskey or whatever product he wants to launch. So even a smaller influencer can have pretty big success. And again, this is my prediction. Who knows? The fact I'm predicting it probably means it will never happen, but it does seem that is kind of the way that we will eventually go.
- [11:15]
Steve Chou
Well, okay, well let's talk about like this prediction in the context of your own brands. So I know we have. You have an off road brand, right? Are you currently. Is that mostly Amazon right now?
- [11:27]
Dave Bryant
Yeah.
- [11:28]
Steve Chou
Okay, mostly Amazon. Do you have like a content part of it, portion of it that you're developing?
- [11:35]
Dave Bryant
Well, you know, that used to be a pretty big component of. So we run three brands and that was a big component of two of the brands we run because we had pretty significant content sites and a lot of that traffic was being directed to Amazon listings. Now after the Google helpful update of whenever it was, when was it now so helpful 3 or. Yeah, it was yeah, that basically eroded that side of the business and it made that strategy very, very hard to succeed. It. Now I will say with the off roading side of the off roading brand that we operated, that content site kind of went more or less to nothing because of the way that content was.
- [12:15]
Steve Chou
It was written content, that's why. Right?
- [12:16]
Dave Bryant
It was written content. Yeah, but it wasn't very visual. Now we also have another craft brand which is extremely visual, which is hard for AI really to replicate. So if you're trying to show somebody visually how to do something, people still want to see images and videos for that. And that content business has done okay. And so that strategy is still kind of working for that brand. So yeah, that was the overall strategy, taking content, using that as a traffic funnel into Amazon. And Amazon really love, loved and loves when you send external traffic into Amazon. But yes, both of those brands are primarily Amazon.
- [12:55]
Steve Chou
Would you say it was largely because the one that succeeded Was video content versus written content?
- [13:02]
Dave Bryant
Yes, 100%. And not just video, just visual. Just visual. So whether images or videos, and obviously video is typically trumps images, but anything visual, I think that is still kind of a lane that AI chatgpt, they can't quite replicate right this second. I mean we've all seen it where any AI generated hand seems to have six or seven fingers. So it's not quite there yet. Eventually it's going to get there, but right now that's still one space that doesn't seem to be too tarnished by AI. And in our experience with that craft brand, yeah, it's done pretty well. After the helpful update, I guess what.
- [13:43]
Steve Chou
I'm trying to get at right now is like would you even bother creating written content even with a lot of images now to promote a brand? Or would you just jump straight to video?
- [13:53]
Dave Bryant
I think there's edge cases where images do help. I mean video, video is how most people want to consume content. So I mean if I had to pick between one or the other, I would definitely pick video. But I do think there is a lane where you do want images. Some people I, I'm this type myself where I do want to consume a lot of content just visually, I don't want to sit and click through a 10 or 12 minute video. So the best answer, the right answer is both. If I had to pick one, it would definitely be video. But videos, video is time intensive. Like it's a lot easier to put up images than video. Like that's the big barrier. It's not that it's not Better Is that is the ROI on the amount of time that you have to put into video? Is it there? It is. As we both know, it's very time intensive.
- [14:40]
Steve Chou
I mean, the only reason why I'm also asking is just the way things are going. Like everyone's just doing research on AI. People might never even see that image that you're posting. Right. They're just doing the research and then they go straight to your website or whatever to. To make a purchase. Right.
- [14:54]
Dave Bryant
Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah. Like we talked about off air, there is still significant amount of Google traffic that goes to the top two or three listings for certain topics which aren't being AI generated by Google. Whether that's there or not. In five or ten years, probably not. It's. It might be viable right now, but five or ten years from now, definitely that will not be the case. So that's definitely where the puck's going. But right there, right now, I think the puck is still there where you can get a top surplus listing on Google and do. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:29]
Steve Chou
At least for like the next six months. I actually heard a rumor that Google was going to upend their entire search for a version of AI overviews. I don't know if that's going to come true or not.
- [15:42]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've all experienced it where it does seem to be overtaking search results for most searches. And I'm sure there is a time when it will become even more intrusive and it's basically purely AI results. But we're seeing it now already. I mean, there's a lot of searches where basically all you're getting is AI results.
- [16:02]
Steve Chou
All right, so you're still all in on Amazon content and Amazon has like all the increased fees and advertising and all that stuff. Like, what advice would you give Amazon sellers today to stay profitable in the environment?
- [16:18]
Dave Bryant
Well, it comes down to product ultimately. You know what, what I always tell people too is, you know, five or six years ago, kind of the rule of thumb is you basically needed a product that you could sell at Forex. So you buy it for 10 bucks and you sell it for 40. And then two or three years ago, after the Amazon fee increases, it changed more to like 5x. And now with all the tariffs plus some of Amazon's fee increases, it's more like 6x. So I think that's the key. You have a product that you can sell at 6x. You're okay if you're still trying to sell a $10 widget for $40 that's a very tough proposition, not only with Amazon fees but plus tariffs and most people are still importing from China and they're not importing from China. Basically every other country now except for the US has tariffs. So tariffs are obviously a very significant additional cost for people. So both of those things, Amazon fees and tariffs basically means that the magical formula now to stay profitable and profitable is probably 10% net margins. That magical formula, it's probably more like 6x.
- [17:20]
Steve Chou
Interesting. And I know you're in Canada actually for the Canadian listeners out there, like what's it like right now over there?
- [17:30]
Dave Bryant
Well, good news.
- [17:31]
Steve Chou
I mean we're pissing you off here from the U.S. right? And some of the old tricks you can't do anymore.
- [17:36]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, we haven't become the 51st state yet. So I think we're all okay with that. I mean that, that part's good. I know Steve is kind of licking his wounds because he can't get Canadians travel down to his conferences. But it seems like the Americans are making up for that. So yeah, we are doing the good Canadian thing and being passive aggressive and just refusing to travel or buy American whiskey. So in that regard, you know, I think Canadians would just have their feelings hurt from a business regard. I mean it's, it's affected certain industries actually in Canada. So there was a very healthy percentage of e commerce companies who were taking advantage of de minimis and they would bring their products from China or whatever country into Canada and then ship across the border same day because 90 of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the US border and they would just ship cross border every day. So effectively it was the same speed as shipping from the US but no tariffs. So now the minimum is gone. That little niche of e commerce businesses who are taking advantage of that little loophole, they have all had their businesses totally disrupted. So on the e commerce side, yeah, it's been a little bit disruptive depending on what business model your e commerce company had. From a business side like overall economy seems to do have been doing okay right now. But yeah, obviously a lot of I think anywhere in the world has been Disrupted by Trump 2.0.
- [19:02]
Steve Chou
I just wanted to take a moment.
- [19:03]
To tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that.
- [19:06]
You may not be aware of if.
- [19:08]
You are interested in starting your own online store. I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained@mywifequitterjob.com free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I'll send.
- [19:34]
You the course right away.
- [19:35]
Once again, that's my wife. Quitterjob.com free.
- [19:39]
Now back to the show. I actually have a ton of friends who, you know, when the De Minimis, when Trump eliminated De Minimis from China, they're like, oh, no problem, we'll just ship all of our stuff to Mexico and Canada on the board.
- [19:52]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, Y.
- [19:53]
Steve Chou
And then when he passed the everything every country rule, they were like, oh my God, I just spent like the last couple months moving all that stuff over.
- [20:00]
Dave Bryant
So well, I mean, I remember when I sold my business a few years ago, I thought, you know what, I'll take some of this money, I'll buy a warehouse here in Canada. And now with all these tariffs, I'll just take advantage of this. I'll be like the low cost provider because we'll have all our products brought into Canada and ship them cross border and there'll be no duties and we'll be able to undercut everybody on price and never pulled the trigger on that, thankfully. But had, I mean, geez, that entire business model just be.
- [20:28]
Steve Chou
Yeah, it's very unpredictable. All right, well, okay, let's talk about the illegal activity on Amazon. That's a very juicy topic now. Okay, so you, you just put out a video on this. And I do know that Amazon has been putting out these press releases over the years that it's drastically cut down on illegal reviews. How it's actively trying to like lose less merchandise in its warehouses. What's, what's really going on, Dave, in.
- [20:53]
Dave Bryant
Terms of reviews, they did. So just to give a little history lesson, in 2022, they did suspend a lot of very major sellers on Amazon and basically they were all guilty of putting insert cards into their, into their packages and saying, hey, buy our product, leave a five star review and we'll give you a 20 gift card. And that was very traceable. So Amazon, all they had to do is go into the warehouse, open up a box and they can find these review insert cards. So you're caught red handed with that. And they suspended a lot of very, very major sellers, like public companies in China. So definitely that was a very real action that Amazon took and that had like a very material positive effect in getting rid of a lot of these bad actors who are basically paying for reviews by Leaving these insert cards, that's fine. So they did a good job there. Now what's happened, it's gone from insert cards which are very, very traceable to now people using these review brokers, basically people who will get you fake reviews for five bucks a piece. And that's where all the actions turn to. And these fake review groups exist basically in one place. It's Facebook. So if you go on to Facebook, you search for Amazon reviews, you can find a million Facebook review groups where you can get free products all in exchange for leaving five star reviews. And so now basically all the actions shifted from leaving insert cards to using these review brokers and Facebook groups. So I know mutual Amazon did do.
- [22:23]
Steve Chou
A lot, had had like a rebate service that kind of got in trouble, right?
- [22:30]
Dave Bryant
Well, yeah, yeah. And the review, and that's a, a really good example of kind of also what exists today. So yeah, you're talking about one of our friends who had a rebate service. And the theory behind that service was it wasn't necessarily to get fake reviews, although we'll talk about that in a second. The point was to kind of juice Amazon's algorithm and get some extra link juice and conversion juice for your product. So you give away a bunch of free products through one of these rebate services. Amazon would think, oh my gosh, everybody's buying this product, we should rank it highly. And so that was the overt reason why that service existed. The wink, wink, nudge nudge side of the service was, yeah, buy our product for free, great. And by the way, please leave us a review. So that was the other thing that was happening and that still exists today. Like these wink, wink, nudge nudge services where you give away discounted products and there's kind of an implicit agreement that yeah, you're probably going to leave a five star review because if you leave, if you don't leave any review, that's probably okay. But you're definitely not going to leave a one star review because you'll get kicked off the platform. So that still exists today.
- [23:38]
Steve Chou
Okay, but what you're talking about here is completely different and sketchier with the.
- [23:45]
Dave Bryant
Overt buying a fake review. So I'm not going to mention the websites you should Google buy fake Amazon reviews. A ton of these websites exist and you can buy five review packages, you can buy 10 review packages, you can buy 100 review packages and you pay a set price per review. Obviously you have to compensate the product costs as well. And within seven to 10 business days you get either five, 10 or 100 reviews.
- [24:10]
Steve Chou
You know, realistically, Amazon could shut these sites down by just telling Google to just filing DMCA takedown requests with Google and they wouldn't be in search at least. Right, but they're not doing that.
- [24:21]
Dave Bryant
Yes. So that's one way to find these review groups. But any Amazon seller listening has probably at some point or the other had a little message, somehow get through Amazon's filters and say, hey, you want Reviews? Message me. WeChat me. So there's these kind of underground ways where you can find these services where you buy reviews as well. And not to pick on China, but again, talk going back to like the mecca of Chinese sellers. You walk through this shopping or half shopping mall, half offices, you walk through there and there's basically billboards everywhere for different Amazon services. Some of them are photography services, some of them are listing optimization services, and some of them are review services. And they don't say fake reviews, but they call them review services. So there are more kind of grassroots ways that people are finding these services to get fake reviews. So you're right. They can stop it on the Google side and just like not have them show up in the serps. But there's other ways that people can find these groups.
- [25:21]
Steve Chou
Okay, let's get to the interesting part. You actually tried one of these services just as just for content reasons, right?
- [25:29]
Dave Bryant
I did.
- [25:29]
Steve Chou
And how does it work?
- [25:31]
Dave Bryant
Yeah. So tried one of these services. So basically Amazon released a press release saying they shut down all these websites. I went to one of these websites, tried to buy a fake review message. The operator of the website said, hey, can you get me a fake review? They said, sure, no problem. By the way, though, I just want to hop on a WeChat call with you just to kind of verify your identity. And basically the identity check was to make sure I was Chinese. As I talked about in the video, I kind of smudged the camera on my lens a little bit, put on a hat, tried to give a broken English accent. And the guy more or less said, okay, sir, it looks like you might be in China. So yeah, go ahead, buy your review. Now, talking to this guy, he was very clearly South Asian. Turns out he's from Bangladesh. So that's where most of these fake review services are working.
- [26:17]
Steve Chou
How did you find that out?
- [26:20]
Dave Bryant
It was in actually the court documents that Amazon had filed taking down these review brokers. So they actually had the names of the people and where they existed in the court documents. Now, they weren't able to take action against them, but they did Find out their names. So yeah, it turns out most of them are in India and Bangladesh. Probably not a surprise, but to a.
- [26:38]
Steve Chou
Lot of people, I just remember his name happened to be Steve, right?
- [26:42]
Dave Bryant
It happened to be Steve. It was definitely not Steve. You can see it in the court documents. It was definitely not Steve. So, yeah, not Steve. But Steve still managed to get the fake review, so paid $5 plus the cost of the product. Now, I did not do it on my own product. Found another product with tens of thousands of reviews because I don't want either my products getting suspended or somebody else's products being suspended. And truth of it is, like, the chances that Amazon's going to notice one fake review on a product with tens of thousands of reviews, probably, probably not likely. So anyways, bought this fake review, I thought for sure my money's gone because I basically bitcoin the guy because I didn't want any trace of this happening.
- [27:26]
Steve Chou
Did you really? You paid with crypto?
- [27:28]
Dave Bryant
Yeah. Well, how else am I going to do. I'm not going to do it with PayPal. Okay, so, and, and again, to their credit, right, like he could have just taken the money and run. Maybe he, maybe there's a bigger scheme here. He wants me to buy the 100 review package for 500. Maybe that's the ultimate scheme. But I do legitimately think that he's actually just providing a good service and like he's not going to take the money. He's actually going to provide the reviews if I bought a thousand review package. So anyways, crypto the money over to him and within about seven to 10 days, that review popped up right on the product page. Now the other thing was this is not some rudimentary operation. So I had to create an account on their website, had to log in. They had a tracking service where I can number one, track the order that the person had used to order. And then also I could track the status of the review and it would say, okay, you need to wait a few days for the review to populate because we don't want to do it too quickly, otherwise Amazon's going to catch it. So the whole process took about 10 days from the time I cryptoed the money to the time somebody bought the product and ultimately left the review.
- [28:35]
Steve Chou
Sounds like this is a real business with like a software back end and.
- [28:39]
Dave Bryant
Oh, dude, incredible.
- [28:42]
Steve Chou
All right, so where is this review coming from though? Is this someone that you bought it or that part?
- [28:49]
Dave Bryant
I mean, they're not going to reveal their secret sauce where they get their reviewers from. So I did ask Steve, I said, hey, where are these reviews coming from? Are they all coming from Facebook? And oh, no, no, know, we have, we have other sources. Truth of it is almost all of them are coming from these Facebook groups. So they operate these Facebook groups for the buyer side. So people buying products and leaving reviews. So again, like I mentioned before, if you go onto Facebook, look for Amazon reviews, you'll find a million of these Facebook or Amazon review groups. And so all these guys who operate these services operate a few of these Facebook groups. Most of them have thousands of members and that's where they're getting the reviews from. So they post the product. Steve has his linen that he wants to get a bunch of free reviews for. He'll tell Steve, Steve will then go post that product in the Facebook group for all the customers and say, hey, if you guys want some handkerchiefs and linens, go to this link, buy it, message us your order number, leave a review, and then we'll reimburse you for your costs. So that's where they're coming from. They're almost all coming from Facebook review groups. They might say otherwise, but even in the Amazon court documents, they've said the same thing. They're almost all coming from Facebook review groups.
- [30:01]
Steve Chou
Here's what I found nefarious about all this. You can actually pay for one star reviews too, right?
- [30:07]
Dave Bryant
Yes, yes. So, and that's what I was curious about because we've all, as Amazon sellers, been hit with one star reviews. And so I asked Steve, I said, hey, you know, it's great that you can leave five star reviews. Can you leave one star reviews? He said, oh yeah, sure, no problem. You want one star reviews, three star reviews, five star reviews, no problem. Anything you want, we'll get it for you.
- [30:29]
Steve Chou
Okay. So I've had a rash of students in the class where they launch and before they've even shipped their stuff over to Amazon, they get a negative one star review. So it seems like this is very common. I mean, what do you do in that case?
- [30:43]
Dave Bryant
I mean this. So this is the sad part about it. So a lot of people, what they resort to, you get hit with negative reviews and you know it's your competitor, what do you do? You hit them back. And so you buy. It goes for this tit and tap where people will buy fake reviews against their competitors. That's the natural reaction from a lot of people in terms of if you don't want to get into that slugfest, what can you do? I mean, really, all you can kind of do is cross your fingers and hope that Amazon catches these fake reviewers. So Amazon did claim that last year they shut down 250 million fake reviews before they ever got posted. They shut down that many. How many are getting through? Who knows? But it's probably a lot bigger than 250 million. So, yeah, they're catching some of these and hopefully they catch them if you're getting hit with fake reviews. But other than that, they're very hard to trace. And that's the problem. They're real customers leaving these reviews. They're real customers based in the US Leaving these reviews very hard to catch. Now, if somebody hasn't bought the product, then that's very traceable from Amazon. Like if somebody's it is.
- [31:46]
Steve Chou
But it's still really hard to get it taken down. Right? I mean, yeah, in this case, and this is, I get asked these questions and I don't really have good answers for them. That's why I brought it up here. Like, I had one student who was already. He spent a lot of time getting his product ready, puts up his listing instantly. I think he got four negative reviews and he hadn't even shipped anything yet. Okay. And then he appealed to Amazon. Look, the listings even live, I don't have anything. But he couldn't get them taken down.
- [32:12]
Dave Bryant
Which is very frustrating. Yeah, I mean, I'll a few tactical things that people could do just to kind of make it meaningful. So first off, Amazon is being a little bit more receptive to review removal requests. And it's brute force most of the time. You just got to email, email, email, Case, Case, Case. The conversion rate on that is very low, but they are definitely a lot more receptive nowadays than compared to previously where it was basically a blanket. No, never a chance in hell that you'll get a review removed. They are more receptive to it now. So that still is an option. There are also review removal services now that exist. Steve. You might have had some reach out to you to sponsor podcast, send emails. Yep. And they're doing the exact same thing that like these account appeal specialists are doing where when you get your account suspended, they're just doing brute force and they're just opening case after case after case trying to get your reviews removed. So it's something you can do yourself or you can use a review removal tool as well. And most of them, you only pay per review that you get removed. So that is another option. And then the third more realistic option, you have to make up for it if you're in a really Competitive category where these bad actors exist. You got to be able to make up for it with a ton of five star reviews. And not buying fake five star reviews, that's not a good option because eventually you will get caught. But you have to have, you have to have that launch velocity when you launch to get a ton of reviews. So fine, there's your 30 free reviews and then after that, you know, you really got to pump PPC and just get a ton of sales because you are going to get some percentage of people that are going to leave reviews. Hopefully it's a good product and you're going to get a lot of five star reviews and not three star reviews. And just really blast in the beginning to get that order volume where those four reviews get washed away. That's kind of the only thing you can do. But you know, sometimes you get four one star reviews right out of the gate and you basically have to relaunch the product.
- [34:12]
Steve Chou
That's actually what I told him to do. He's like, you haven't shipped anything yet so it's not a big deal. You'll have to remark your products. Yeah, again, not a big deal. Just relaunch the listing. It ended up being good in the end but like it's just very frustrating and discouraging for someone who's new to hit that.
- [34:26]
Dave Bryant
Oh yeah, it is. And the problem is with Amazon, they can't do anything against this, against the people buying either fake one star reviews or five star reviews. Because there was a time many years ago where if your product was getting a bunch of fake five star reviews, you would have your product almost immediately suspended. Because Amazon can eventually, if you get enough of these fake reviews, Amazon knows that it's a fake review. One or at least one or two of the reviews will be detectable. They'll suspend the asin. And then sellers caught on. Huh. Okay, well if I just leave Steve a bunch of fake five star reviews, his product's going to get suspended. Because Amazon thinks that you're buying fake reviews for your own product. And Amazon realized that, that, oh, now this is just a technique to get other people's products suspended by leaving them fake five star reviews. And you do it in enough quantity, they're going to get suspended. So now Amazon, they can't really suspend people when they're getting fake five star reviews. All they can do is things like they're trying to do by taking down these actual review brokers, which they're not really doing a good job of, but actually suspending people who are buying fake five star reviews. Very, very, very tough for them to do anything.
- [35:32]
Steve Chou
Yeah, well, Dave, I know you do a lot more volume on Amazon than I do. What is your general feel of the landscape in terms of just bad activity? Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse? And what are your, what's your outlook on Amazon going forward?
- [35:45]
Dave Bryant
I mean, I think Amazon is getting better at, at getting rid of bad actors. I think my best advice to people still though is avoid categories where bad actors exist. So you know, things like off roading products and boating products, really not a lot of bad actors. If you're selling supplements or beauty products, yeah, you're going to have a lot of bad actors in that space. So good reason to avoid those categories unless you're prepared to get into that fight. And if you are, I mean some people are just more apt to participate in those things. By all means, go ahead. But if that's not a fight you want to do, avoid those categories. And those are the big two ones. Like, well, anything that's selling millions of dollars a month for a top selling Asin, it's going to be a dirty, dirty fight. So avoid those categories. I think the best thing you can do, have a lot of products doing tens of thousands of dollars a month. Not a single product doing millions of dollars.
- [36:40]
Steve Chou
Basically stay on the radar, right? Niche products, have a collection of them. Diversify. If one gets hammered, you still have a whole bunch left over.
- [36:49]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, and if you avoid the categories where you're going to get into those fights, you're probably going to sleep better at night doing it.
- [36:58]
Steve Chou
I mean, one reason why I love just having the brand in the first place is because, you know, people will actually search for your brand.
- [37:06]
Dave Bryant
Right.
- [37:07]
Steve Chou
Whereas on Amazon, like if you get taken down and the brand is in such small letters, someone will replace you eventually, someone will knock you off eventually. It's harder to do that when you have a, have something recognizable or reputation out there. Right?
- [37:21]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah. I would argue that reputation is. Probably a lot of people think their brand reputation is more than it really is. I think actually having a brand that people are googling on any volume is pretty rare. And there are obviously brands that do it for the most part. I think we're kind of in a world where brands are becoming less and less important and we're kind of just getting into just your plain Jane private label products and we all have Amazon to thank for that.
- [37:53]
Steve Chou
Interesting. I, I feel like it's going the other way now, now that TEMU has gotten Drastically hurt also. Right. Like Timo was like the U.S. yeah, in the U.S. correct. In the U.S. yes. I'm very U S centric because I live here. Probably not in Canada. Right. I mean Timo is still probably going strong in Canada I would imagine.
- [38:11]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, yeah. And they're going all. I mean that they are definitely going very hard in Europe, Canada, Australia, trying to make up for that lost US volume.
- [38:19]
Steve Chou
Yeah, yeah. So all right, so going forward.
- [38:25]
Dave Bryant
Are.
- [38:26]
Steve Chou
You going to try any live selling with your brands or.
- [38:30]
Dave Bryant
No, I don't think live selling is here just yet. Okay. Social selling I do think. And that can be personally selling it yourself or working more aggressively with influencers. Definitely that is going to be a project for 2026 and going onwards and it's something we have actually been pretty good about in the past, specifically working with YouTubers. So especially in the off roading space there are, there's a very healthy community of off road content creators there. So we've been pretty good with working with them in the past and just going to continue down that path. Path and breaking out to other platforms too, like especially TikTok and working with influencers there because again it's very niche specific when it comes to off roading. There are a lot of content creators both on TikTok and YouTube so it makes it pretty easy to work with them with something like a boating brand. There's actually not a lot of content creators there so it makes it a little bit trickier.
- [39:27]
Steve Chou
I'm surprised. Okay.
- [39:29]
Dave Bryant
Rich old guys, right? That's, that's the problem. Yeah, I guess you need, you need young poor guys or girls.
- [39:37]
Steve Chou
So you're deciding to go the influencer route rather than creating your own content. For the most part it sounds like.
- [39:42]
Dave Bryant
Yeah, I mean create content for ecom crew. That's actually what I'm kind of passionate about is creating content for E commerce. You can only do so many things. I think if I was going to be the sole content creator for a brand, it would have to be something I'm uber, uber, uber passionate about because you can only fake it so much when it comes to a brand. So you know, do I enjoy camping in the outdoors? Yes. Am I driving around in a lifted 4x4? No. So you know, you kind of need to, you need to be the rule.
- [40:14]
Steve Chou
Of course, in the off roading, I mean you can't take your Prius off roading, right?
- [40:18]
Dave Bryant
Well there are. You can get a Prius lifted but yeah, it wouldn't be your typical day to day driver.
- [40:24]
Steve Chou
Well, what Is the future of E Com crew actually. What's the goal there?
- [40:28]
Dave Bryant
Well, first off, blogging has been very, very hit, especially in that space by Google. Helpful. Again speaking about social, I think definitely where people are consuming their information when it comes to E commerce or really anything technology is more YouTube than anything else. So yeah, that's the big goal is to get some traction on YouTube. I enjoy making the content there. Haven't quite succeeded in figuring out how to get it to stick there yet. But I think that's the transition is continue to go hard on YouTube, continue the podcast like we are. I think our email list and our emails that we put out weekly are really good as well. But those are kind of the three big ones. And then you know, less emphasis on the blog. But like we were talking about offline, it's still, it's still a major component to the brand but definitely not as important as it was pre helpful.
- [41:26]
Steve Chou
You know I gotta say though, I think you're one of the few people that are still putting out blog posts on Amazon and they're all really good. And obviously I would trust your newsletter over something that AI hallucinates online.
- [41:42]
Dave Bryant
So. Yeah, well, yeah. And AI has helped with repurposing content a lot. So it definitely makes it easy or easier to take something like a blog post and help regenerate that into content for your email list and into a script for YouTube. So AI has definitely helped in that part and just making jobs easier in terms of creating the content. Yeah. Never in a million years could you trust it to give you any real E commerce advice. But it definitely helps with some of just the day to day tasks with repurposing content. Content, because that's a big part about content is repurposing.
- [42:16]
Steve Chou
Yeah. So Dave, where can people find you online? Where can people sign up for your newsletter? Where can people find. Check out your YouTube channel. I'll link all this stuff of course, but say it verbally.
- [42:27]
Dave Bryant
Sure. Ecomcrew.com and anyone listening should go to YouTube.com ecomcrew subscribe. That would be great. But yeah, Those are the two big ones. Econ crew.com and YouTube.com Ecom crew and.
- [42:42]
Steve Chou
I will say this here first. I think the channel is going to break out this year if you keep putting out hits like the last video. I think it's going to be really good.
- [42:52]
Dave Bryant
Okay. Am I, am I nipping at your, at your heels there? 400,000 subscribers. Are we, we.
- [42:59]
Steve Chou
Do you know what's funny about like YouTube? Like I don't feel like there's any competition in the, in the space. You know what I'm saying? It's like rising tide lifts all boats. It's not like we're going head to head on anything. So I'm always happy to help promote you with, with any of the content that you put out.
- [43:13]
Dave Bryant
So yeah, I mean, that is a beautiful thing about YouTube. You're absolutely right where you can have multiple topics or multiple creators on a topic and they don't cannibalize each other's content. They don't take away anything from the other guy people. Some people like ketchup, some people like mustard, some people like mayonnaise. And so you can have something for everybody's taste buds.
- [43:36]
Steve Chou
Yep. So go check out the Ecom Crew channel.
- [43:39]
Dave Bryant
Thank you Steve for the recommendation.
- [43:42]
Steve Chou
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Amazon is still getting the squeeze from all sides, so make sure you check my YouTube channel to learn how to fight back. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com episode621 and once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com if you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.