June 18, 2025 • 25 mins
What happens when a single 1-star review tanks your listing- and you can’t ignore it?
On this 188th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Shane Barker, CEO and founder of TraceFuse. Tracefuse is the first and only Amazon TOS-compliant system designed to ethically remove negative reviews…without shady workarounds or black-hat tactics.
From the emotional toll of a 1-star review bomb to the ripple effect on conversions, ad spend, and organic ranking, Shane shares why review protection isn’t just a reactive tool- it’s a critical piece of brand growth. He walks through how TraceFuse identifies guideline violations and why honest feedback is sacred- but fraud shouldn’t get a free pass.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why most sellers are dead wrong about what reviews can be removed
- The difference between real customer criticism and TOS-violating abuse
- What to do if you're suddenly hit with a review bomb or shady competitor tactics
- Why ethical review management is not about hiding criticism, but stopping abuse
- How removing fake or exaggerated reviews can boost CTR, conversion, and ROAS
Check out the Amazon Review Checker: https://tracefuse.ai/amazon-review-checker/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Shane Barker (00:04):
Our goal is to help them remove negative
reviews, obviously. And let's isthat a headache for you? If it's
a headache for you, let us takeit on, right? We're a
performance based companyanyway, so you only pay when
reviews actually get removed.
And if it makes sense from anROI perspective, then great, we
should move forward.
Andrew Maff (01:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of
the E comm show as usual. I amyour host, Andrew Maff, and
today I am joined by the amazingShane Barker, who is the founder
and CEO over at TraceFuse.
Shane, how are you doing, buddy,you ready for a good show?
Shane Barker (01:22):
Man, I'm doing awesome. Man, I'm doing really,
really good. And I Yeah. Man, Ijust push ups. I hit some sit
ups, actually, that's all a lie.
But I am ready for the show. Ididn't really do all that
because you look great. I'mgetting older. And, yeah, I
mean, it's the filters. Butyeah, yeah, no, I'm absolutely
ready. Man, I'm ready to knockthis thing out.
Andrew Maff (01:37):
Beautiful. Man, you, you are the one of man, if
I had to guess, like,definitely, less than five
people who I've had on this showmore than once. And, you know,
congratulations, you're welcome.
Shane Barker (01:53):
I mean, I mean, seriously, I just, you know, I
always dreamed of this moment,or maybe I'd be on here a second
time. I always told my wife,like, Listen, if I get on
Andrew's show twice, I'm done,yeah? Like, at this point, I'll
just retire. I'll be I mean, I'malready 1000 air. I mean, I
don't want to get too personal,but I've got 1000s of dollars in
my bank account. Like, yeah,you're crushing 2000 Oh, dude.
Like, making a lot of money.
Like, I'm a big deal.
Andrew Maff (02:13):
Yeah, we should do this whole show dry sarcasm, so
that everyone just has to guesswhat the value is so that we're
not making it clear.
Shane Barker (02:23):
Well, we're doing good so far. We're doing really
good so far, because people arelike, what did the title say?
Talking about what not to do andhow to do things differently in
life. I don't know, but eitherway, yeah.
Andrew Maff (02:33):
This is our moment to try out our stand up that
we'vealways wanted to do. We'lltalk. Now. We'll talk. We'll
talk ecommerce.
Shane, welcome back. Love you.
Appreciate it. Thank you so muchfor doing this. TraceFuse. Let's
pretend that everyone's a newlistener. So let's, let's do a
bit of a recap. Tell us a littlebit about yourself TraceFuse,
(02:54):
and we'll take it from there.
Shane Barker (02:56):
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah. So I name is ShaneBarker, I grew up in the digital
space. Have my own littlewebsite. Shanebarker.com did a
lot of personal branding. Thereawesome stuff going on over
there, and jumped in the Amazonspace looking at reviews about
five years ago, give or take,about two years of R&D research,
trying to figure out if we couldcrack the code of getting
reviews removed on Amazon aftertwo hard years of losing my hair
and thinking I'm doing the wrongthing in life, we were able to
(03:19):
crack the code. So last threeyears have been pretty amazing.
We help Amazon sellers removenegative reviews. We have about
500 clients, and we've removedover 13,000 reviews for our
clients today. So pretty, prettyproud of that. Important, I
think probably thing to adifferentiator is to understand
that we don't just remove allreviews that are on Amazon,
right? I mean any criticalreviews we talk when I say
critical, I mean one, twos andthree stars. We go after the
(03:42):
reviews that are againstAmazon's guidelines, right? Like
Amazon's own rules. Somebodycusses, mentioned a competitor
pricing, you know, FBA relatedstuff. They ship it late, it's
broken, a ship used somethinglike that. So if there's reviews
that cause you stress, butthey're legit reviews that
really talk about your product,those ones, we you know, if
there's nothing violatingAmazon's guidelines or nothing
fraudulent there, if we know, wecan prove that there's a, you
(04:05):
know, somebody attacking you,
Andrew Maff (04:06):
Yeah, the immediate thing I thought about, well, a
obviously that's something thatwe'd want to get removed. But at
the end of the day, those thingsare, you know, constructive
couple things, but the one I wasjust thinking about, you must
criticism is not a bad thing.
Someone make sure that peopleknow that. I've had people reach
out and say this review isterrible. And I'm like, is it
true? They're like, Yeah, but Igot to get it down. I'm like,
well, then you need to iterate.
You need to figure out how toimprove your product. There's
(04:28):
not much we could do there. So,you know, the thing is, is we're
not here to clean up all everyreview so that you can get away
with murder and continuously,you know, sell products that
maybe aren't great. The goalhere is to go for things that
are legit should be removed ifsomebody's cussing doing
something that's outside of, youknow, of the control that you
have. And you know, like I said,that's kind of the goal.
(04:55):
have people reaching out to youall the time that use your
platformthat then are like, Wait, these
reviews weren't taken down, andthey totally should be, even
though they are definitelyviable reviews just because of a
poor experience or somethingwhich happened, and sometimes
they're beneficial from amarketing perspective, that's a
different story. What? How doyou like? How do you field that
like, how do you keep just theconstant people coming in brands
(05:19):
just being like, Oh, this oneshould have gotten take it down.
It wasn't. And it's like, yeah,because it's real,
Shane Barker (05:26):
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is for
us, is we just kind of look atit, look at the review. I mean,
it really comes down. It's verysimple for us if, if it violates
Amazon's guidelines, and it'ssomething that we would go
after, even if it's a legitreview, right? Like, somebody
had a legit review, but at theend, they said, this product is
effing terrible. Well, guesswhat? That's something that
should be removed. Even thoughthe review can be legit, that's
(05:47):
what we look at, right? So it'snot usually, like, I'll have
people that once can say, hey,this is a very specific review,
and this is really crushingsales. Those aren't really
things that we deal with, right?
Like, that's more of a, youknow, you're gonna reach out to
Amazon. What we're looking at isthings that are clearly against
Amazon's guidelines. Like, it'sjust like, we're, you know, you
and I can look at it, and 20other people could look at and
say, Yeah, this, they're usingthe F word. Like, we really
(06:08):
shouldn't be doing that on theplatform. So that's, that's what
we're looking at, right? Isstuff that's just like,
blatantly, there shouldn't bethere, really, Amazon is even
looking at it going, okay, yeah,that makes sense. Like, there's
really, we don't have to go talkto anybody. We don't have to
debate this. I don't have todebate this. I don't have to
bring a manager over. That's wethat shouldn't be on the
platform, right? So that's thoseare the things that we look at.
If people have very specificproblems about somebody saying
(06:29):
the wrong thing, somebody says,Oh, I went to the hospital and
almost died like you know,that's not necessarily against
Amazon's guidelines, but lasttime I checked, if you take some
creatine, you're not going todie. I don't know how many
people have died from creatine.
So, you know, that's what welook at, is like, like, does
that make sense? Right? Like,well, there's other people that
would help in those situations.
For us, we want to clean up theasin, get people back up to
(06:50):
their, you know, 4.3 4.7whatever that may be, and really
just clean up the listing. Sowe're looking for stuff that
should be removed, or, onceagain, fraudulent stuff is in.
Can be big as well, of where,you know, you've been attacked,
maybe by a competitor orsomething. And our system
actually, you know, now itactually indicates that too.
It'll let us know if there's, ifthere's it'll flag it in our
system. And then we have thesethings called humans, you know,
(07:12):
they're, they're gonna be goneafter AI. But yeah, yeah, we do
still use humans. It's like,it's so archaic, but whatever,
you know, it's like, I know, Iknow exactly.
Andrew Maff (07:25):
Look with that, with without giving it away,
because I know you're gonna, Idon't, I know you're not gonna
want to do that. But can youexplain how exactly it works? Is
it completely automated? Is itjust automating support tickets?
Is it some type of API feed,like, what? What's the actual
nuts and bolts of it?
Shane Barker (07:43):
Yeah, I can't tell you that, if we can go to the
next question. No, I'm justkidding. No, I absolutely can.
Yeah, I'm just kidding. No, no,I'm an open book brother. So
yeah, no, what we do is, really,the process is this. So somebody
goes and signs up with us.
They're going to be filling outjust some basic information.
They put in a merchant token.
When they put in their merchanttoken, that will actually, it
(08:03):
pulls in all of their ASINs intoour software. So then our
software, what you able to do isbe able to navigate around, and
they'll be in charge ofactivating and deactivating
ASINs. So they'll they can, youknow, they want to activate a
product, they want to deactivatea product. It's very, very easy.
They literally click a button,and so when they click that
button, let's say they have 50critical reviews. When they
click that button, we grab those50 critical reviews, we run
(08:24):
those through our AI software.
When I say, AI, this isn't, youknow, chat GPT, that just came
out a year ago. I mean, we,we've been doing this for about
three years with the AI side ofthings. So we've, you know,
obviously it's machine learning.
We're, you know, feeding themodels, and they're getting
better and better better. Sowhat happens there is, it'll
tell us, hey, this is either inviolation of Amazon's guidelines
or not in violation. And so ifit's in violation of Amazon's
(08:45):
guidelines, then we have thosehumans come back again, and then
they come and actually take alook at the reviews, and they'll
take a look at that and say,okay, hey, now I know where I
want to file this, right?
Because we we have some, I say,insider knowledge, not insider,
like Amazon told us, butinsider, as in, we filed so many
cases, there's just some uniqueknowledge that we've gained
through really filing them wrongfor the first two years, right,
(09:05):
and now we've gotten it down toa really awesome a system where,
you know we have the databecause we're filing so many
cases. If Amazon changes apolicy or changes something, we
know it instantly, because maybewhat we started doing here isn't
working as well as it used to.
So we have other departments orsomething that we can file with
so that's mainly the processthere. We file cases. We send
(09:26):
emails directly to Amazon.
Everything that we do iscompliant with Amazon. And
really, you know, we send thosethose cases, and Amazon either
accepts them, denies them,responds back, doesn't respond
back. It's a it can be a tediousprocess at points, you know
we're but we have it down towhere we know how many cases to
file. We know you know when tofile, what departments to file
with, how long to wait until weask for an update. These are all
(09:48):
things that we've learned, youknow, as you know, just through
the whole process of learning aswe go through this thing,
Andrew Maff (09:55):
yeah, yeah.
Interesting. What's like? Acommon misconception?
I assume it's people think youcould just take down all the bad
reviews. Or is it, or is thereanything else that's like,
everyone thinks this, it's nottrue.
Shane Barker (10:08):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, they just think
it's easy, like, so my, one ofmy qualifying questions when I
talk to any seller is, like,Hey, have you tried to do this?
So if they say, yes, I've triedto do this. I can look in their
eyes and it's just, you know,just despair and like, Okay, I
just don't want to keep tryingto do this. I love, I love
banging my head on the wall. Imean, I love how it feels. But
there's a certain point whereI'm gonna have to do other
things as a seller, right? Like,so what happens is, usually, at
(10:31):
that point, they're saying, Hey,listen, we just want somebody to
take on this headache. I've, youknow, we all get to that point
with anything we do in life,right in the beginning. For me,
I've always been like, Oh, getit done myself. And I'll do it,
I'll figure it out. And that'sgreat, until you get to a point
where you hopefully are olderand wiser and you're like, Hey,
I'm making enough money. Like,you know, I don't need to go mow
my lawn. I don't need to gochange my oil. There's other
(10:51):
people that would love to takethat on, you know, just as a
basic example, it's the samething with this. Like, now I
would hire somebody to do myPPC, I'll hire somebody to do my
SEO. I have knowledge when itcomes to that, and I could do it
myself. But, you know, there wasa point in my career that I was
the roadblock for everything,right? I became the person that
was in the way of everything. Igot to approve everything, and
it's like, well, that's greatuntil things aren't getting
(11:13):
approved, right? Like, so that'swhat I look at with this, is
like, are they at that pointwhere, hey, we've tried to do
it, we've filed 100 cases, and Ijust want to focus in other
areas. You got to ask yourself,are you, you know, you a
fireman, right? Are you in justputting out fires all day with
your business? Are you actuallygrowing your business? And that
was a reality check for me. Backin the day, it was like, Man,
I'm a fireman. I wasn't growingmy businesses like I should be.
(11:35):
I was, you know, in the middleof it, because I was the person
in the middle of everything. Andit's like, Hey, you got to
outsource. So that's, that'swhat we look at it with
TraceFuse. Our goal is to helpthem remove negative reviews,
obviously. And let's, is that aheadache for you? If it's a
headache for you, let us take iton, right? We're a performance
based company anyway, so youonly pay when reviews actually
get removed. And if it makessense from an ROI perspective,
(11:56):
then great, we should moveforward. And the other huge
upside is that they can picktheir ASINs, right? So we're not
saying, Hey, we have to go afteryour whole merchant token, or
all of your your ASINs. Hey, youwant to just go after your hero
asin, or you just drop from a4.2 to a 4.2 or, excuse me, 4.3
to a 4.2then great. That's a huge
transition. You can lose 10 to50% of your sales. So what we're
doing is like, Hey, where areyou at in this process? You
(12:19):
know, we're going to talk abouta little bit, probably at the
end of probably at the end ofthe podcast. We have a little
special thing for everybody,but, you know, there's we want
to make it so they can be ableto do it on their own. But if
you're past that point, yousaid, Hey, listen, I'm already
done banging in my head, and,you know, I've lost almost all
my hair. That's reason why Ihave these days, because I don't
really have a lot of hair leftfrom filing cases because of,
you know, fake reviews. Like,yeah, I mean, I would take my
(12:40):
hat off, but there's just not alot of left up there. So, you
know, don't embarrass anybody,especially when you got a nice
big, full head of hair, man,you're just bragging over there.
But that's okay. I keep gluingit back on, and it's working,
bro, that what kind of glue doyou use? I need some of that my
life. I I thought about goingout to Turkey. I went to Turkey.
This is a funny story. I went toTurkey to go I was at a speaker,
did a speaking event out there.
(13:01):
And all the guys, have you everbeen to Turkey? No, oh, God, so
it's a trip. Like I was walkingaround, it looked like everybody
had their heads peeled off.
Like, I'm not joking, like therewas tons of people in the
airport. Well, Turkey is whereeverybody goes to get the hair
implants, or, like, there's somekind of, yeah, like, I didn't
know. Like, I just thoughteverybody was getting attacked.
I was, like, looking for a guywith a machete that was just
(13:21):
gonna come just gonna come outstart hammering people. No, I'm,
I was like, hold on, what isgoing this? This country's
really getting attacked. Youknow, this was a number of years
ago, and I looked it up, becauseI was like, this is this?
There's an epidemic here, like,people's heads are blowing up,
or something just not right ishappening, and it literally,
Turkey is where everybody goes.
So that's why I'm just, don'tI'm not saying you need that
(13:41):
you're doing solid, but you'renot doing it. Yeah? It was
crazy. I just thought there wasa lot of really mad wives or I
didn't know what was going on.
But needless to say, if you needa hair transplant, Turkey is
where to go from what I'veheard.
Andrew Maff (13:53):
This episode is sponsored by Turkey.
So what? Um, what inspired youto make this like, what? What
did something happen where youwere like, screw these reviews.
I gotta fix this problem. Like,tell me that story.
Shane Barker (14:10):
Yeah, yeah.
Really, for me, it was, uh, Iwas, I'd always want to do,
like, a SaaS product, right? AndI was always kind of intrigued
by that. Had friends that haddone really well with SaaS
products. But, you know, I grewup in the like the SEO industry
and influencer marketing, and bythe time I wanted to come up
with anything, it was kind ofsaturated. Not that there wasn't
new ideas and stuff, but I wasjust like, Yeah, you know, I
want to go compete witheverybody. Plus I knew a lot of
(14:32):
those people, right? So that waskind of the hard part, too. Not
that I'm not, you know, shyabout competing, but I just
thought, well, I don't reallywant to knock and, you know,
that's the way people feed theirkids last time I checked. So,
you know, I was just kind ofsitting back knowing that an
opportunity would come about,and we were obviously in the E
commerce space and helping outsome clients on Amazon. And then
that's when I kind of had theaha moment. I was like, Well,
(14:52):
what's a common factor thateverybody has issues with? And
reviews was a big issue. And soI thought.
And let me see if I can kind ofcrack this code. I went in a
little cocky, probably way toococky. Actually. Was like, oh,
click the Report button, filessome cases. Yeah. I mean, I've
almost got a full head of hairat that point. I don't know. But
anyways, I don't want to go intothat again. But yeah, so it was.
(15:14):
It was kind of those ahamoments, yeah, shout out to my,
my people that are getting theirhairs implanted.
Yeah, it was, it was kind ofcrazy, because I thought, well,
the review thing has got to beeasy. Well, once again, two
years into it, I honestly wasthinking, and I I should
probably have just, like, put mymoney in another place, or
become, like a barista, or maybesell shoes or something like, I
(15:34):
was like, There's got to besomething better for me out
there, which making coffee is astrong thing for me. But yeah,
it was, that was, that wasreality check, you know, like I
said, of two years into it, wefinally, finally cracked the
code after, you know, a lot ofpraying, which is not a good
marketing strategy, just so, youknow. But I guess it does help
over time, if you pray enough tothe right little baby Jesus or
(15:55):
whoever you pray to, that's whatI did. And, you know, all of a
sudden, making some magichappen, and we were able to
crack the code. So I was very,very happy about that. But
getting to that point, as youknow, every entrepreneur, it's
like, when do you jump ship andgo to something different,
right? We were, I was close,man. We were, I mean, we're
working on almost full time fortwo years. I mean, that's a lot
of cases to be filed, and, yeah,there was a lot of back and
(16:15):
forth that we were, we were ableto figure out because of that. I
mean, that's but, you know, it'snow, we're at a place where
things are going really, reallywell, and we're very, very
excited about it, but our goalis just to help sellers. I mean,
we just, you know, we know it'salready, there's already 10,000
things you got to do, right? Youknow, when you make money, it's
awesome, but it's, there's just,it's a very like anything. I
mean, anytime you're going to gosell anything, if it was easy,
everybody to be doing it, youknow, yeah. So we look at this
(16:37):
going, okay, how can I take awaya little bit of the headache,
right? And the review thing issomething most of the time,
people are like, sellers, like,Ah, you can't do it now. We've
removed so many. They're like,God, how is that even possible?
I can't remove one and you canremove 13,000 and I'm like,
well, hasn't been an easy ride.
You know? It's not an easyjourney. My journey has been a
lot of ups and downs as anentrepreneur, right? But, but
we've been doing doing a goodjob, and we've got some great
(16:58):
testimonials from some awesomeclients. So I'm I feel very
fortunate.
Andrew Maff (17:03):
How do you like? I can imagine, this is probably a
question you get from a lot ofbrands of like, proving out the
value, right? Like, okay, hey,let's say, you know, they, they
put it into your system, they'vegot 100 reviews. They can see
that, you know, maybe five ofthem are clearly fraudulent, and
you can help take them down. I'msure one of the following
(17:24):
questions from a lot of brandsis like, what, what's that going
to do to my sales? Like, I knowyou can't really answer that
question, but what? What is thethe answer you typically provide
to that, and then we'll justplaster this on your website so
that people stop asking you.
Shane Barker (17:39):
Yeah, absolutely.
That sounds about right? Yeah. Imean, really, at the end of the
day, it comes down to weactually have a calculator that
we've created. So the calculatordoes exactly that. Now, the
calculators in beta will alwaysbe in beta. So, you know,
because Amazon weighs thingsdifferently, does different
things here. But really what wedo is that calculator will so if
you drop down from your 4.3 to4.2 when there's a little
(18:00):
calculator, you can toggle overto, let's say you want to get
back up to a 4.3 and it'll tellyou approximately how many
critical reviews we need toremove. And so that's a
calculator that we've createdmainly for that, right? Because
I don't want, as the owner, Idon't want people to go and
spend tons of money with us andnot have some kind of ROI,
right? So obviously they knowwhat they're, you know, they
(18:21):
should know what their salesare. And if you went from a 4.3
to 4.2 I mean, I've seen clientsdrop from 10 to 50% of their
sales like easily. So you know,you're gonna say, Okay, if I was
at 100,000 now, at 50,000 doesit make sense to remove 15 or 20
reviews? I would say it does.
Right? The other thing that'sthat's very valuable that we
didn't talk about last time wechatted, because I didn't have
(18:44):
it yet, is the monitoring. Sonow we do monitoring, which is
baked into the program. So thatmeans is from, you know, let's
say, if you guys get reviewstoday, our system would grab
those reviews, review them, andsee if they're in violation of
Amazon's guidelines orfraudulent, and then we file on
them for free, and they only paywhen the reviews get removed. So
now what that does that adds alevel of security. You know, you
(19:04):
think about a month before PrimeDay or Christmas, you hear all
the horror stories of peoplegetting bombarded in or things
happening get all kinds ofreviews and getting knocked
down. I mean, it's like if youhad a brick and mortar store
where you were sellingsweatshirts and the person next
to you was selling sweatshirtsand somebody, right before a
month for Christmas kicked inyour door and stole all your
sweatshirts. I mean, that'sreally what it is, right? It's
like, yeah, you know, just andso what we do is we monitor them
(19:27):
now, so that'll make it. So ifanybody comes in and tries to
take your sweatshirts, you know,we have like, little pistols and
handguns that will try to stoptaking your sweatshirts. Yeah,
that's, that's, that's all bakedin the gun, all that kind of
stuff. You won't ever get introuble. My team takes full
responsibility for anything thathappens to those people that try
to take your sweatshirts.
Andrew Maff (19:45):
Yeah, is that account wide or on an asin basis
or both?
Shane Barker (19:49):
It's actually, well, it's for whatever asin is
active in the back end of oursoftware. So when they pull in,
let's say, pull in 100 ASINs,they want to activate five of
them. That's totally fine, butthose are the five that'll be
protected.
The other upside to that is,really, when you do a launch,
right? Because obviously, as youknow, you can do a launch,
everything's going great. Youget one one star review, and
it's crushes you, andcompetitors know that. So what
(20:10):
we do is, if you monitor, youknow, click to monitor it or
make it active, there's a higherlikelihood, obviously, if they
come in and cuss or saysomething crazy, that we can get
that removed. Now we can'tguarantee to get it removed, but
and at least adds one level ofsecurity. You know that if
somebody comes in and sayssomething that we can file on,
we're going to be filing on itto try to clean up that launch
and get you back out there.
Andrew Maff (20:29):
Yeah, is there a benefit outside of the obvious,
of just time forwhen a review comes in
immediately being like, Hey,this is fraudulent. Like, is it
harder for you to get ones takendown if someone comes to you
brand new and is like, I havethese and they're from like, two
years ago?
Shane Barker (20:49):
So there's two answers to that. So one, the
newer reviews are gonna havegonna be weighted different than
the older reviews. And thereason why that is is for
obvious reasons. If you, youknow, had a product five years
ago, your product today isprobably different than the
product you had five years ago.
You years ago. Amazon starts toweigh those a little
differently. So myrecommendation. The reason why
we did the monitoring is that ifa review comes in today, what
you don't want, and we've seenthis either through people
(21:12):
attacking or things justhappening, is the review could
have a cuss word in it, or havepricing, all this stuff that
shouldn't happen, then peopleclick that it's helpful, and
then guess what? That becomes alittle much harder, a little
harder for us to remove, becausean Amazon goes well, but it's
helpful, right? Which is less ofa human looking at it, more of
Amazon just saying, hey, ifeverybody thinks it's helpful,
then it's helpful, even thoughit could have a cuss word or it
(21:33):
could have something in there.
So our goal is is to go in andget it filed on that, get that
thing removed, and not havingletting people click that it's
helpful, because that shouldn'teven be there anyways. And I've
seen that quite a few timeswhere people have, you know, 100
times people have clicked thatit's helpful. And then it's
like, even though it's somethingblatantly against Amazon's
guidelines, those become morechallenging for us. But we can
(21:56):
remove reviews all the way up towhen the asin was created. We
can even do vine reviews. Youknow, Vine reviews, if somebody
custom a vine review ormentioned a competitor, those
are ones that we can, we canfile on and potentially get them
removed as well. So, you know,really anything that's out
there, as long as it's inviolation or potentially
fraudulent we're filing on it.
If it's a legit review, there'snothing we're going to do about
that, like it's, you know, it'sjust a life lesson. You got to
(22:17):
learn from it and make a betterproduct, or understand what
they're saying and how you canimprove things which can be
valuable.
Andrew Maff (22:24):
Yeah. Shane as usual, man, this is awesome. I
really appreciate it. I want togive you the floor let everyone
know where they can find outmore about trace views and tell
them anything else you want themto know and more about you.
Shane Barker (22:34):
Absolutely. Yeah, dude, I love turkey. It's almost
lunchtime, yeah? So, yeah. Imean, you guys can reach out to
me. Obviously, the website istracefuse.ai, that's T, R, A, C,
E, F, U, S, E dot AI,you can also reach out to me at
Shane, that's S, H, A, N, E, atTraceFuse.ai, and last but not
least, we're going to put it inthe show notes, but we have a
(22:55):
Amazon review checker, so thisis going to be, it's just trace
views.ai, forward slash, Amazon,dash review, dash checker. And
for all of you that can't spell,we'll have a link in the show
notes for you guys. You guys canclick on that. What's gonna
happen there is, when you clickon it, you can go in and put in
your Asin. It'll usually takeabout an hour to actually create
a free report for you. You haveto verify your email address,
(23:18):
make sure you're not trying tospam us, and then, great, you
get a report in your inbox. LikeI said, takes about an hour,
hour and a half, depending onunless it's a huge ASIN, what we
do is we pull all thatinformation in. We look at your
reviews, our AI will tell uswhich ones are not compliant
with Amazon's guidelines. Andyou actually can use that to
file and then the top right handcorner is that infamous
calculator that we talked about,the calculator where you go and
(23:38):
toggle this thing back and forthand see approximately how many
critical reviews you need toremove. And that is all free. 99
that's gratis. That is no pagasfor all my Hispanic folks out
there, you don't have to pay forit. So it's absolutely free. Go
check it out, take a look at itand file some cases. And if it
doesn't work, guess what?
TraceFuse will always be here tosave the day.
Andrew Maff (24:00):
Love it. That was amazing. Shane, thank you so
much. Everyone who tuned in asusual. Thank you all. Make sure
you do the usual thing. Rate,review, subscribe. All that fun
stuff, on whichever podcastplatform you prefer, or head
over to the Ecommshow.com tocheck out all of our previous
episodes. But as usual, thankyou for joining us. See you in
the next one. Have a good one!
Narrator (24:19):
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show, head over
to ecommshow.com to subscribe onyour favorite podcast platform
or on the BlueTusker YouTubechannel. The E comm show is
brought to you by BlueTusker, afull service digital marketing
company specifically for Ecommerce sellers looking to
accelerate their growth. Go tobluetuskr.com now for more
(24:41):
information, make sure to tunein next week for another amazing
episode of the E comm show you.
Our goal is to help them remove negative
reviews, obviously. And let's isthat a headache for you? If it's
a headache for you, let us takeit on, right? We're a
performance based companyanyway, so you only pay when
reviews actually get removed.
And if it makes sense from anROI perspective, then great, we
should move forward.
Andrew Maff (01:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of
the E comm show as usual. I amyour host, Andrew Maff, and
today I am joined by the amazingShane Barker, who is the founder
and CEO over at TraceFuse.
Shane, how are you doing, buddy,you ready for a good show?
Shane Barker (01:22):
Man, I'm doing awesome. Man, I'm doing really,
really good. And I Yeah. Man, Ijust push ups. I hit some sit
ups, actually, that's all a lie.
But I am ready for the show. Ididn't really do all that
because you look great. I'mgetting older. And, yeah, I
mean, it's the filters. Butyeah, yeah, no, I'm absolutely
ready. Man, I'm ready to knockthis thing out.
Andrew Maff (01:37):
Beautiful. Man, you, you are the one of man, if
I had to guess, like,definitely, less than five
people who I've had on this showmore than once. And, you know,
congratulations, you're welcome.
Shane Barker (01:53):
I mean, I mean, seriously, I just, you know, I
always dreamed of this moment,or maybe I'd be on here a second
time. I always told my wife,like, Listen, if I get on
Andrew's show twice, I'm done,yeah? Like, at this point, I'll
just retire. I'll be I mean, I'malready 1000 air. I mean, I
don't want to get too personal,but I've got 1000s of dollars in
my bank account. Like, yeah,you're crushing 2000 Oh, dude.
Like, making a lot of money.
Like, I'm a big deal.
Andrew Maff (02:13):
Yeah, we should do this whole show dry sarcasm, so
that everyone just has to guesswhat the value is so that we're
not making it clear.
Shane Barker (02:23):
Well, we're doing good so far. We're doing really
good so far, because people arelike, what did the title say?
Talking about what not to do andhow to do things differently in
life. I don't know, but eitherway, yeah.
Andrew Maff (02:33):
This is our moment to try out our stand up that
we'vealways wanted to do. We'lltalk. Now. We'll talk. We'll
talk ecommerce.
Shane, welcome back. Love you.
Appreciate it. Thank you so muchfor doing this. TraceFuse. Let's
pretend that everyone's a newlistener. So let's, let's do a
bit of a recap. Tell us a littlebit about yourself TraceFuse,
(02:54):
and we'll take it from there.
Shane Barker (02:56):
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah. So I name is ShaneBarker, I grew up in the digital
space. Have my own littlewebsite. Shanebarker.com did a
lot of personal branding. Thereawesome stuff going on over
there, and jumped in the Amazonspace looking at reviews about
five years ago, give or take,about two years of R&D research,
trying to figure out if we couldcrack the code of getting
reviews removed on Amazon aftertwo hard years of losing my hair
and thinking I'm doing the wrongthing in life, we were able to
(03:19):
crack the code. So last threeyears have been pretty amazing.
We help Amazon sellers removenegative reviews. We have about
500 clients, and we've removedover 13,000 reviews for our
clients today. So pretty, prettyproud of that. Important, I
think probably thing to adifferentiator is to understand
that we don't just remove allreviews that are on Amazon,
right? I mean any criticalreviews we talk when I say
critical, I mean one, twos andthree stars. We go after the
(03:42):
reviews that are againstAmazon's guidelines, right? Like
Amazon's own rules. Somebodycusses, mentioned a competitor
pricing, you know, FBA relatedstuff. They ship it late, it's
broken, a ship used somethinglike that. So if there's reviews
that cause you stress, butthey're legit reviews that
really talk about your product,those ones, we you know, if
there's nothing violatingAmazon's guidelines or nothing
fraudulent there, if we know, wecan prove that there's a, you
(04:05):
know, somebody attacking you,
Andrew Maff (04:06):
Yeah, the immediate thing I thought about, well, a
obviously that's something thatwe'd want to get removed. But at
the end of the day, those thingsare, you know, constructive
couple things, but the one I wasjust thinking about, you must
criticism is not a bad thing.
Someone make sure that peopleknow that. I've had people reach
out and say this review isterrible. And I'm like, is it
true? They're like, Yeah, but Igot to get it down. I'm like,
well, then you need to iterate.
You need to figure out how toimprove your product. There's
(04:28):
not much we could do there. So,you know, the thing is, is we're
not here to clean up all everyreview so that you can get away
with murder and continuously,you know, sell products that
maybe aren't great. The goalhere is to go for things that
are legit should be removed ifsomebody's cussing doing
something that's outside of, youknow, of the control that you
have. And you know, like I said,that's kind of the goal.
(04:55):
have people reaching out to youall the time that use your
platformthat then are like, Wait, these
reviews weren't taken down, andthey totally should be, even
though they are definitelyviable reviews just because of a
poor experience or somethingwhich happened, and sometimes
they're beneficial from amarketing perspective, that's a
different story. What? How doyou like? How do you field that
like, how do you keep just theconstant people coming in brands
(05:19):
just being like, Oh, this oneshould have gotten take it down.
It wasn't. And it's like, yeah,because it's real,
Shane Barker (05:26):
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is for
us, is we just kind of look atit, look at the review. I mean,
it really comes down. It's verysimple for us if, if it violates
Amazon's guidelines, and it'ssomething that we would go
after, even if it's a legitreview, right? Like, somebody
had a legit review, but at theend, they said, this product is
effing terrible. Well, guesswhat? That's something that
should be removed. Even thoughthe review can be legit, that's
(05:47):
what we look at, right? So it'snot usually, like, I'll have
people that once can say, hey,this is a very specific review,
and this is really crushingsales. Those aren't really
things that we deal with, right?
Like, that's more of a, youknow, you're gonna reach out to
Amazon. What we're looking at isthings that are clearly against
Amazon's guidelines. Like, it'sjust like, we're, you know, you
and I can look at it, and 20other people could look at and
say, Yeah, this, they're usingthe F word. Like, we really
(06:08):
shouldn't be doing that on theplatform. So that's, that's what
we're looking at, right? Isstuff that's just like,
blatantly, there shouldn't bethere, really, Amazon is even
looking at it going, okay, yeah,that makes sense. Like, there's
really, we don't have to go talkto anybody. We don't have to
debate this. I don't have todebate this. I don't have to
bring a manager over. That's wethat shouldn't be on the
platform, right? So that's thoseare the things that we look at.
If people have very specificproblems about somebody saying
(06:29):
the wrong thing, somebody says,Oh, I went to the hospital and
almost died like you know,that's not necessarily against
Amazon's guidelines, but lasttime I checked, if you take some
creatine, you're not going todie. I don't know how many
people have died from creatine.
So, you know, that's what welook at, is like, like, does
that make sense? Right? Like,well, there's other people that
would help in those situations.
For us, we want to clean up theasin, get people back up to
(06:50):
their, you know, 4.3 4.7whatever that may be, and really
just clean up the listing. Sowe're looking for stuff that
should be removed, or, onceagain, fraudulent stuff is in.
Can be big as well, of where,you know, you've been attacked,
maybe by a competitor orsomething. And our system
actually, you know, now itactually indicates that too.
It'll let us know if there's, ifthere's it'll flag it in our
system. And then we have thesethings called humans, you know,
(07:12):
they're, they're gonna be goneafter AI. But yeah, yeah, we do
still use humans. It's like,it's so archaic, but whatever,
you know, it's like, I know, Iknow exactly.
Andrew Maff (07:25):
Look with that, with without giving it away,
because I know you're gonna, Idon't, I know you're not gonna
want to do that. But can youexplain how exactly it works? Is
it completely automated? Is itjust automating support tickets?
Is it some type of API feed,like, what? What's the actual
nuts and bolts of it?
Shane Barker (07:43):
Yeah, I can't tell you that, if we can go to the
next question. No, I'm justkidding. No, I absolutely can.
Yeah, I'm just kidding. No, no,I'm an open book brother. So
yeah, no, what we do is, really,the process is this. So somebody
goes and signs up with us.
They're going to be filling outjust some basic information.
They put in a merchant token.
When they put in their merchanttoken, that will actually, it
(08:03):
pulls in all of their ASINs intoour software. So then our
software, what you able to do isbe able to navigate around, and
they'll be in charge ofactivating and deactivating
ASINs. So they'll they can, youknow, they want to activate a
product, they want to deactivatea product. It's very, very easy.
They literally click a button,and so when they click that
button, let's say they have 50critical reviews. When they
click that button, we grab those50 critical reviews, we run
(08:24):
those through our AI software.
When I say, AI, this isn't, youknow, chat GPT, that just came
out a year ago. I mean, we,we've been doing this for about
three years with the AI side ofthings. So we've, you know,
obviously it's machine learning.
We're, you know, feeding themodels, and they're getting
better and better better. Sowhat happens there is, it'll
tell us, hey, this is either inviolation of Amazon's guidelines
or not in violation. And so ifit's in violation of Amazon's
(08:45):
guidelines, then we have thosehumans come back again, and then
they come and actually take alook at the reviews, and they'll
take a look at that and say,okay, hey, now I know where I
want to file this, right?
Because we we have some, I say,insider knowledge, not insider,
like Amazon told us, butinsider, as in, we filed so many
cases, there's just some uniqueknowledge that we've gained
through really filing them wrongfor the first two years, right,
(09:05):
and now we've gotten it down toa really awesome a system where,
you know we have the databecause we're filing so many
cases. If Amazon changes apolicy or changes something, we
know it instantly, because maybewhat we started doing here isn't
working as well as it used to.
So we have other departments orsomething that we can file with
so that's mainly the processthere. We file cases. We send
(09:26):
emails directly to Amazon.
Everything that we do iscompliant with Amazon. And
really, you know, we send thosethose cases, and Amazon either
accepts them, denies them,responds back, doesn't respond
back. It's a it can be a tediousprocess at points, you know
we're but we have it down towhere we know how many cases to
file. We know you know when tofile, what departments to file
with, how long to wait until weask for an update. These are all
(09:48):
things that we've learned, youknow, as you know, just through
the whole process of learning aswe go through this thing,
Andrew Maff (09:55):
yeah, yeah.
Interesting. What's like? Acommon misconception?
I assume it's people think youcould just take down all the bad
reviews. Or is it, or is thereanything else that's like,
everyone thinks this, it's nottrue.
Shane Barker (10:08):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, they just think
it's easy, like, so my, one ofmy qualifying questions when I
talk to any seller is, like,Hey, have you tried to do this?
So if they say, yes, I've triedto do this. I can look in their
eyes and it's just, you know,just despair and like, Okay, I
just don't want to keep tryingto do this. I love, I love
banging my head on the wall. Imean, I love how it feels. But
there's a certain point whereI'm gonna have to do other
things as a seller, right? Like,so what happens is, usually, at
(10:31):
that point, they're saying, Hey,listen, we just want somebody to
take on this headache. I've, youknow, we all get to that point
with anything we do in life,right in the beginning. For me,
I've always been like, Oh, getit done myself. And I'll do it,
I'll figure it out. And that'sgreat, until you get to a point
where you hopefully are olderand wiser and you're like, Hey,
I'm making enough money. Like,you know, I don't need to go mow
my lawn. I don't need to gochange my oil. There's other
(10:51):
people that would love to takethat on, you know, just as a
basic example, it's the samething with this. Like, now I
would hire somebody to do myPPC, I'll hire somebody to do my
SEO. I have knowledge when itcomes to that, and I could do it
myself. But, you know, there wasa point in my career that I was
the roadblock for everything,right? I became the person that
was in the way of everything. Igot to approve everything, and
it's like, well, that's greatuntil things aren't getting
(11:13):
approved, right? Like, so that'swhat I look at with this, is
like, are they at that pointwhere, hey, we've tried to do
it, we've filed 100 cases, and Ijust want to focus in other
areas. You got to ask yourself,are you, you know, you a
fireman, right? Are you in justputting out fires all day with
your business? Are you actuallygrowing your business? And that
was a reality check for me. Backin the day, it was like, Man,
I'm a fireman. I wasn't growingmy businesses like I should be.
(11:35):
I was, you know, in the middleof it, because I was the person
in the middle of everything. Andit's like, Hey, you got to
outsource. So that's, that'swhat we look at it with
TraceFuse. Our goal is to helpthem remove negative reviews,
obviously. And let's, is that aheadache for you? If it's a
headache for you, let us take iton, right? We're a performance
based company anyway, so youonly pay when reviews actually
get removed. And if it makessense from an ROI perspective,
(11:56):
then great, we should moveforward. And the other huge
upside is that they can picktheir ASINs, right? So we're not
saying, Hey, we have to go afteryour whole merchant token, or
all of your your ASINs. Hey, youwant to just go after your hero
asin, or you just drop from a4.2 to a 4.2 or, excuse me, 4.3
to a 4.2then great. That's a huge
transition. You can lose 10 to50% of your sales. So what we're
doing is like, Hey, where areyou at in this process? You
(12:19):
know, we're going to talk abouta little bit, probably at the
end of probably at the end ofthe podcast. We have a little
special thing for everybody,but, you know, there's we want
to make it so they can be ableto do it on their own. But if
you're past that point, yousaid, Hey, listen, I'm already
done banging in my head, and,you know, I've lost almost all
my hair. That's reason why Ihave these days, because I don't
really have a lot of hair leftfrom filing cases because of,
you know, fake reviews. Like,yeah, I mean, I would take my
(12:40):
hat off, but there's just not alot of left up there. So, you
know, don't embarrass anybody,especially when you got a nice
big, full head of hair, man,you're just bragging over there.
But that's okay. I keep gluingit back on, and it's working,
bro, that what kind of glue doyou use? I need some of that my
life. I I thought about goingout to Turkey. I went to Turkey.
This is a funny story. I went toTurkey to go I was at a speaker,
did a speaking event out there.
(13:01):
And all the guys, have you everbeen to Turkey? No, oh, God, so
it's a trip. Like I was walkingaround, it looked like everybody
had their heads peeled off.
Like, I'm not joking, like therewas tons of people in the
airport. Well, Turkey is whereeverybody goes to get the hair
implants, or, like, there's somekind of, yeah, like, I didn't
know. Like, I just thoughteverybody was getting attacked.
I was, like, looking for a guywith a machete that was just
(13:21):
gonna come just gonna come outstart hammering people. No, I'm,
I was like, hold on, what isgoing this? This country's
really getting attacked. Youknow, this was a number of years
ago, and I looked it up, becauseI was like, this is this?
There's an epidemic here, like,people's heads are blowing up,
or something just not right ishappening, and it literally,
Turkey is where everybody goes.
So that's why I'm just, don'tI'm not saying you need that
(13:41):
you're doing solid, but you'renot doing it. Yeah? It was
crazy. I just thought there wasa lot of really mad wives or I
didn't know what was going on.
But needless to say, if you needa hair transplant, Turkey is
where to go from what I'veheard.
Andrew Maff (13:53):
This episode is sponsored by Turkey.
So what? Um, what inspired youto make this like, what? What
did something happen where youwere like, screw these reviews.
I gotta fix this problem. Like,tell me that story.
Shane Barker (14:10):
Yeah, yeah.
Really, for me, it was, uh, Iwas, I'd always want to do,
like, a SaaS product, right? AndI was always kind of intrigued
by that. Had friends that haddone really well with SaaS
products. But, you know, I grewup in the like the SEO industry
and influencer marketing, and bythe time I wanted to come up
with anything, it was kind ofsaturated. Not that there wasn't
new ideas and stuff, but I wasjust like, Yeah, you know, I
want to go compete witheverybody. Plus I knew a lot of
(14:32):
those people, right? So that waskind of the hard part, too. Not
that I'm not, you know, shyabout competing, but I just
thought, well, I don't reallywant to knock and, you know,
that's the way people feed theirkids last time I checked. So,
you know, I was just kind ofsitting back knowing that an
opportunity would come about,and we were obviously in the E
commerce space and helping outsome clients on Amazon. And then
that's when I kind of had theaha moment. I was like, Well,
(14:52):
what's a common factor thateverybody has issues with? And
reviews was a big issue. And soI thought.
And let me see if I can kind ofcrack this code. I went in a
little cocky, probably way toococky. Actually. Was like, oh,
click the Report button, filessome cases. Yeah. I mean, I've
almost got a full head of hairat that point. I don't know. But
anyways, I don't want to go intothat again. But yeah, so it was.
(15:14):
It was kind of those ahamoments, yeah, shout out to my,
my people that are getting theirhairs implanted.
Yeah, it was, it was kind ofcrazy, because I thought, well,
the review thing has got to beeasy. Well, once again, two
years into it, I honestly wasthinking, and I I should
probably have just, like, put mymoney in another place, or
become, like a barista, or maybesell shoes or something like, I
(15:34):
was like, There's got to besomething better for me out
there, which making coffee is astrong thing for me. But yeah,
it was, that was, that wasreality check, you know, like I
said, of two years into it, wefinally, finally cracked the
code after, you know, a lot ofpraying, which is not a good
marketing strategy, just so, youknow. But I guess it does help
over time, if you pray enough tothe right little baby Jesus or
(15:55):
whoever you pray to, that's whatI did. And, you know, all of a
sudden, making some magichappen, and we were able to
crack the code. So I was very,very happy about that. But
getting to that point, as youknow, every entrepreneur, it's
like, when do you jump ship andgo to something different,
right? We were, I was close,man. We were, I mean, we're
working on almost full time fortwo years. I mean, that's a lot
of cases to be filed, and, yeah,there was a lot of back and
(16:15):
forth that we were, we were ableto figure out because of that. I
mean, that's but, you know, it'snow, we're at a place where
things are going really, reallywell, and we're very, very
excited about it, but our goalis just to help sellers. I mean,
we just, you know, we know it'salready, there's already 10,000
things you got to do, right? Youknow, when you make money, it's
awesome, but it's, there's just,it's a very like anything. I
mean, anytime you're going to gosell anything, if it was easy,
everybody to be doing it, youknow, yeah. So we look at this
(16:37):
going, okay, how can I take awaya little bit of the headache,
right? And the review thing issomething most of the time,
people are like, sellers, like,Ah, you can't do it now. We've
removed so many. They're like,God, how is that even possible?
I can't remove one and you canremove 13,000 and I'm like,
well, hasn't been an easy ride.
You know? It's not an easyjourney. My journey has been a
lot of ups and downs as anentrepreneur, right? But, but
we've been doing doing a goodjob, and we've got some great
(16:58):
testimonials from some awesomeclients. So I'm I feel very
fortunate.
Andrew Maff (17:03):
How do you like? I can imagine, this is probably a
question you get from a lot ofbrands of like, proving out the
value, right? Like, okay, hey,let's say, you know, they, they
put it into your system, they'vegot 100 reviews. They can see
that, you know, maybe five ofthem are clearly fraudulent, and
you can help take them down. I'msure one of the following
(17:24):
questions from a lot of brandsis like, what, what's that going
to do to my sales? Like, I knowyou can't really answer that
question, but what? What is thethe answer you typically provide
to that, and then we'll justplaster this on your website so
that people stop asking you.
Shane Barker (17:39):
Yeah, absolutely.
That sounds about right? Yeah. Imean, really, at the end of the
day, it comes down to weactually have a calculator that
we've created. So the calculatordoes exactly that. Now, the
calculators in beta will alwaysbe in beta. So, you know,
because Amazon weighs thingsdifferently, does different
things here. But really what wedo is that calculator will so if
you drop down from your 4.3 to4.2 when there's a little
(18:00):
calculator, you can toggle overto, let's say you want to get
back up to a 4.3 and it'll tellyou approximately how many
critical reviews we need toremove. And so that's a
calculator that we've createdmainly for that, right? Because
I don't want, as the owner, Idon't want people to go and
spend tons of money with us andnot have some kind of ROI,
right? So obviously they knowwhat they're, you know, they
(18:21):
should know what their salesare. And if you went from a 4.3
to 4.2 I mean, I've seen clientsdrop from 10 to 50% of their
sales like easily. So you know,you're gonna say, Okay, if I was
at 100,000 now, at 50,000 doesit make sense to remove 15 or 20
reviews? I would say it does.
Right? The other thing that'sthat's very valuable that we
didn't talk about last time wechatted, because I didn't have
(18:44):
it yet, is the monitoring. Sonow we do monitoring, which is
baked into the program. So thatmeans is from, you know, let's
say, if you guys get reviewstoday, our system would grab
those reviews, review them, andsee if they're in violation of
Amazon's guidelines orfraudulent, and then we file on
them for free, and they only paywhen the reviews get removed. So
now what that does that adds alevel of security. You know, you
(19:04):
think about a month before PrimeDay or Christmas, you hear all
the horror stories of peoplegetting bombarded in or things
happening get all kinds ofreviews and getting knocked
down. I mean, it's like if youhad a brick and mortar store
where you were sellingsweatshirts and the person next
to you was selling sweatshirtsand somebody, right before a
month for Christmas kicked inyour door and stole all your
sweatshirts. I mean, that'sreally what it is, right? It's
like, yeah, you know, just andso what we do is we monitor them
(19:27):
now, so that'll make it. So ifanybody comes in and tries to
take your sweatshirts, you know,we have like, little pistols and
handguns that will try to stoptaking your sweatshirts. Yeah,
that's, that's, that's all bakedin the gun, all that kind of
stuff. You won't ever get introuble. My team takes full
responsibility for anything thathappens to those people that try
to take your sweatshirts.
Andrew Maff (19:45):
Yeah, is that account wide or on an asin basis
or both?
Shane Barker (19:49):
It's actually, well, it's for whatever asin is
active in the back end of oursoftware. So when they pull in,
let's say, pull in 100 ASINs,they want to activate five of
them. That's totally fine, butthose are the five that'll be
protected.
The other upside to that is,really, when you do a launch,
right? Because obviously, as youknow, you can do a launch,
everything's going great. Youget one one star review, and
it's crushes you, andcompetitors know that. So what
(20:10):
we do is, if you monitor, youknow, click to monitor it or
make it active, there's a higherlikelihood, obviously, if they
come in and cuss or saysomething crazy, that we can get
that removed. Now we can'tguarantee to get it removed, but
and at least adds one level ofsecurity. You know that if
somebody comes in and sayssomething that we can file on,
we're going to be filing on itto try to clean up that launch
and get you back out there.
Andrew Maff (20:29):
Yeah, is there a benefit outside of the obvious,
of just time forwhen a review comes in
immediately being like, Hey,this is fraudulent. Like, is it
harder for you to get ones takendown if someone comes to you
brand new and is like, I havethese and they're from like, two
years ago?
Shane Barker (20:49):
So there's two answers to that. So one, the
newer reviews are gonna havegonna be weighted different than
the older reviews. And thereason why that is is for
obvious reasons. If you, youknow, had a product five years
ago, your product today isprobably different than the
product you had five years ago.
You years ago. Amazon starts toweigh those a little
differently. So myrecommendation. The reason why
we did the monitoring is that ifa review comes in today, what
you don't want, and we've seenthis either through people
(21:12):
attacking or things justhappening, is the review could
have a cuss word in it, or havepricing, all this stuff that
shouldn't happen, then peopleclick that it's helpful, and
then guess what? That becomes alittle much harder, a little
harder for us to remove, becausean Amazon goes well, but it's
helpful, right? Which is less ofa human looking at it, more of
Amazon just saying, hey, ifeverybody thinks it's helpful,
then it's helpful, even thoughit could have a cuss word or it
(21:33):
could have something in there.
So our goal is is to go in andget it filed on that, get that
thing removed, and not havingletting people click that it's
helpful, because that shouldn'teven be there anyways. And I've
seen that quite a few timeswhere people have, you know, 100
times people have clicked thatit's helpful. And then it's
like, even though it's somethingblatantly against Amazon's
guidelines, those become morechallenging for us. But we can
(21:56):
remove reviews all the way up towhen the asin was created. We
can even do vine reviews. Youknow, Vine reviews, if somebody
custom a vine review ormentioned a competitor, those
are ones that we can, we canfile on and potentially get them
removed as well. So, you know,really anything that's out
there, as long as it's inviolation or potentially
fraudulent we're filing on it.
If it's a legit review, there'snothing we're going to do about
that, like it's, you know, it'sjust a life lesson. You got to
(22:17):
learn from it and make a betterproduct, or understand what
they're saying and how you canimprove things which can be
valuable.
Andrew Maff (22:24):
Yeah. Shane as usual, man, this is awesome. I
really appreciate it. I want togive you the floor let everyone
know where they can find outmore about trace views and tell
them anything else you want themto know and more about you.
Shane Barker (22:34):
Absolutely. Yeah, dude, I love turkey. It's almost
lunchtime, yeah? So, yeah. Imean, you guys can reach out to
me. Obviously, the website istracefuse.ai, that's T, R, A, C,
E, F, U, S, E dot AI,you can also reach out to me at
Shane, that's S, H, A, N, E, atTraceFuse.ai, and last but not
least, we're going to put it inthe show notes, but we have a
(22:55):
Amazon review checker, so thisis going to be, it's just trace
views.ai, forward slash, Amazon,dash review, dash checker. And
for all of you that can't spell,we'll have a link in the show
notes for you guys. You guys canclick on that. What's gonna
happen there is, when you clickon it, you can go in and put in
your Asin. It'll usually takeabout an hour to actually create
a free report for you. You haveto verify your email address,
(23:18):
make sure you're not trying tospam us, and then, great, you
get a report in your inbox. LikeI said, takes about an hour,
hour and a half, depending onunless it's a huge ASIN, what we
do is we pull all thatinformation in. We look at your
reviews, our AI will tell uswhich ones are not compliant
with Amazon's guidelines. Andyou actually can use that to
file and then the top right handcorner is that infamous
calculator that we talked about,the calculator where you go and
(23:38):
toggle this thing back and forthand see approximately how many
critical reviews you need toremove. And that is all free. 99
that's gratis. That is no pagasfor all my Hispanic folks out
there, you don't have to pay forit. So it's absolutely free. Go
check it out, take a look at itand file some cases. And if it
doesn't work, guess what?
TraceFuse will always be here tosave the day.
Andrew Maff (24:00):
Love it. That was amazing. Shane, thank you so
much. Everyone who tuned in asusual. Thank you all. Make sure
you do the usual thing. Rate,review, subscribe. All that fun
stuff, on whichever podcastplatform you prefer, or head
over to the Ecommshow.com tocheck out all of our previous
episodes. But as usual, thankyou for joining us. See you in
the next one. Have a good one!
Narrator (24:19):
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show, head over
to ecommshow.com to subscribe onyour favorite podcast platform
or on the BlueTusker YouTubechannel. The E comm show is
brought to you by BlueTusker, afull service digital marketing
company specifically for Ecommerce sellers looking to
accelerate their growth. Go tobluetuskr.com now for more
(24:41):
information, make sure to tunein next week for another amazing
episode of the E comm show you.
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