Shane Barker, the founder and CEO of TraceFuse, a reputation management company that helps Amazon sellers identify and remove policy-violating negative reviews.

As a veteran digital marketing strategist, entrepreneur, author, and international speaker, Shane has spent more than two decades helping brands strengthen their online presence and grow profitably. Under his leadership, TraceFuse has helped more than 850 brands remove over 27,000 negative reviews from their Amazon listings. He is passionate about helping e-commerce businesses turn reputation into a measurable growth advantage.

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley speaks with Shane Barker, founder of TraceFuse, about managing Amazon reviews. Shane explains how his company uses proprietary AI combined with human expertise to identify and remove policy-violating negative reviews, maintaining a 25% removal rate. They discuss common violations, including competitor mentions, pricing disclosures, and fraudulent competitor attacks. Shane emphasizes that review management should complement strong product quality, not replace it, and advises sellers to monitor reviews consistently, delegate removal efforts to experts, and use available tools to protect their reputation and maximize sales.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Timestamps:

00:00:48 Introduction to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast
The podcast intro and host, Josh Hadley, introduces the episode’s topic: removing non-compliant negative reviews on Amazon.

00:01:50 Introducing Shane Barker and TraceFuse
Host Josh Hadley introduces guest Shane Barker, founder of TraceFuse, a company specializing in removing policy-violating negative reviews.

00:03:50 The Current State of Amazon Reviews
Shane discusses the importance of reviews and how Amazon’s changes, like limiting review visibility, affect sellers and their strategies.

00:07:56 Types of Non-Compliant Reviews
Shane explains which reviews violate Amazon’s guidelines, such as those with profanity, competitor mentions, pricing details, or shipping complaints.

00:12:53 Can Sellers Use AI to Remove Reviews Themselves?
Shane addresses whether sellers can use AI to manage reviews themselves, offering a free tool but highlighting the complexities involved.

00:17:21 TraceFuse Process and Success Rate
Shane explains his company’s process, which uses human filers and has a 25% success rate without special Amazon connections.

00:22:41 Is It Safe to Use a Review Removal Service?
Shane addresses seller concerns about account safety, confirming they stay compliant with Amazon’s policies and have never had an account suspended.

00:25:52 Case Studies and ROI
Shane shares how TraceFuse helps sellers identify high-impact ASINs to work on, using a calculator to show potential ROI.

00:30:11 Pricing for Large Sellers
Shane discusses pricing models for larger sellers with thousands of ASINs, explaining why deep discounts aren’t feasible due to manual effort.

00:32:24 Prevalence of Black Hat Attacks
Shane reveals that black hat attacks are rampant in categories like supplements, beauty, and pet products due to high customer lifetime value.

00:37:50 Identifying Competitor Attacks
Shane explains how his software identifies attacks by monitoring review velocity and flagging unusual spikes in negative feedback for investigation.

00:39:18 The Future of Amazon Reviews
Shane predicts reviews will become even more critical and hopes Amazon will improve its system to prevent unverified purchase reviews.

00:43:07 Actionable Takeaways for Sellers
Josh Hadley summarizes three key takeaways: use free tools, focus on high-value tasks, and prioritize creating excellent products.

00:50:19 Lightning Round Questions
Shane answers rapid-fire questions about his most influential book, favorite AI tools, and who he respects in the e-commerce space.

00:53:33 Special Offer and How to Connect
Shane offers listeners a discount on the onboarding fee and shares the best ways to connect with him and TraceFuse.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“TraceFuse“: “00:01:50”
“Amazon Review Checker”: “00:13:35”
“Review AI”: “00:41:55”
“Loom“: “00:51:32”
“Phantom“: “00:51:32”

Books
“Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill“: “00:51:14”

Videos
“Video Testimonials”: “00:25:11”

Special Offers
“Onboarding Fee Discount”: “00:54:08”

Additional Resources
“Amazon Community Guidelines“: “00:08:26”

Episode Sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Transcript:Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Shane Barker 00:00:00  It’s like drugs trying to get through the US border right at the end of the day, it’s like they might. The US Border Patrol might stop three of them, but that’s seven of them go through. It’s the same thing with this, right? Amazon does a good job of stopping a good majority of them, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some, you know, FBA related stuff. So if something got shipped out late, broken or used, those are all things that we take a look at and say, well, wait a second. If somebody said terrible product took two weeks to get here or you hate the shipping, you don’t hate the product, right? Or hey, the box said it came in, was dented. Okay, but that’s not a product problem. That’s a shipping problem. And so that’s something else we take a look at. And then the other side of it is really fraudulent activity right. That would be like an escalation case with Amazon where somebody comes in and is attacking you.

Shane Barker 00:00:41  And there’s a number of different ways our software will indicate that.

MC 00:00:48  Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:01:02  What if the reviews are hurting? Your Amazon conversion rate right now actually aren’t legitimate? And what if there was a top compliant way to actually get them removed? Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures, I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in eCommerce. Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael E Gerber, author of the E myth. Today, I am excited to introduce you all to Shane Barker. Shane is the founder and CEO of TraceFuse, a reputation management company that helps Amazon sellers identify and remove policy violating negative reviews.

Josh Hadley 00:01:50  As a veteran digital marketing strategist, entrepreneur, author, and international speaker. Shayne has spent more than two decades helping brands strengthen their online presence and grow profitably under his leadership. TraceFuse has helped more than 850 brands remove over 27,000 negative reviews from their Amazon listings. He is passionate about helping other e-commerce businesses turn reputation into a measurable growth advantage. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Shane.

Shane Barker 00:02:22  Josh, thanks for having me, man. I remember as a kid thinking, one day I’ll make it on Josh’s show. Your show wasn’t even around, but I knew that it would be around and here I am. So I texted my mom this morning. She’s like, no, you’re not. I swear I’m not even kidding. I’m on Josh’s podcast today. And she said, well, honey, you made it. So here we are.

Josh Hadley 00:02:40  I love it. I think that, at that time, my first initiative was on the cassette tapes. You know, if you remember that.

Shane Barker 00:02:48  Yeah, I do, I thought it was a tracks, but I don’t think that’s probably because I’m a little older.

Shane Barker 00:02:52  But yeah, you’re a little cassettes. Yeah. Yeah. I love those mixtapes. They were amazing by the way.

Josh Hadley 00:02:56  Because a good time. I was recording my voice hitting the. You know, I had to push two buttons down on it, you know, to actually hit record.

Shane Barker 00:03:03  That is flashback for sure. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:03:05  Exactly. Our younger listeners are wondering what podcast they just started listening to. Shane, pleasure to have you on the show. This is going to be a fun conversation. my biggest thing and I want to dive straight on into this thing. Amazon is starting to kind of like police and get their reviews in ways that we’ve never seen before. Like even me as a shopper, I can’t even look at all the reviews, let alone as a business owner. And yet I know that there are negative reviews that are not, you know, toes compliant from Amazon’s policy. I also know sometimes I’m getting attacked by competitors and I can’t see those reviews or whatnot, so I’m kind of curious.

Josh Hadley 00:03:50  Shane, what do you see happening right now in the world of Amazon reviews? Because whether you’re an Amazon seller or even just a CPG brand that’s selling into brick and mortar retail, I would argue Amazon is the one place that everybody goes first before they buy something to see, before they buy something, even in a retail store. They’re going to be like, what are the reviews look like on Amazon? So this like whole reviews thing is very important. But like tell me what what you see going on in the the world of reviews right now.

Shane Barker 00:04:19  Yeah. So I mean I can tell you so we’ve been you know, we’ve been doing this for about six years, two years of R&D to figure out where to file cases and where to get things done. So we’ve seen a lot of changes. I mean, as it happens, whether it be on Amazon or Walmart or wherever, right? There’s always going to be changes that can affect your business. And so what we looked at was like reviews being a big indicator on whether people buy or don’t buy.

Shane Barker 00:04:41  Right. I mean, no matter what you’re you spend on PPC and all these other things, if you have bad reviews, people aren’t going to buy. I mean, it just comes down to that. Right? And so I, I grew up in the digital space where there was restaurants and other stuff and other businesses that we would help. And then I really wanted to, you know, jump into the Amazon side of things. So when you see these reviews, you know, when you when Amazon makes decisions. And I think as sellers we look at it and go, man, they’re cutting me out. They’re not I can’t do this and I can’t do that. Not all these decisions are made to hurt sellers. Now sometimes they do. It’s not you know, the decisions they make are going to be best for Amazon and usually for the buyers and so on the seller side of things. Not that Amazon doesn’t love you, but they’re definitely pulling back things. And they’re doing things for their own reasons.

Shane Barker 00:05:19  Right. Internal reasons. So we look at it originally we used to be able to grab reviews all the way back to when the JSON was created, right? That was a thing that we could do. Now they’re making it a little more difficult for us. And so what I mean by that, I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think there’s there’s reasons why they’re doing it because of AI. And, you know, looking at reviews. And Amazon does have a very strong structure when it comes to the reviews, right? I mean, I know clients that we work with that you know, when they were going to get into Walmart, that’s where they would go and look they would go look at their Amazon reviews. They were using that as an indicator on whether that product was going to be successful or not. So looking at those reviews and knowing what you have there is going to be very, very important. But as Amazon starts to, what it feels like is making it so that we can’t see as many reviews, actually, it’s not just feeling like it, it is actually so we can’t see as many reviews on our side.

Shane Barker 00:06:04  It hasn’t affected us as much because we can still manually grab reviews. We can go in through Seller Central. There’s some different places that we can go and grab those reviews. What I recommend is, hey, when we go and try to clean up, you know, all the reviews that violate Amazon’s guidelines because those are the ones we go after. Just so everybody’s clear. We don’t go after reviews that you just don’t like, right? If you don’t like a review, if you make it to a certain point with Amazon, there’s going to be reviews you don’t like. I mean, that’s just how it goes, right? In fact, if you don’t have any reviews, you don’t like it and you haven’t made it yet. I know it sounds might feel a little weird, but at the end of the day, you know the reviews are going to be an indicator of, once again, that progression of your business and what you’ve got going on there. My recommendation, no matter what Amazon does on their side, is to start monitoring your reviews, right? I mean, that’s obviously what we do with our 850 customers.

Shane Barker 00:06:49  You know, the we go back and we, you know, clean up all the reviews and then we monitor them on a monthly basis, which makes it so that when new reviews come in, we obviously can see those. Right? Amazon doesn’t, you know, make us. So we can’t see those. We see those. We can file cases faster. So once again and we’re going to talk about this as we go through this podcast is you know being more proactive than reactive. Right. Like hey if you got some issues figure it out today. Do it. Figure out the system for what you’re going to do and how you’re going to monitor those reviews and get those cleaned up. Because what we’re looking at with Amazon is obviously the AI side of things. Amazon’s taking a look at your reviews for the last whatever how long your ations been created. And they’re coming up with some kind of a summary for it. Right. So you can see that now. And so if you have a certain thing that happened over and over and over, Amazon’s going to, you know, put a light on that.

Shane Barker 00:07:33  Right. And so you need to make sure that if those reviews that violate Amazon’s guidelines, you want to clean those up as best as you can. Not only for sales and for everything, but for reputation. I mean, the reviews obviously, is going to be the blood of Amazon and of every seller because once again, you can have a terrible product and great reviews. You can sell a lot, you can have a great product and terrible reviews. You’re not going to sell as much. So you know something that I think every seller needs to take a look at.

Josh Hadley 00:07:56  So on that note, tell me, what are some of the reviews that come through that are actually, noncompliant with Amazon’s policies because you just mentioned, like, it’s not just any negative review. You don’t have a magic formula of like, oh, you don’t like this review? Somebody left a nasty comment on like, sorry. Like, I don’t have that magic touch, but what are the things that you are actually looking for that you’re able to actually handle and resolve?

Shane Barker 00:08:26  Yeah.

Shane Barker 00:08:26  Great question. So we we actually if you actually can Google it, you can just put Amazon Community guidelines and you can take a look at that. And what we’ve done is we’ve built AI software before AI got big and was the big thing. And everybody’s talking about it. This was about four years ago. Really what we do is we look at Amazon’s guidelines and we run any of the reviews through our AI that’s proprietary to us, and it’ll tell us which reviews violate Amazon’s guidelines. And some of those examples can be cutscenes. So if anybody custom review mentioning competitors, if you said, hey, I, you know, love my Nike cross trainers, but I really wish that my Adidas X ones were, you know, I could buy those locally. What you’re really saying is, hey, these Nike’s are cool, but hey, you should go buy these Adidas. Right? Those are the ones that I like better. mentioning an exact price. So they said, hey, this is, you know, I got this for 29.95 on Prime Day.

Shane Barker 00:09:13  Now, I looked at it. It’s $45. This is ridiculous. I would never pay that. These are all things. These are Amazon’s rules, right? So we’re just if Amazon says this is the rule then we’re just making sure that sellers or excuse me that buyers that buy it, if they write a review that violates Amazon’s guidelines, most of the time they don’t know it, right. And so in Amazon, I would have to say, does a good job of removing those before they hit the platform. They’re saying, I think last year was like 275 million that they stop before they hit the platform. So now once again, the the analogy I always use, and this is always a very weird analogy, but it’s like it’s like drugs trying to get through the US border. Right? At the end of the day, it’s like they might the US Border Patrol might stop three of them, but that seven of them go through. It’s the same thing with this, right? Amazon does a good job of stopping a good majority of them, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some, you know, FBA related stuff.

Shane Barker 00:10:00  So if something got shipped out late, broken or used, those are all things that we take a look at and say, well, wait a second. If somebody said terrible product took two weeks to get here or you hate to ship in, you don’t hate the product, right? Or, hey, the box that it came in was dented. Okay. But that’s not a product problem. That’s a shipping problem. And so that’s something else we take a look at. And then the other side of it is really fraudulent activity. Right. That would be like an escalation case with Amazon where somebody comes in and is attacking you. And there’s a number of different ways our software will indicate that. But one of the main ways is, you know, somebody comes in and keeps buying your product and giving you a one star review, which doesn’t really make sense because as consumers, if you hate a product and you give it a one star review, you usually don’t buy ten more just from the research I’ve done.

Shane Barker 00:10:41  Anyways, you know, if you hate it, you’re not going to buy more. And if you do, then there’s something weird going on and then what happens? It gets flagged in our system and then our filers, which are humans because we everything that we file is done with humans, right? We don’t use AI to file anything because that would be against Amazon’s guidelines. But then what we do is we take a look at that and we’re filing those cases. And if they just happen to buy your competitor’s products and the products are very similar, let’s say it’s two things are creatine that are very similar. And they only gave them five star reviews. Then we file an escalation case with Amazon and say, hey, there’s something funny going on here, and this is some of the proof. And when we’re doing escalation cases there’s got to be a smoking gun, right? This isn’t a this isn’t a time just to complain to Amazon. It’s like, hey, this just doesn’t work. And we use a lot of statistical analysis and saying, hey, what are the odds of this? Not just our feelings and emotions about what that is.

Shane Barker 00:11:29  Amazon doesn’t really care about your emotions as much. They want a case. They want a facts. They want. Hey, tell me what it is. We can look into it. And then either a we can go and remove that buyer’s account or we say, hey, there’s not enough information. So, you know, our goal is, you know, because I do all of our own demo meetings, my goal is always to improve the software. Right? I want to there’s always new black hat stuff that’s going on, new ways that people are gaming the system. I want to know those so that I can, you know, put that into the software so that we can even the playing field. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to for me is, you know, I enjoy sellers. I know how hard it is to run a brand. And especially somebody like yourself, you’re at eight, you’re getting up to nine. I mean, you guys are big dogs over there, but it’s it’s hard, right? I mean, it’s not an easy thing to do.

Shane Barker 00:12:09  And it’s like if we can even that playing field, especially if you know certain categories, there’s people being attacked and there’s certain things that happen. we’re obviously very we see that on a daily basis. And so it’s kind of disheartening. But my goal is to say, hey, you know, if we’re going to go in a race, everybody should have the same shoes and, you know, should be able to use their inhaler the same and, you know, be able to run and be able to make things happen. And so my goal has always been to kind of even that playing field for sellers that get attacked. you know, because it’s just disheartening. You know, it’s it’s enough. It’s already hard enough, as I said, to run your business between tariffs and inventory and people and finding good people and selling and competition and, you know, everything going up price wise and, you know, all those things. It’s just, you know, we want to make sure that everybody has a good opportunity to be able to be successful in Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:12:53  Yeah. I’m curious to get your thoughts on this, Shane, if I’m listening to this and I’m like, oh, well, now in the world of AI, I could basically just have this automated. I don’t need a software that sits behind me. I can just do this myself. What do you say to those sellers that are that, well, hey, I can have AI comb through my reviews and tell me which ones are policy violating and things like that. And then, sure, I can open up a support ticket on Seller Central. Is it as easy as that? tell me a little bit more, because I think I know the answer to that. But tell me what what, what the reality check is on that thought process.

Shane Barker 00:13:35  Yeah, I mean, I so it’s funny when we, when people were talking about, you know, hey, we can use AI because I would have a few sellers that would just be up front. Hey, I’ll just use AI and I can do this, right? And and I would tell them, hey, you can try to do that for sure.

Shane Barker 00:13:46  Right. And so what we ended up doing because of that is we have an Amazon review checker. So why go and use AI and all these type things. We have a tool that you. That’s literally the tool that we use. And you can use it for free. So if they go to AI there’s an Amazon review checker you can put in your Asin. And we’ll give you a report and tell you what’s in violation of Amazon’s guidelines. So what I’m doing is saying, hey, why go use AI. Because I’m telling you it’s there’s going to be hallucinations or things that happen. They don’t know where to file. They don’t. There’s certain terminology that you use with case filings that you do. There’s a lot of things that we’ve learned literally for two years of doing it the wrong way. Right. Kind of going through our testing now, our last 4 or 4 and a half years, obviously we’ve moved about 27,000 reviews. So we’re very proud of that. But things are constantly changing and moving right.

Shane Barker 00:14:30  Whether Amazon’s changing policies you can’t see as many reviews. There’s things that happen. AI is not going to keep up with that, right. If Amazon closes this department like we’re filing cases and we used to have a, you know, 15%, 20% success rate. And now all of a sudden we’re down to 1%. We know that Amazon’s done something right. There’s been some changes. That’s just because we’re big data, right? We have a lot of information that comes through. AI is not going to notice those changes right. Because I’ll also people say, well, I’ll just hire a VA and I’m like, okay, and you can do that. Like I’m not saying don’t I’m going to provide you the free tools. You can have a VA file. That case fact I want you to go do that because I want you to understand the process. If you can remove those reviews, that’s awesome. Like I don’t you don’t need to pay me. Like I have no problem with that. Like, I know people always think I’m crazy when I say that.

Shane Barker 00:15:12  Like, I would rather people not use us and not have to use us. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s why I would provide free tools if I wasn’t going to, you know, if I didn’t want to get you to the finish line. So you don’t need to go use AI. I know that you can literally use our software, put it in your ace and grab that report, and then you can have a VA file it. Now what you got to have to be careful of, you know, is if you want results and you want it in a month or two, a VA might not be able to get that done. Because if you get to the end and it doesn’t happen, is that going to be worth it for that risk? Right. Of what? When you could have hired somebody to do that. So if you want to try that, let’s say you want to do it in December. Let’s say let’s say, let’s say we’re this interview’s in July, which it isn’t, but let’s say it’s six months out.

Shane Barker 00:15:51  Maybe give your VA a month or two, right. Knowing that Prime is when you really, or Christmas is when you want to make sure this happens. Give your VA a little bit of time. They don’t get it done. And you can hire somebody like TraceFuse to be able to make that happen. So I highly recommend trying it on your own. Like I have no issues with that. We even have a PDF that we give to people that if anybody reaches out to me, I’ll send it to you. And you can find on the website as well, that shows of different places that we file cases. So I’m, I’m literally giving not all the keys to the castle, but a good percentage of them. And if you’ve got some knowledge with Amazon, you can try it on your own. What usually happens is people go, listen, I got a million things I got to focus on between PPC and this and hiring and this and that. And reviews are just they’re causing me too much headache.

Shane Barker 00:16:33  I don’t want to deal with it. You know, if you have to get crazy results and you’re going to need to probably have somebody take that on. But once again, we give some free tools that they can go Try to figure it out on their own, which once again, my goal is if they could do that, that’s awesome. You know, at the end of the day. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:16:47  Impressive. Well, I think that at the end of the at the end of the day, you’re trying to come in and like you, you know, the channels to actually get things resolved. And you know, the wording things like that I’m sure like, and I don’t know, or maybe you have some secret partners in Amazon that you’re paying under the table. Maybe that’s your business strategy. And they just blew it up. no, I’m sure there’s more to that. Like, is that true? Like, there’s just a lot of nuances with the cases. And I mean, even Amazon now, it’s like a nightmare just trying to create a case now because of their AI bot crap.

Shane Barker 00:17:21  Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, we don’t have any connections at Amazon or anything like that. I mean, we file cases. I’m not going to say no different than anybody else. We file them differently because we know the terminology. We know with certain departments there are certain things that they’re going to react to. But that was only because we we tested this for two years. So that really the because that’s the kind of the secrets. Well it is the a secret sauce, right? It’s like we know because of the amount of cases we file, when certain departments are shutting down or certain things that are happening, we can see we know usually when reviews are going to start being wiped because we can start seeing that. So there’s certain things that we see that other people don’t see because of the amount of the volume and the connections that we have, not the connections as in somebody at Amazon. But like as in, you know, having access to these accounts and seeing the reviews that are coming in and different things that happen.

Shane Barker 00:18:04  So yeah, we don’t know, no special connections or anything. We just we put in the hard work. But, you know, that’s the key to this whole thing is that, you know, not everything that we go and file on is going to get removed. And that’s another thing that sellers have to realize is that this is it’s a game of timing, you know, with filing cases and getting things in, you got to find the customer service person that says, hey, this makes sense to me. Great case. And guess what? I’m going to remove this review. And it might take a little bit of time to find that person, right? If I had that individual, it’s not always customer service is is not bad at Amazon, but it could be improved upon. I guess it would be a nice way of saying it.

Josh Hadley 00:18:37  So what is the hit rate look like? What’s your success rate in general look like?

Shane Barker 00:18:42  Yeah. So really on anything that we file on we have about a 25% success rate.

Shane Barker 00:18:48  So we are the highest in the industry. And what that means is that when we have, let’s say if you have 100 critical reviews, we’re not going to file on all 100 critical reviews, right? Because not all of them violate Amazon’s guidelines. And so what we do is we’ll we’ll look at the, you know, depending on category. And obviously there’s a number of different variables that we look at their competition. Then what we do is we look at those reviews, we run those to the AI and then it’ll tell us, hey, let’s say, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 of these are, you know, in violation of Amazon’s guidelines. But there’s also severities to that, right? If somebody said, this is an effing terrible product, that should be high up on the tier, if they said, this is a stupid, dumb product, my my house, that wasn’t really a cuss word, so but maybe there might be somebody that we could file. We could file a case in that, but that might have a lower success rate because it’s not quite as aggressive as somebody that used the F word.

Shane Barker 00:19:35  So once again, when we look at that we’re going to assess that. And then we have about about a 25% success rate. Once again, we start off around ten. And now we’ve been able to improve that over time. And our goal is to continue to improve that. you know, as things happen and new black hat strategies are happening and, you know, new categories and all the other fun stuff.

Josh Hadley 00:19:52  Yeah. is there I guess if you open a case, does it? Is there ever a situation where like, okay, we don’t get it resolved for a month or two? Like it actually takes six months or a year. Like, what is the general time frame look like? And just because they said no this one time, does that mean no forever? Tell me more about that.

Shane Barker 00:20:14  Yeah. So we’re we’re filing on on things that violate Amazon’s guidelines. So if somebody says no then we file another case usually if depending on what the review says, right. If it says this is a terrible product and I hate it was stupid, we might file something else.

Shane Barker 00:20:29  If it says the F word. I’m I’m absolutely going to give that one another try. Right. Because I’m like, at the end of the day, I don’t know who would look at that and say, yeah, we should keep that. You know, it’s good for the kids of Amazon to be able to read that like. Right. Like the idea of this is like, hey, you just you just obviously closed the case and didn’t do anything, right. We got to file another case with that. So, you know, it really depends on the review. Depends on where we’re filing. You know, sometimes we file with the department. They say no. If they say no multiple times, great. Then we can go and file with another department. What we don’t do is file one after another after another after another on the same thing. So our process we talk about how quickly reviews can be removed. I mean we tell people we’ve seen it in a few days, we’ve seen it in a few months, and we’ve seen it not get removed.

Shane Barker 00:21:10  So that’s the things that we’ll have sellers that will come to us and say, hey, I just got these two reviews and they use the F word like, why aren’t they removed? And it’s like, well, we only charge you when reviews get removed, right? So in the end of the day, I want that review removed probably just as badly as you do. Right? I mean, that’s how I make my money. That’s how I feed my family. That’s how I feed my employees and everything. And you want the reviews removed, so we’re on the same page. I just have to be able to get Amazon to respond to that. And that just depends on, once again, where we’re filing, you know, the time of the year. There’s a lot of different things that play into that. But that’s where the hey, if you need reviews removed in two weeks, I don’t care whether you work with us or another company, it’s it’s not probably not going to happen. Right? I mean, you just really have to say, okay, listen, this is a strategy.

Shane Barker 00:21:53  This is something I have to implement over the next few months to clean things up to make that happen, because there is no guarantees that we’re going to remove every review that we file on. In fact, that’s just not going to happen. We’re at 25%, so it means 75%. We fail, which is a in any other industry. I wouldn’t even say that out loud. That’s just terrible. 25% is terrible, but it’s the best in this industry. And it’s just, you know, that other 75%, we’re we’re putting in the effort and we’re trying to get those removed as quickly as possible. But once again, it’s you know, it. There’s this thing called Amazon. And they’re the ones who make that final decision. And they put down the gavel and say yes or no. And if they say no, sometimes we file again.

Josh Hadley 00:22:30  Yeah. Love it. Interesting process. And yeah, I think it’s, you know, fascinating. And we all know this. Anybody that’s gone to seller support, it’s like if you don’t get it the first time then you keep going back.

Josh Hadley 00:22:41  And it just depends on who’s desk this lands on, etc.. Shane A bigger question I have is if I’m very conservative with my Amazon account and we know that the FTC is all up Amazon’s rear end right now all about reviews. I’m a big proponent of, hey, I’m going to avoid reviews like a nine foot pole. I’m not asking for them. I’m not touching them. I’m just going to let things play out. is that the right strategy? and is there any concern for me as a seller to be like, yeah, now I’ve got this, you know, I’ve got this aggressive agency behind me that’s trying to get down reviews because you guys are incentivized for every negative review you get pulled down. Or is Amazon look at you guys and be like, what are you doing to manipulate Reviews. you know, because that’s the big threat that everybody has. Like, how should a seller be thinking through that?

Shane Barker 00:23:39  Yeah. So I can tell you, when we first started, I it was crickets.

Shane Barker 00:23:43  I would go to conferences and say, hey, we could move negative reviews. And people are like, no, I don’t want any part of that black hat stuff. And I’m like, no, no, it’s not black hat. And they’re like, yeah, right. And so it was it was quite a challenge, you know, because I mean, you have to realize that people are sellers are are nervous of Amazon. Right? I mean, they just are because you can you know and Amazon’s huge. So you got to expect there’s going to be mistakes. There’s going to be shipping issues. These things happen. But if Amazon does a knee jerk reaction and you know shuts down accounts that can affect you, I can tell you full heartedly from the bottom of my heart, we’ve never had an account get suspended because of what we do, right? I mean, so that’s our thing is that we stay compliance. If anything, we’ve had sellers that have come to us and said, hey, can you file more cases? Can you get more reviews removed? And I just won’t do that, right? I mean, I actually had two sellers literally say, I’ll give you six figures.

Shane Barker 00:24:28  And for me, I just, I can’t I would never put their account at risk no matter what they say, right? Like, I just can’t do that because my thing is, like, I want to make sure that everybody that we’re compliant with Amazon, I don’t want to make Amazon mad, and I don’t want to file too many cases. So that really is for us is has always been the thing of like, hey, we can’t we’re doing it as fast as we can to stay compliant with Amazon. So once again, very proud of the fact that we’ve never had an account get suspended. And once again, people always want us. You know, some people want us to go a little faster. We would love to go faster. But once again, we have to stay compliant with Amazon. and the other thing is, is if you’re worried about your account, we have 25 video testimonials of clients that have had some great success with us. So, you know, that question doesn’t come up as much.

Shane Barker 00:25:11  because in the beginning it was the number one question, like, what happens if I, you know, you guys are going to file too many cases? And what happens if Amazon comes after me? We don’t reach out to the customer. We’re just saying, hey Amazon, your terms of service. Say you don’t use the F word. These guys use the F word. Can you guys remove this review? I mean, it’s really that easy. But we’re not going to file ten cases in one day on that one. We’re not going to file it for, you know, ten different departments. We don’t do that right at the end of the day because that Amazon doesn’t like that. Now, I do think that if Amazon would respond maybe a little faster, that would be awesome. But you know, it is what it is. This is this is the business that we’re in. And, you know, we just have to be patient and know that over time something can be removed or maybe it won’t be removed.

Shane Barker 00:25:50  You just never know.

Josh Hadley 00:25:52  So, Shane, I’m curious, you’ve worked with a lot of sellers over the last, you know, six, four years especially. do you have any wins or case studies that you might be able to share? Is like, is this worth the cost? Even paying you? It could be expensive. And I’ve despite everything that you just said, I still don’t trust you. I, I, I want to keep my account squeaky clean. you know, give me some case studies as to, like, why you even worry about this.

Shane Barker 00:26:19  Yeah. So it’s funny. So when we first started this, it was really like, hey, just. We need to remove reviews. You need to clean up your profile. That was the angle because that was, you know, very new to people. What we’ve done now is now we actually have we have a proprietary calculator. And then we also have a new thing that we just implemented this last month, where it’ll kind of talk about where the low hanging fruit is at.

Shane Barker 00:26:39  So what we do is because I don’t at the end of the day, I don’t want you to go in activating ations. like when a client signs up with us, they go into the software in the back end. We don’t use a Google Drive dock or anything. You know, software that we’ve created over the years. They can go in and pick the essence that they want, but the value of that is, is before they activate that ace. And we have a little calculator button. And actually when they when they do the Amazon review check, when they put in that ace and they get that report in the top right hand corner, there’ll be a calculator that they can click on it. And what it’ll tell them is this. If you’re at a, you know, 4.2 and you want to get to a 4.3, it’ll tell you approximately how many reviews we think need to be removed. Now this is an approximate if it says five, maybe it’s four, maybe it’s six, maybe it’s seven.

Shane Barker 00:27:17  And then how much more revenue you guys should be able to bring in because of that? Because I really don’t want you to go and activate. I shouldn’t have to say this out loud, but if you’re at a 3.1, why are you going to activate that? Right. Unless. That’s right. Like why? Like why are you going to give me all kinds of money? Right. Why are you going to activate that? And we remove 50 reviews and you get up to a 3.8. Who cares? Right? Like, why would you do that? So what I’ve done is I’m trying to add some transparency here and saying, hey, this is you can use this calculator. And then in our actual software, right when they sign up on the bottom. So let’s say you’re one of the big things we had was like big sellers right. That would come to us and they’re saying, hey, I got 1000 Asians. Like what do we need to do? And so what we’ve done is we’ve developed a program that when they put in their Asin, we’ll, we’ll run it through and it’ll say, hey, here goes your tier one opportunity.

Shane Barker 00:28:02  So your tier one is like, hey, you have to remove five reviews or we have to remove five reviews, or I guess they could remove five reviews to try, but let’s say we remove five reviews. Then your revenue should go up by $10,000 on this Asian. Right. Or $12,000. So and it’s all done with AI. So the beautiful thing is, when they use that calculator get from a 4.2 to 4.3, it’ll have some basic information they can put in their real information. They can say, you know what, I don’t sell 500 utes. I do a thousand units. My profit margin isn’t $6. Shame. It’s actually $12. And those numbers will change and it’ll say, hey, we think we need to remove four reviews at $250 a piece. It’s a $1,000 investment to make $15,000 in six months. Is that worth it? In my world, I would say yes, let’s do that. If it’s $1,000 and I would make $1,200 in six months. No. Why. Right.

Shane Barker 00:28:50  So that’s what we’re doing is I’m trying to make it or not trying. We are we’re making it so people go and take a look at it and say, hey, does this make sense to activate it? And with the other thing that we have that we’re, you know, they see at the bottom the goal of that is to go in and, you know, tell sellers, go in and activate the ones that you’re at a 4.2 to get to a 4.3 or a 3.9 to a 4.0. Once that happens, your revenue is going to go up. You’re going to see the value of it, not a crazy investment or risk. Once that goes up, you start getting more revenue. They’re great. You start going after the ones that are maybe a 3.8, and you want to get it to a 4.0 because it’s going to take a little more push. They’re assuming, well, it depends on how many reviews you have and the categories and things. But I always tell people, J, start off just a place where you can get some instant revenue, and then we monitor you so you don’t fall back down, or the goal is so you don’t fall back down.

Shane Barker 00:29:35  And then obviously take a look at more positive reviews and make sure that’s all happening. just make sure you’re compliant with Amazon’s guidelines. Stay away from anything that if you’ve heard, don’t do it. And people said don’t do it. I would just be very careful and not do it. You don’t want to give Amazon a reason. You know, it’s like it’s like driving a car. You don’t want to give anybody a reason to pull you over. Right? At the end of the day, it’s like, hey, I make sure that everything is good. I’m using my blinker at ten and two. I’m doing all the things right because I don’t want to get in trouble. I want to be a good boy. Right. It’s the same thing with Amazon. If you hear things, just be ultra cautious. And I think most sellers are just because, you know they don’t want to get banned. They don’t want anything bad to happen to their account. That’s how they make their money.

Josh Hadley 00:30:11  Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:30:11  No. Makes a lot of sense. If you are a bigger seller and you have thousands of these, you know, ace ins or reviews, do you guys do like package deals or is it just like, hey, we’re just success based at the end of the day. And what does that look like?

Shane Barker 00:30:28  Yeah, yeah. So we actually, with bigger agencies, we do have some tiered pricing that we put out there. really, that’s more of an on a volume basis. The hard part for us is it’s not even though we can we can lower the price with bigger agencies or bigger, sellers. The problem is it’s not less work for us, right? So that’s what we get at. We have this price point because we know in theory how many times it’s going to take for Amazon to say yes or say no. And once again, we fail 75% of the time. Once again, I’m going to tell you, successful 25 highest in the industry. We have 75% of the time we will do work and not get paid for it.

Shane Barker 00:31:05  So there’s not this crazy, you know, like I’ve had people say, hey, can you charge me $100? And it’s like, if I could be profitable on that, I would. But at the end of the day, we don’t use AI to file. We use humans, which anybody that in the industry should do that you have to use humans. And then we file these cases and we get these things going and we could get ignored ten times and never get that removed. But the time and the effort that we put into that is still a cost for us. So once again, there’s not this crazy, crazy discount. Is there a discount for volume? Because because I get it. There is. But what I tell them and say, hey, instead of going in and saying, hey, I want to remove 10,000 reviews or whatever your number is. Why don’t you start with the low hanging fruit, start there, start to get some traction and get some revenue back in the door.

Shane Barker 00:31:46  Try the other ones. Get some revenue back in the door, and then you’re not going to be worried about the discount as much because you’re looking at it saying, hey, I’ve already increased my revenue on these two products by whatever it is, you know, 10% or 20%, 30%. So that’s what I encourage people to do. but yeah, I mean, I’d love to give deeper discounts, but it just it’s because of the amount of manual effort that it takes. It’s not just clicking a button and having the magic happen, like there’s a lot of work that goes into it and we’re constantly having to do new things like go find where the new reviews are at and all these types of things. So there’s constantly this, this, these things that we have to learn that can be some new things. On when Amazon changes policies, you It takes time to figure it out.

Josh Hadley 00:32:24  Yeah. Love that. So let’s talk about black hat strategies. How prevalent. Like if you were to kind of like tally up the, you know, the number of negative reviews that you guys are able to like go after and toss compliant.

Josh Hadley 00:32:43  I know everybody talks about being attacked by Black Hat. Do you see it as super prevalent? Do you see it as like, it’s pretty rare. or is it like on a case by case basis? Tell me what you’re seeing on that side. And like, is this something that a lot of sellers might be sleeping on or not?

Shane Barker 00:33:02  Yeah. In certain categories it’s rampant. I mean, it’s like it’s it’s pretty crazy. I, I try to I’m a little jaded because I’ve, you know, only seen millions of reviews at this point with these old eyes. It’s the reason I wear glasses these days. But the there’s some things that used to shock me now that don’t shock me as much anymore. Because once again, we’re, you know, seeing different things that happen. But I can tell you that, you know, when you talk. About like supplements, when you talk about beauty, when you talk about pet, those are all categories that that there seems to be more attacks going on.

Shane Barker 00:33:32  And the reason why that is. There’s a number of reasons, but the main reason is the lifetime value of a customer. So the analogy I always use I have a a dog, Bailey, she just passed a few weeks ago. She was just an absolute angel. She was a little pitty, just the best dog in the world. And we had my wife and I, we agreed that there was an unlimited budget for our dogs and treats, so I’m not even going to tell you how much we spend on a monthly basis. But it’s the dogs are treated better than most humans. I’ll just kind of throw that out there. But so what? What I’m the point I’m trying to make here is that let’s say there’s some treats that my dogs like, and they’re $30 every two weeks. Let’s say that’s what the number is, right? Which is ours is a lot higher. But let’s just leave that as the number. So great. It’s $30 for that for a month’s time. Let’s say it’s $60.

Shane Barker 00:34:14  Right. And Bailey was 17.5 years old. So let’s say Bailey started eating the treats for ten years. So we have ten years times 12, so it’s 120 times 60. So badly, in theory is worth 7 or 8 grand to to to these brands. So what we look at there. So somebody and this is once again not ethical. Please don’t do this. This is not the way to do things. It’s already hard enough to run your business. But what people will do, other sellers will look at this and say, well $30 isn’t a lot to pay, right? And they’ll come and buy your product. And this happens. You can look it up online, they’ll ship it to somebody in Australia or wherever. It doesn’t matter. They’ll just ship. Grandma will get some dog treats. She doesn’t have dogs, right? She has cats and we don’t know why. But grandma gets this this package. Well, what happens there is they’re just going and they’ll go and give you a bad review.

Shane Barker 00:34:58  And you’re a verified buyer, right? And they’re going to say, hey, I tried this and oh, man, my dog went to the hospital and had diarrhea for two weeks. And you’re going, oh, whoa. Like and then so you as a consumer go, my little angel that I love more than probably humans. am I going to take a chance and give her these treats? There’s 5% off, 10% off. But she might go to the hospital. Like that’s crazy. I’m not going to take the chance. Right. There’s just no way. Right? I’m going to buy another product. I’m going to do something different. And so that’s what you have to look out for, is when there’s a high lifetime value. But it’s not as expensive to buy because then they can come in and buy ten year products, give you a one star review, and guess what? That takes you for Prime for Christmas and all these times. And usually it happens a few weeks or a few months before.

Shane Barker 00:35:42  And then that’s why I talk about being proactive. And, you know, less reactive is if we’re monitoring for us as an agency, when we do things, when those come in, we obviously see those, and we’re going to be filing on those as quickly as possible. And if you don’t have TraceFuse and you do it yourself, just monitor those reviews, right. You get to see when those new reviews come in and you take a look at those. And if they seem a little suspect, if there’s something that violates Amazon’s guidelines or if you can build a, you know, I call it a Rico case, but like when you’re grabbing all the information together and building the case, leave the emotion out of it. Go ahead and say, great, now I’m going to file this case and talk about why I think I’m being attacked. But you have to make sure that you’re hitting on all the basis points for as a customer service person. They look at it and say, you know what? That makes sense.

Shane Barker 00:36:23  That resonates. Yeah, they did that wrong. Yes. Okay. Hey, now we need to go ahead and get those removed. But once again certain categories it’s very, very aggressive. You’re not going to see for the most part. You know let’s say you have a specialized bike right. It’s like a 10,000 $15,000 bike. You’re not going to have a competitor come by ten of those, right? I mean, that’d be great. That’s $100,000 in sales. That’d be really nice. Like, please attack me if you want to come by a $10,000 bike for me, I would. That would be great. but they’re not going to do that, because guess what? The lifetime value you only, in theory going to buy one of those bikes in five years. Right. So it’s not they don’t have that. You’re not going to order that every two weeks. And so that’s kind of the difference when we look at that. But we don’t see like talk about beauty and stuff like in us is really where they have a lot of issues with that.

Shane Barker 00:37:05  But like if you go to like Canada and we do UK, we’ve done, you know, we’ve taken on France, we just did a UK launch. excuse me, EU launch. We’re obviously in France and Spain. We’re all over now but we don’t see that as much of that happening. The US seems to be where a lot of the pet beauty and supplements, where there seems to be a lot of nefarious activity that goes on, and which is it’s just sad because there’s enough money for everybody. Trust me, there’s enough. There’s enough people buying dog treats and creatine and, you know, makeup. It’s not going away. It’s going to be, if anything, it’s going to flourish. But just, you know, be a good person, be a better human, and don’t attack each other. It’s not a good way to go.

Josh Hadley 00:37:40  Yeah. How is that part of your guys’s process? Like are you able to help understand when something seems like an attack versus not?

Shane Barker 00:37:50  Yeah. It’s review velocity, right? So at the end of the day, if you, you know, get one negative review every two weeks, then all of a sudden you get 10 in 3 days, unless you had a crazy sales period or something nuts that happened that that said, okay, for every ten sales we get one negative review, which would be a terrible number, but you get 100 sales and you get ten negative reviews.

Shane Barker 00:38:08  Well, that makes sense, right? We look at the review velocity. Most of the time it’s it’s pretty evident. You see this crazy uptick and most sellers, you know, if they follow their spider sense, they go, hey, something doesn’t seem right. There’s something funny going on here. Sales are very close to being the same, but I’ve ten times as many reviews. Let’s take a look at those. Our system will flag that though. Like we go when we look at that. And then once again, our filers will go and take a look at the account and say, hey, is there something funny going on here? And then we’ll go ahead and file for that. So most sellers, when they hire us, we tell them, hey, you don’t have to worry about this anymore. Like I’m not saying don’t look at it. I’m not saying have don’t have a pulse on it. But we’re going to go ahead and we’re monitoring. We’re going to file the cases. We’re going to get all that stuff done.

Shane Barker 00:38:49  You can see everything in the back end of the software. You know, which reviews we’re working on. You know, when reviews get removed, you actually can we have a collection of you can see the actual review and you click on the review ID and it goes to a 404 page or a dog of Amazon’s page. So we’ve built this out. You know where they can be able to see that activate deactivate aliens all at their own, their own will. They can go in and do that whenever. And the goal of that is, once again, you can activate and deactivate your business changes. And so now they have that that freedom to be able to do that.

Josh Hadley 00:39:18  Fantastic. Shane, as we begin to wrap things up, two final questions for you. Number one, what haven’t I asked you that I should have asked you? And then part two is where do you think Amazon’s going in the game of reviews. And then if you were to put on your prediction hat look inside that crystal ball.

Josh Hadley 00:39:36  where are we going in the next 3 to 5 years with reviews on Amazon?

Shane Barker 00:39:40  I mean, it’s only going to get bigger, right? I think the review thing, I think it’s going to I was a little from a seller’s perspective, it’s always been a little confusing to me on how people can write reviews on something they didn’t necessarily purchase. That’s it’s just really odd to me because I just feel like that opens up attacks and different things that can happen there, which I wasn’t. But I’m sure Amazon has a reason for it. I just myself, from a seller’s perspective, I wasn’t a huge fan of that because, I mean, obviously that can happen in the ratings that people can come in and attack you and stuff like that. So what I’m really hoping is that I know Amazon is going to start kind of pulling back, you know, the reviews and the reason they’re doing that because of AI and other things. and I know that they’re they’re going to be improving some things as well. I’ve also heard that as well.

Shane Barker 00:40:24  So my goal at the end of the day is once again, you have to protect those reviews because once they start sliding, it’s you know, I’ve talked to quite a few sellers that are just like, hey, I got some bad reviews, I’m out. Like, I don’t, I just can’t I don’t have the bandwidth, I don’t have the finances, I don’t have, like, I’ve been doing this for a year. I just got hit with ten negative reviews. I can’t seem to get them removed. Like, it’s just frustrating and I’m kind of at wit’s end. And some of those people, I tell them either a, hey, we can probably help you, and we’ll take a look at the account, or if this is too much for you, it’s not going to get any easier. Right. And I hate to have those conversations. I mean, I’m not here to tell somebody to, you know, stop doing their dream. But if I have a conversation with them and the anxiety is high and they’re like, I just can’t do this.

Shane Barker 00:41:09  I mean, I’ve I’ve told people, hey, don’t sign up with us. This doesn’t make any sense to clean up his listing, right? And I do that because I want to be transparent with them. I don’t want their last thousand dollars to be spent with us. That that is not. Go do something else or whatever I can do to help you. Or I’ll recommend other people in my network that maybe can help them. That might be less expensive or whatever that is. But you know, you have to realize that, you know, Amazon is constantly going to change, right? Whether that be Walmart, Amazon, Shopify, things are always going to change. But at the end of the day, if you, you know, good about getting the negative reviews removed, make sure you’re getting more positive reviews. There’s obviously some great softwares for that where you know it can automate the anybody buys something, it automates that process where Amazon sends out that email. There’s a company called review that that we have a partnership with that does that exact same thing reviewing AI, which is pretty awesome.

Shane Barker 00:41:55  It just once again, if you have ten people that order it, you can say in four days, I want you to send this request, which is Amazon’s request to go and get those reviews. So we always encourage people. It’s like a diet, you know, like if you eat right and you work out, you’re going to lose weight faster. I’m really good at Not eating right and and working out. That’s like my my superpower is like I drink a beer and then I’ll try to go work out. Right. That’s kind of where I’m at. Don’t be like me. Make sure you don’t. Well, I’m not saying don’t drink beer. I’m Irish, I have to. But you know what you really need to take a look at is like, you know, what are we going to do to be able to to get you back up to that 4.3? getting positive reviews and getting rid of the negative reviews are going to be the key. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:42:33  Shane, anything else that we haven’t talked about that we should be?

Shane Barker 00:42:37  Oh, Josh, this was all the magic I thought I was going to be my friend.

Shane Barker 00:42:40  I thank you so much for having me today. this was exciting. Like I said, I’ve been excited about being on the podcast. You’ve done such amazing things with your brand, and you do such a great job with educating people and what they need to do. I think your podcast is invaluable, and I’m not just saying that because I’m on it. I’ve listened to it before, so thank you for all the work you’re doing, man. All the changes and things that happen at Amazon. You’ve obviously been, you know, knowing what’s going on and being able to educate people. So I’ve always I’ve been a big fan I guess is really what I’m saying.

Josh Hadley 00:43:07  Awesome. Well, hey. Well I appreciate, appreciate the kind words. Shane, as we wrap things up, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. Action item number one and this is honestly something I’m going to be telling my team immediately is like, go and plug in my ason over on your guys’s site just to see what you guys can pull.

Josh Hadley 00:43:33  because rather than me, you know, because I’ve got an AI ninja on my team that can go build some incredible stuff, but it’s like, as you said, like, watch out for the hallucinations. Everything. Plus, you guys can actually see the reviews. I, I can’t even see all of them anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shane Barker 00:43:51  There’s no reason not to use our tool for free. I mean, it’s free 99. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that. You don’t need to go and figure out cloud or AI or ChatGPT or any of the stuff that you got going on. Just go in. You can take a look at that evaluating and it’ll tell you literally creates a report that says here goes the review. This is what violates Amazon’s guidelines. And we have that proprietary calculator that you can use for free. So yeah, don’t need to go figure it out on your own. We’re doing that for free so people don’t go use AI and mess up and file wrong things. The goal of this is, is so you guys can just use the tool for free.

Josh Hadley 00:44:20  Love that. Well. And then the second action item is you as the CEO or founder or the brand manager. Where is your time best spent? And I would argue your time is much better spent thinking about growth initiatives than it is, you know, dealing with, you know, at the end of the day, this is just a support issue. And, you know, you talked about it’s like it’s just healthy maintenance. We should have this running on autopilot. And so my encouragement is like, yeah, is this the silver bullet that’s going to ten x your business overnight. No it’s not. However it’s one of those healthy maintenance things that you should have running just on autopilot. And so if I’m looking as a CEO to hire somebody that’s going to be focused on growth and maybe new product development or TikTok shop or, you know, off Amazon advertising, things like that. I’m going to go hire that person first rather than going and trying to hire and train a VA, because the amount of time I’m going to spend investing in them, is just not as worth it.

Josh Hadley 00:45:26  And I’m not doing this as like a pitch to say like, oh, TraceFuse everything. I’m saying that as like as a business owner, there are certain things that you should invest your time in to go figure it out. And then there are other things that you should hand off to other people. And this is a really good example of one of those that’s like, use a subject matter expert. There’s no like I you’ve sacrificed two years just to figure it out yourself. Me as a brand owner, I’m not trying to, unlock. How do I remove negative reviews for other sellers? So that’d be a waste of two years. If it takes me two years with my VA to go figure that out.

Shane Barker 00:46:06  That is really, really key. And once again, even if it’s not reviews, I mean, you as you know, as a seller, if you’re a CEO of a brand, you really have to figure out where you’re going to spend your time. Right. And where is the best place to spend that time? And I can tell you if your thing is, if you want to be in the weeds and be the roadblock, and you want to be in the middle of everything, it’s going to be very hard to scale because I’ve been that person.

Shane Barker 00:46:26  I’ve been, oh, everything runs through me. And then all of a sudden I’m the roadblock, which I’m stopping the growth of my company. This is for a past company that I had. So what if you have to look at what I tell people when I used to do consulting is like, hey, go take a look at the 50 things you do on a daily basis. Figure out where you make your money, right. And figure out where are the things that you want to focus on. So give you an example. If I go and do a speaking engagement list I’m going to do it in India. I have I have a team that can go and negotiate the terms. And you know, if I train them up to do that, I have to show up to speak, right? But guess what? That’s a great use of my time. If I go out there and I speak for an hour, what is the impact of that? Right. That’s where I should be. But if I, if I spend ten hours negotiating, going back and forth, that’s not where I should be.

Shane Barker 00:47:06  Right. I should be out there educating people and showing people how to build a better business and be able to help them. And so you’ve got to think about that yourself. If you spend one hour on business development a day and you spend 12 hours on, you know, being a fireman and putting the fires out, you’re not you’re not going to grow, right? You’re busy. Right? That’s awesome. You’re busy, but you’re not really busy, right? You’re I mean, going and watching videos on YouTube is not busy, right? Like that’s you did something, but that means you weren’t doing you weren’t putting allocating your time in the right place. So I tell people, hey, you charge 250 an hour. Okay, great. Then you should be working for eight hours and trying to do as much of that as possible while everybody else can do this other stuff. Posting on social media, you can use AI sending out your emails. Figure out all this stuff that drives the people in.

Shane Barker 00:47:48  And then what I need to be doing is sitting here and talking with the customers, right? That’s where I make my money, and that’s where I can help educate people on what we’ve got going on. So once you’ve built a cycle like that where once again, this everything comes in, I’m going to maximize my time because once again, I used to only work for one hour a day on actual business development. Now I do all my own sales meetings and I have an amazing team. I’m not just saying that because they’re probably going to listen to this. My team is really amazing and they take care of all these other things, so I don’t have to worry about that, right? This it’s called delegation, folks. Make sure you take a look at it. And it doesn’t mean because you’re delegating with somebody doesn’t mean you need to spend $100,000 on it. You can delegate little things here and there, build trust, and then you can eventually build out an amazing team. But whether it’s reviews or anything, figure out what you can outsource, what makes sense to you, and if financially, if you’re making enough money to do that, great.

Shane Barker 00:48:35  Do that. If not, you can go and figure it out, get enough knowledge, and then hire somebody to do that. But figure out where you make your money and you want to focus on that.

Josh Hadley 00:48:43  Really well put. My third and final action item for our listeners is to focus on your products. Because I’m a big believer that the review negative review removal is just kind of like, hey, it’s it’s necessary maintenance, but that should not be your strategy as to how you’re going to get 4.54.8 star listings on Amazon. That’s kind of like you’re doing damage control and you can help like mitigate, like whether you’re getting attacked by a competitor or something like that. Cool. Like that’s fine. But like the hard work starts from the product R&D side and making sure you actually put together a product listing that is solid, the product actually serves the customer’s need, because I think you’ve probably heard it more times than not. Like, hey, can you work miracles on my products? Like, dude, your product sucks.

Josh Hadley 00:49:39  That’s why it’s at three stars I don’t like. I can remove the some of these negative reviews, but like, what’s the point? Go start like go get a new product.

Shane Barker 00:49:49  Yeah, yeah. And we’ve we’ve had to tell people that and say, hey, listen like I don’t, you know, as much as if you just want to spend money blindly, you can do that. But I think there’s a bigger issue here, right. Like and I can go and remove some reviews, but if you need me to remove 50 in a small amount of time. That’s just not going to happen. And if you need miracles, I’m not a miracle worker, right? We have certain guidelines and things that we have to do to stay compliant, and we’re going to make sure that we do that. But like anything, you know, you want to make sure that you you have a plan. You’re figuring out what you need to do. And then once again, divide and conquer. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:50:19  As we wrap things up, Shane, I have my three lightning round questions for you.

Josh Hadley 00:50:24  So number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Shane Barker 00:50:29  Man it’s funny. So there’s there’s actually quite a few books that I, that I’m like a big fan of, Think and Grow Rich. I know it was like a kind of a staple. I read that every year because I it’s crazy that it was written, I don’t even know, 80 years ago or whatever it was, and that it’s still applicable. And there’s still so many things. I mean, I have about three books that I read, 3 to 4 books that I read every year, because every time I it’s like watching a TV show, you’re like, oh, I didn’t see that the first time. And so there’s three. That main one is obviously Think and Grow Rich, which is is just a no brainer. I had my son read it as well, and he’s in commercial real estate, which I’m very proud of. But he, It’s one of those things. I think it’s just one of those books that’s.

Shane Barker 00:51:03  I mean, it just seems to be, you know, timeless. It’s one of those things. You just read it and it’s like, man, that’s that’s insane. I didn’t catch that the first time, but now it’s applicable to my business. Let’s go and mark that down. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:51:14  that is definitely one of the timeless principle books that, like, every time you read it, you’re in a different state of mind. Yeah. And you pick up different things based on, you know, the context that you’re living in. So great recommendation. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool you’ve been using and how have you been using it.

Shane Barker 00:51:32  Oh good old AI. Yeah. We I mean, outside of trade shoes, which I’m a pretty big fan of, you know, loom has been something that we’ve used. I, I was up early, early, early on loom user because I would, you know, I’d write these big old long dissertations on what I want change for the website and all this kind of stuff, and then I’d read it in the morning and go, no wonder they didn’t know what they were doing.

Shane Barker 00:51:53  You know, because I’m, I’m apparently something was going on last night. I wrote a weird stuff. But anyways, I would the video side of things I think is, you know, that’s mainly on video now. They have AI and all the other stuff. Phantom has been another one that’s great for, you know, being able to go because I do I mean, last year I did 1100 demo meetings with free shoes. I mean, so that’s about how many we do and be able to have that information at the end of it and kind of, hey, what are the next steps and everything? So, you know, obviously AI is constantly changing and there’s new things, and I have Claude and all the other things that go with that and things that you can go and run, you know, AI, you can run your SEO through and all these types of things. Of course, you have to make sure that the information is correct and hallucination is is a thing. But I would have to say so phantom and I would say I have to lume.

Shane Barker 00:52:33  Those are some ones that we’ve we’ve really, really enjoyed from it from an AI perspective.

Josh Hadley 00:52:38  Very cool. Final question for you. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space? Could even be a brand owner that you think other people should be following and why?

Shane Barker 00:52:48  Yeah. So, you know, it’s it’s funny. So I got some good buddies in mine over at Covert Ops that have been doing some really, really cool stuff with some really big agencies that were kind of like, I don’t know if there’s any room for improvement. I, I’ve been watching those guys for a long time. They have a long, long history in the, in, in the digital space. Obviously they jumped into Amazon and they’ve been doing some really, really big things. I mean, I have we have a crazy amount of partners that we work with. So there’s a lot of them that are doing some amazing things. But Covert Ops is doing just some pretty crazy stuff that when I read it, I go, man, I, I didn’t even think about that.

Shane Barker 00:53:20  So, you know, it’s always nice to I always want to be the dumbest person in the room. That’s always my goal. So I try to put, you know, partner and work with people that are smarter than me so I can learn stuff in the Amazon space and refer the right types of people to the right types of customers.

Josh Hadley 00:53:33  Wow. Great recommendation. All right, Shane, if people have been jamming, listen to this episode. They’re like, yeah, I would like to get a few reviews removed or they want to pick your brain. Where’s the best place people could reach out to you? I also think you put together a little special offer for our listeners as well.

Shane Barker 00:53:51  Yeah, absolutely. So you guys, anybody can go over to LinkedIn, just look up Shane Barker. I’m doing. I think last month we did like 1.3 million impressions on LinkedIn. So we’re very, very active there talking about review stuff. We’re obviously talking about updates on Amazon. We have a great newsletter as well that you can sign up with.

Shane Barker 00:54:08  It’s not just review based stuff, it’s anything happened in the Amazon space that they can go and take a look at there. And yet we do have a special offer. So really anybody that reaches out to us and talks about hearing about us on the on the program, we’re actually going to be able to we’re going to get rid of the onboarding fee. So we have a $250 onboarding fee. And so what we’re going to knock that down to is a dollar. So we’re going to go ahead and knock that down. You guys don’t have to pay an onboarding fee. Just say I heard you on Josh’s podcast. You have to give me a secret handshake and then you’re going to have to. I’m just kidding. No secret handshakes because it’ll be on zoom, so it’ll be kind of awkward. But yeah, reach out to us at any point and go in and take a look at the Amazon review checker. Try it yourself first. And if you said, hey, I don’t want any part of that, man, I got a million other things to focus on.

Shane Barker 00:54:50  Reach out to us. You can go over to TraceFuse AI once again, reach out to us, and we’re we’re here to help. I’ll also give you guys my email address if you guys want. It is Shane. That’s S h a n e at TraceFuse that’s TraceFuse.

Josh Hadley 00:55:06  Easy enough. Now I’m, that’s going to be my new, spam whenever I go sign up for the new raffle. You know, drawing at the carnival.

Shane Barker 00:55:14  Dude, I hope we win. I love carnivals. Yeah, let.

Josh Hadley 00:55:17  Me.

Shane Barker 00:55:17  Know.

Josh Hadley 00:55:17  Let me know.

Shane Barker 00:55:18  If I win. Yep, yeah, I will. I’m gonna invite you. Of course. Fly my plane out, that I don’t have to pick you up and you can come out to the carnival.

Josh Hadley 00:55:25  Perfect. Well, Shane, this has been a lot of fun. And, we’ll also leave that link, for that referral code in the show notes to make it easy for you guys to get that discount. So, Shane, thank you again for your time and your wealth and wisdom that you shared with us today.

Shane Barker 00:55:39  All right. Thanks for having me. Josh, this was awesome.

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