Removing Negative Reviews with Danan Coleman

hi guys and welcome to another YouTube video on Amazonia PPC YouTube channel for this video we have a really special guest it's Dana and he's going to talk about the review management and provide a framework how we can actually improve our reviews so Dan and welcome tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do sure thanks Igor I appreciate you having me on the podcast um so uh I've been a seller for 14 years on Amazon I've been in the software and service space Amazon sellers for about six years now uh six years this year and um one of my passions is helping Brands really helping anybody actually um but in in this space helping Brands and there is no more effective way to help a brand get their sales up and their rating up by removing negative reviews nobody's ever talked about that before right uh we all want to get more posit reviews and Amazon as you well know has really clamped down on what we're able to do about that yeah and reviews are really sensitive topic I feel like people are scared even to talk about it what's allowed what's not so yeah yeah yeah yeah so I'll start off by saying everything that I'm going to go over is white hat I don't do any black hat stuff I'm I've never been a black hat person gry hat probably I won't admit that publicly yeah I'm really glad to hear that because I people are attracted to to black hat and gray hat tactics just uh for obvious reasons but I'm I'm really glad that you follow those those rules and yeah I'm really eager to to find out more and learn about it because I'm my knowledge about reviews is really really low so I'm looking forward to what you can share us yeah cool so if you if you want I've got a presentation I can go ahead and present right now if you'd like awesome I think I gave you the yeah access please go ahead so you should be seeing my screen now yes yes okay awesome all right that's good deal um all right so this is about protecting your brand and this is a framework for Amazon review management so my name is Dan and Coleman I started selling with my wife in 20110 we've done Arbitrage we've done private label we've done handmade we've done wholesale and our most effective model to date is exclusivity to a manufacturers brand on Amazon uh I've also got six years as I mentioned before in the thirdparty service and software space for Amazon sellers and I've got a strong passion for helping people uh I not only help people in Amazon but I'm I'm FEMA certified for volunteer Disaster Response I'm a huge outdoors guy and oh I'm a certified Master Jaguar technician I don't even know why that's in there that's true but uh it's not relevant at all congratulations uh yeah thank you and if anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn for those of you listening there's a YouTube part of this um and I've got a QR code on the screen but uh let's go into what we're going to cover on this um so we're going to go over the harm that negative reviews can cause we're going to go over to and Community guidelines violations spotting black hat tactics and then tips on removing those reviews that are in violation sounds great so yeah and uh Igor please you know I I kind of just get on a roll but please interrupt me if you have any questions along the way yeah I will I'm I'm excited to to learn so I will no worries awesome thanks yeah so good um a lot of us know that your star ratings affect your star rating right that one's obvious but it goes well beyond that it affects your whole brand image and your reputation it also affects your BSR so if if you look if you track your BSR On Any Given as you'll see that it varies wildly throughout the day but there is an overall trend over days weeks months and years right so as your star rating goes down and this isn't always true but it's largely true your product ranking so your BSR tends to go down you get you start showing up less and less and lower and lower in the organic results which then in turn your conversion rate goes down and that can lead to even more PPC cost because you have to spend you have to drive more traffic for the same amount of sales because your uh conversion rates down so I'm going to go over in Greater detail the devastating effects of critical reviews on your brand and we're going to go over a few definitions first so first of all we're going to Define what's a rating and what's a review a rating is just a star rating right there's no text involved but a review is a written uh something written along with that star rating and a critical review as defined by Amazon is a written one two or three star review another little tidbit in this one is a this one's a tough one dropping from a 4.3 rating to a 4.2 rating can cost you as much as 50% of your sales uh I've heard from a couple of customers that it killed the product but the average is is 25 to 50% and um and the reason why is you lose that half star so you go from a a visual 4 and a half star down to a four star this one's a tough one as well it takes as many as 12 five-star reviews to overcome just a single one star which that math doesn't math to me but yeah it is what it is it's it's like I've seen it as low as seven to overcome a one star and I've seen it as high as 1520 somewhere in that range it's kind of hard to tell sometimes yeah but that 12 is even is even more in reality when we take into consideration how many people actually leave a review so how many sales actually land those 12 so it's yeah yeah exactly so if you know I don't have the exact number but was something like two or 3% of your purchases end up in actually having a a review written I think that's right so if you if you needed you know 10 more reviews you've got to get 200 Sales you know so what and then or you can do tactics to get reviews and what does that cost you what's it cost you to acquire 10 reviews you know so every review like the first you know there's another thing that's actually not in there that I need to cover and that is that your star rating is not purely a mathematical formula and Amazon tells you as much they take other things to into account like how recent was the review I think that's all about all they tell you but how recent was the review but I think it goes a lot further just like uh Google does it um you know what's the what's the quality of the review how many quality reviews does that account have that is written this review how often do they write reviews so you know how how regularly are they doing this and I and of course a bunch of other factors but um it it doesn't make sense though that there was a account in account they had two five stars one of them written one of them not uh two four stars not neither of them written so just ratings zero three stars uh one I think it was one two star written two star no it was zero two stars and then a single one star rating nothing written not a review and that product was rated at 3.8 so just that one critical rating took it from what should be about a 4.6 or 4.4 something like that all the way down to a 3.8 so that that was like absolute um I don't have any words to describe that so you can do neither so many good things uh on your listing on your products and something like that can really nail you down yeah for sure I I have a lot of words for that um but I won't say them so the point is is that every negative you review that you get on your product has a compounding effect on ultimately your conversion rate so let's go into some data on negative revieww removal I'm going to get into how you can identify and remove the reviews that violate Amazon's to so let's get into the identification part first so some of the common violations for reviews most common are cursing or foul language mentioning the price of an item uh mentioning a competitor blaming shipping or packaging suu so a lot we see a lot of arrived broken one star uh box was damaged product was damaged Etc and so they get these one star ratings for these these shipping issues um another one is used uh sold used sorry uh sold as new but it's used I think we've all had this problem before and even though Amazon says that you know you can tell them I want to recall my inventory I want you to destroy my inventory I've Got a Friend where uh that nearly bankrupt their business because Amazon graded a used swim diaper as new and sold it and there was basically poop in the diaper in the swim diaper so I used the products these products myself so like I don't know clearly someone at Amazon yeah someone at Amazon just didn't even open the box because it's just yeah anyhow um so defamation of the brand that's another big one um when it comes to hostile threatening or violent speech those are slam dunks right so Amazon is pretty hard on not allowing that sort of verbage to be used in reviews and here's an example of a couple of those these are real reviews that I I screenshotted probably I don't know maybe a month ago um I took the uh the Rebo sugar-free gummy bears because there's tens of thousands of reviews on that some of them are absolutely hilarious but you can see in these cases this one says gummies from hell go and die see you in hell abominable little bastards and so that that sort of stuff isn't allowed and you might wonder why is it there and we ask the same question that's why we exist we go we find this stuff and we help you get rid of it or in this case you go find it and you help you get rid of it so another really important aspect is the Integrity of the review so just so you guys know the purpose of reviews on Amazon is for the reviewer to provide information that will help the prospective customer make a buying decision that is the purpose of reviews to provide the information to help that buyer make a decision to either purchase or not so you need to when you're looking at your reviews if someone says uh you know gives a three star and it just says didn't work for me okay but but why what aspect of it um those are harder to get to get rid of but you can get rid of those so once again the Integrity of the reviews is super important well that's a that's a good uh example actually because I think everybody saw an example of those just didn't like it or whatever just short explanation without any details and just whatever two or three star reviews so so is there a chance to actually do something about it yes there is I mean wording right and yeah there are not nuances to death yeah so my recommendation is uh and I'll see if I can get the list for you to maybe post into into here but I've got a list I think it's like somewhere between 10 and 12 different policies on Amazon that goes into reviews and the Integrity of them what's in allowed what's not allowed and and what's a violation what's not a violation and uh I'll get into this a little bit later in this presentation but you you need to be educated when you are going to get these reviews removed because I assure you that the person that's looking at your case is not right so you have to educate them um yeah so I'll get into that a little bit later but uh igore if you would just remind me to provide you with the uh list of links I have I I'd be happy to provide that to you so we can put it into the documents you got it cool cool all right so next up is not a product review right it's got to actually be a product review in order for it to be a product review so if it's uh bad for the buyer experience it's bad for both you and Amazon so keep that in mind right so here's an example of not a product review again Gummy Bears and the title is I'd buy toilet paper and then they go into the fact that uh this is way less expensive than a particular medical procedure right clearly not a product review and I'm not entirely certain if this is true today but I'm not sure if you can use emojis in reviews anymore can't remember I know you can't use them in your listings anymore in your bullet points I'm not sure if you're allowed to use them in reviews I think that's actually covered in one of the policies that I'll give to you so here we go again with uh unsolicited medical advice this is a big one um I'm going to show you an example of this this says make sure you drink plenty of clean water to help this product work you should also look at magnesium levels and potassium deficiencies so this this is medical advice right uh and it's it also what I didn't highlight here is it said it's uh beneficial in controlling gout right and if you have problems with taking big Pharma poison right so this person look this is likely a legitimate review you know and but the fact is is that they are giving unsolicited medical advice so that's not allowed personal information Amazon will get rid of that at the drop of a hat uh it's not common what's that eigor that's smart the previous example about a medical advice that's really really smart that you obviously need to have a lot of knowledge about it what's aot what's not so that's where you guys coming yeah I mean we've gone through literally millions of reviews you know as as crazy as that is it is true we've gone through millions of reviews you are the one who should I I think you should have like a newsletter of the most hilarious reviews because I'm I'm literally trying not to laugh at these examples that you're showing just to keep it studious that's a good idea we so we do have a newsletter I think I'll add a section to it that that's hilarious reviews that's a great idea igore I Love It of the week I mean yeah love it I love it so remind me of that I will I will absolutely Implement that into our into like the bottom of our or maybe the top of our of our newsletter that'd be awesome so uh yeah Amazon's going to get rid of personal information reviews really fast return policy this is another big one this is borderline as big as the hey uh arrived damaged arrived broken right so when it comes to return policy Amazon is the one that sets that right and if you've got consumables if you've got uh let's let's just say you you buy a camping toilet right Amazon's not not going to let you return that that's like hazardous waste basically could be in there and so they just don't want to deal with that and they say no way right I I'm sure we've all met people that have had problems large enough with Amazon to maybe use a camping toilet and send it in used just to display their feelings but anyhow if there's a review where the person's super pissed off they paid $30 for this supplement or this item and they found out they can't return it well that's that's not the buyer's decision that's Amazon's decision therefore it's not a product review even as a matter of fact even if they did product uh seller feedback you can get that potentially removed as well that's not within the scope of what we do at this time but uh it's it's definitely a possibility yeah so let's go into black hat stuff right here is this is a recent customer within the last like 30 days or something like that on the Le hand side there is a five-star review and that's the picture that the client put up there on the right hand side you have a three star review and it's a screenshot of the picture from the fstar review on a mobile device right so it says it does con this review says it does contain uh formalin and which under the name of methylene glycol right okay fine so if you look closer at this review right it says the text within the review is not original it was copy pasted from content from a Google search on common names from from aldhy now my executive assistant Lindsay actually found this out absolutely genius but she found out that this is literally a copy paste from Google right and and so it's a copy of a screenshot of someone else's images image to leave a critical review utilizing copy pasted text from Google so if this isn't a fraudulent review then I don't know what is right well that's that's really smart yeah so here's some successfully removed reviews now at this point we're we're over 10,000 reviews removed for our customers probably maybe even over 12,000 at this point um but the top left one says it's shipping related and the review is really my production delayed and arrived broken I'm very upset we got that removed next one is FBA related ripoff sent me a 0.15 ounce sample size when I ordered a 2 ounce which is three times the price right that's an FBA issue granted it's possible for Brands to accidentally send in the wrong inventory but that's not one of these cases right Amazon just messed up and then we've got uh not a product review and the review is eh it worked in a way right so that's that example I kind of it didn't work for me right and that's all that you say and then unsolicited medical advice this product made my irritation bump worse and I had an allergic reaction on my nose from it from this product don't buy it right so all types of reviews can get removed now let's go into a few things that you need to know this these These are details if you're ever going to pay attention to all the words I keep saying this sections probably the most important so most sellers have a 1% or less success uccess rate at removing negative reviews but you have to understand that persistence is key on this and just for reference and and that's not I'm not here to like try and sell everyone on Trace views but Trace views has a 5 to 15% removal rate of all of your critical reviews right Fair full disclosure I would not expect you to have that same results we have just unbelievable amounts of data and processes in place but if you get even close to that you are doing extraordinarily well and I just want everyone to know that [Music] most 10% that's nothing but in reality it's really hard to get even to that number oh yeah for sure I mean in reality most sellers can't even get remove reviews removed no matter how much they violate the community guidelines there's there's some Wild reviews out there where it's it has to be an automated response from Amazon they don't actually look you know yeah so um next thing you need to know is that most requests for removal are sent with too much emotion you need to keep the emotion out keep to the facts and I I'm going to like I'm going to hit this hard right because like I said I'm an Amazon Seller too and when I I've had I did campling blanket blankets for a while that was one of my only white labels private labels um and I had a number of people return my blankets filthy with mud and dog hair and all that stuff and they returned it as it arrived damaged but it was so obvious that they bought the product went camping with it let their dogs sleep on it got it all dirty and they were done camp with this one camping trip and then they just returned it and marked it as damaged right right so anyhow you can imagine that I had some Choice words [Music] yeah yeah completely understand it reminded me of of an advice that uh former manager while I was working in corporation gave me is that when you are so pissed off that you want to write an emotional email never send it out because it's GNA be nonsense just write an email save it as draft close your laptop go for a walk then return to it and then when you read it you're gonna be shocked by what you wanted to include in the email because it's not business related just emotions it's the same way absolutely I so that's so interesting and and that's awesome that you got that advice because my wife had to give me that same advice and so I would write the emails and then I would have her check it and more times than one all that was left from the original em email that I wrote was dear person comma new paragraph and then she wrote the rest from there because I I will say that uh I can get quite heated when I feel like I've been wronged by somebody and so that's and you know and I know this and and I think in in our hearts we all know this but like attacking somebody verbally any in any way attacking somebody is just it's never the right solution right good communic ation solves all things eventually right and prevents so many bad things oh yes absolutely and you know this is a this is a lesson that I have to you know constantly be reminded of and and especially with three kids right so I've got three daughters they're six four and two and you tell the kid like hey go go pick up your toys right and they don't do it it never never Works to yell at them it just makes them upset and then you feel terrible because now you've made your daughter cry I'm talking about me of course right it liter it just never works right so what what I found does work is good communication and good control but anyhow this isn't a parenting uh thing or or marriage counseling so let's get into the next things I got two boys so I feel you no worries yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you've got boys I mean my girls I I've come to find that uh that girls are apparently are much easier to deal with at least in the beginning stages than than boys are because as boys we go crazy don't we yeah and I have a perfect example uh for comparison purposes my my my brother four daughters and once they when when they came to Be Our Guest uh they were in a room and it was quiet and I was like there are four kids they they were just sitting on the on on the floor writing and like crayons all over the place but they were absolutely quiet imagine four boys in one room oh no it'd be Mayhem absolute Mayhem yeah so I I I understand what you what you're saying completely so yeah yeah perfect off topic for a for parents yeah perfect all right cool so um next thing is and this is super important Amazon cares about Amazon and Amazon cares about their customers so those are the two things that Amazon cares about they don't care about you you know it's nothing personal it's just a fact right so your Viewpoint needs to be how does this review affect the Amazon Customer how does it affect Amazon right so keep that in mind when you're looking at reviews and then you need to read the community guidelines particularly the section called what's not allowed and you need to read it over and over and over again and you need to reference it regularly when you're trying to get a review removed because you're going to be referencing that uh the community guidelines in the emails or in the case that you are filing so here are some tips to increase your success rate file cases with factual supporting data keep all the emotion out of it facts only you are a lawyer you are completely disconnected from this situation you do do not really care your the client only hired you to handle it keep all emotion out reference the terms of service and Community guidelines and tell the person the in the case tell the person that's reading this how it violate violates those guidelines right be persistent it's probably going to take more than one time right I firmly believe that Amazon basically automatically declines everything on the first try on the first notice because that probably eliminates 70% of their work right so this is what to include when you contact Amazon and for those of you that are looking at this in uh in the video take a screenshot of this and write this down for those of you that are just listening I'm going to list this out the as in question all right so you need to have the as in there you need the buyer name and you need the link to that that buyer's name to that buyer's account right you also need the review ID so if you go and you open up any review um well not any review quick little side thing here if you're on amazon.com and the review was left on amazon.com you can open up the review but reviews from other countries also display in there so if it's in another country that review won't be clickable you'll have to open up. co.uk or. de or wherever in order to access that review but the point is is that you'll need the link to that review ID which is in the link to the review you need the review title and body you need to tell the uh in the email tell the person at Amazon what is the type of violation there's a list of different ways that they can that there are uh ways for reviews to be in violation you need to indicate that and then you need to explain the in uh desired result which of course is that Amazon removes the review so again Amazon does not care about your emotional your emotions that I I'll read you two reviews so the the first one has emotional damage in it right emotional damage um this review is completely fake there is no way the buyer received a used product instead of a new one because we don't even sell refurbished items right that's quite emotional not non- emotional or less emotional would be this review violates Amazon's Community guidelines because it is about seller order or shipping feedback this brand does not sell used units and only ships new units in the FBA facilities right yeah more facts you're yeah exactly all right so here are the main takeaways a critical one two or three a critical review is a written one two or three story review and it affects your sales your conversion rate your BSR and many aspects of your brand reviews that may seem genuine and in fact even could be genuine are still potentially eligible for removal if they violate the community guidelines and then you can remove get reviews removed yourself with the right approach and with uh with persistence I think persistence is probably the most important uh part here so for those of you watching you can scan this QR code on on the uh screen here and there is a special off offer for anyone that is listening in and then for those of you that are just listening go to trace. Amazonia z n a and um honestly I I can't even remember what the special offer it is it's probably probably like a $500 credit towards your first two reviews removed nice that's good yeah but that's it well thank you Dan uh at the end they saved a very special question for you and the the presentation was awesome really um to me it sounds like this should be handled by the professionals okay I suppose there can be sellers that maybe would like to try themselves but uh for such a crucial task I would definitely recommend reaching out to you because it's it's something that should yeah I I I do hate that I have to agree with you to be perfectly honest like of course we want more customers more business to help more more people right but unfortunately yes that's true um we will have a better success rate than anybody that's why we have agencies that use our products for all of their customers it's like they they can't do it they've tried you know um the best I've ever heard is 3% and that was from a very large agency from someone who I really respect in the field so right um yeah it takes experience it it it takes experience but the there's like there's community help there's SE uh um Seller Support and there's brand registry but we've got about 10 other teams that we work with that are like we don't we don't put out there who it is that we work with because then if we did that Amazon would just shut them down which they've done before right right yeah so the last question I have before we end this podcast is that uh can you give us a few examples on what are some of the black hat tactics that somebody could use and our is using against the things that's what I don't know actually so you saw you showed us one example of that like fake review of the image of the the actual review but yeah what is it that we should be let's say afraid of and be uh on attention uh about certain behaviors that we how to even uh is there a way to spot a black hat review or any anything that you can share along those lines yeah there's a couple ways so number one is if you think that a review is suspicious investigate the buyer's account most of the time not all the time they will show the last 16 reviews that that account has done so we see things like uh and actually I think I'll put it I'll put this in the chat for you real quick and so that you can see this this is uh an account that only did one star reviews right so for those of you that aren't that aren't able to see this and eigor if you want to share your screen on this that that would be interesting um but there are in the screenshot there are 12 reviews every single one of them says do not buy as the title oh and then and oh it was do not don't waste your money that's what it was and so if you look at the Snippets from all the reviews almost every single one of them says dirty and ripped ripped and dirty arrived broken and dirty it's like you'd think that Amazon was being fulfilled from a dirt lot and they were using shovels to put things into the into the boxes you know automated one like yeah I I mean honestly chat GPT would do a much better job I would think but uh yeah this is just one account we we have so far and the Our intention is to get with the FTC on this we've isolated what we believe are 1,400 just from our customers mind you 1,400 fraudulent accounts that's on the first pass and that's only from reviews that have on our customers right so and each one of those accounts sometimes there's just one but sometimes they do multiples um but there's the let me just list out a few ways to look to locate black hat stuff and and it takes some work right so number one is do you have a sudden spike in the number of critical reviews that lead to only exactly moving down a star rating right yeah uh whereas you might get one one star review per day if you get 18 in a day and then you're straight back down to one star investigate every single one of those of those buyer accounts they're probably in some way Associated to each other whether that is uh just that they all well here what you'll see is that they they all those reviews will come in at once and in many cases those buyer accounts have also left critical reviews on the exactly same other products right there's yeah I'm just sorry to that's great I'm just thinking for the brands out there with with high volumes that's a lot of manual work I would say so if there's no team member to do to do that then it's actually uh those um negative reviews malicious negative reviews by by a blackhead tactic can really get away without noticing if you have so many reviews by day so yeah yeah yeah exactly and you know this this is why we exist like we we've built software to when when we get a customer we not only download their reviews but we download all the reviews that those reviewers have left on all the other products because that's how we you know look for this black hat stuff so spikes in your critical review account uh account reviews that use the exact same images or the exact same titles and B uh and and um and then reviewers that have left let's say a one star on your product let's say you sell uh airpods right so they they left a one star on airpods they left a one star on some Bose things they left a one star on some Sellar candy stuffs and then a five star on some noname brand right that's pretty yeah no yeah thank you very much Dan it was a pleasure talking to you I learned so many things and I'm sure that everybody watching is going to feel the same it was an absolute pleasure and I'm looking forward to conect with you in the future also thanks youor