If you're selling on Amazon, you're playing defense every single day. Or you should be. Negative reviews can tank your rankings overnight, and dozens of hidden listing issues are quietly sabotaging your sales while you sleep. In this eye-opening episode, Danan Coleman, CEO and founder of Ecom Triage and host of the Ecom Growth Show, reveals the underground world of Amazon review manipulation and the critical monitoring strategies that separate thriving brands from those that struggle. From detecting fraudulent review patterns to catching orphaned ASINs before they cost you thousands, Danan shares the insider knowledge that most sellers never learn until it's too late.

Key Topics & Insights:

• The True Impact of Negative Reviews - Why dropping from a 4.3 to 4.2 star rating can cause a 750% shift in BSR and 25-50% reduction in sales overnight, plus how to identify which negative reviews actually violate Amazon's guidelines
• The Review Removal Game Plan - How to use Amazon's community guidelines to your advantage, the specific patterns that indicate fraudulent reviews, and why Danan's free ReviewGPT tool can instantly tell you if a review is removable (with templates to send to Amazon)
• Detecting Review Manipulation - The telltale signs of fake negative reviews, including suspicious reviewer patterns and the "batch attack" method competitors use to tank your ratings
• Critical Listing Monitoring - The "orphaned ASIN" problem that can kill individual product variants overnight, split review issues that destroy conversion rates, and why products sometimes get mysteriously recategorized into completely wrong sections
• The Amazon Merchandising Mindset - Why you need to think like a physical store merchandiser, constantly ensuring your products are on the right "shelf," facing forward, and visible to shoppers in the right category
• Advanced Catalog Defense - How dimensional weight changes can secretly increase your fees, image monitoring strategies that prevent conversion killers, and why change logs are essential for big brands and agencies managing multiple ASINs

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducting Danan Coleman

(03:40) Understanding the Impact of Negative Reviews

(08:07) Amazon Guidelines and Best Practices for Review Removal

(14:09) Identifying Defamatory Reviews

(19:20) Time Decay to Reviews

(24:47) Navigating Amazon’s Review System

(30:56) Monitoring Product Visibility and Critical Issues

(40:43) Tools for Managing Amazon Listings

(42:26) Exploring Catalog Defender

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Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an amazing guest and we are talking about a hot topic, a very useful, important topic. Two topics actually. We're talking about negative reviews on Amazon. If you're a seller on Amazon or you're building a brand, you're trying to grow on Amazon, you got to be thinking about negative reviews. What do we do? Do we do anything? When do we take action? Things like that. So we're going to dig into that. Plus, what are all the critical things you need to be monitoring with your listings to make sure you're showing up on the right digital shelf consistently and making sure you're able to make sales without this sabotaging your success and you're missing out on opportunities. So my guest today is Danon Coleman. He is the CEO and founder of e-Comm Triage. He's also the host of the e-Comm Growth Show. I was just on that podcast. It's a great one. And so with that, Dana, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going?

Danan Coleman:

Thanks Brett. Yeah, thanks for having me here. And it's going great. Thank you for asking. Yeah, so host of the e-comm growth show founder e-comm Triage. As you can tell, it's e-comm related. So yeah, man. And yes, of course, I'm on your show now. So I would say, yeah, our episode was definitely the best episode I did.

Brett Curry:

Best episode in the history of e-commerce evolution right here, and you are here to listen to it, so it's amazing, man. And we were just talking, we met in Austin, Texas, over tacos, unintentionally. I was speaking at amazing selling machines, or shoot, what's it called? Seller con silicon. They put on my a SM, but it's called Silicon. So I was speaking there, I went to grab a taco. We were sitting at the bar and I was like, Hey, I think I know you. And so we officially met and hung out there.

Brett Curry:

And

Brett Curry:

I will say, just a quick plug for Austin, I think there are two parts of the country that have the best tacos, Southern California, amazing fish tacos and other tacos. And then Austin, Texas, man can't beat either of those locations as far as tacos go.

Danan Coleman:

Yep. Yeah, I actually grew up in southern California, so Austin had being known for having great tacos. They got taco carts all over the place. It's like, I don't know, man, as

Brett Curry:

It SoCal native. Were you skeptical? Were you like, I don't think so. Austin, Texas. What you doing here?

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, because the tacos that I ate were made by my buddies, Aita. Their grandma's made the tacos. Nothing will ever beat that. Nothing beats grandma's

Brett Curry:

100%. And I've got a few spots that are my favorites. One in San Diego called Taco Sand, and in the back there's usually maybe an abuelita back there. She's got the ball of mash, corn mash, she runs it to the thing to flatten the tortilla, throws it on the griddle right there. I mean, there's no way you're going to get a better tortilla than Matt. Not possible. No. So yeah, so anyway, so we met serendipitously over tacos, which is awesome. And they got to know each other. We both at Seller Summit in Fort Lauderdale with our mutual friend Steve Chu and Terry ach. And so yeah, man, excited to dive in. Obviously I'm a huge, huge fan of Amazon. We built our Amazon practice in 2016, so decade ish. And I'm extremely bullish on the future of Amazon. And whether it's a brand that was born on Amazon or it's a brand that's just growing on Amazon, I think it's going to be relevant for this foreseeable future. But there's some issues there. It's not all sunshine and roses, it's not all easy. And there's lots of stuff to keep an eye on. And so I know you've got a really unique perspective on negative reviews. How do you handle it? How do you remove them if you can remove 'em, things like that.

And so maybe before we dive into that, Dana, what would be kind of interesting is tell us about negative reviews. Obviously we know they're not good, but put some context around that. Are negative reviews really bad? Are they all bad and how bad are they type of thing.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah. Alright, cool. So let's look at the good side of negative reviews first. Negative reviews, as long as they're legitimate, tell you what you need to fix with your product. So that's the first thing. It's feedback, right? It's feedback.

Brett Curry:

The legitimate ones

Danan Coleman:

Feedback. Yes, exactly. So where they're bad is when they're not product feedback,

They shouldn't be there. So, or they're just unhelpful. Product sucks, didn't like it. I see those reviews all the time, all the time. Didn't like it didn't work for me. That's the title, that's the body that's completely unhelpful. It maybe it's legitimate, but it's not helpful to anybody. So that's the good side is that if you actually get constructive feedback, you can do something with that. You can repair something, it can be indicative of a serious problem that you need to fix. On the flip side, a lot of, because reviews are so critical to the psyche of a buyer that could be manipulated, that's where we get into the bad side of things. So if you can manipulate the product rating, then you can so manipulate the placement and therefore the sales of a product. Totally. So that's where it gets on. Awesome. That's what I deal with. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. It's so interesting, man. And anybody that's tried to launch a product on Amazon, especially if you're launching in a competitive space or we had a client, I still have this client worked with 'em for years and years, boom, by Cindy Joseph or Boom Beauty now, but they grew for years not on Amazon. So they grew through meta ads and YouTube ads and Google ads and things like that. And so then we helped them launch on Amazon. It was one of our best case studies went from zero in sales to 6 million the first year, but they had all this pent up demand, a lot of people seeing the brand in other places. And so we found those that people were going to Amazon couldn't find, boom there, and a fair number of them were just finding a similar product. So we had these sellers who were kind of squatting on the brand name, and once we launched, boom, all hell broke loose with these sellers.

And as you can imagine, they're like, we got to protect our territory. We don't want to miss out on these sales. So we got all kinds of spammy bad reviews we had to fight through. I mean, then we started getting real reviews from real customers and everything's growing and going fine. But sure, I mean, it's the equivalent to your point, you get a seller rating down to a certain point kind of drops off the shelf. It's kind of the equivalent of, Hey, I'm going to go to the supermarket and just hide all my competitors' products. I'm going to push 'em to the back or put 'em on the floor or something, put a big sign in front of them so no one can see it. And so yeah, there's some nefarious things going on with bad reviews, that's for sure. So talk to us about what do we do then? Obviously we never like to see a negative review. I'm the same. I'm a business owner, I feel the same way. Whether it's my agency or a product I'm involved with or I've got some Airbnbs. So I'm thinking about going into

Danan Coleman:

Airbnb actually

Brett Curry:

And doing negative

Danan Coleman:

Review removal there.

Brett Curry:

Well, I think that'd be a great idea. I think that'd be an awesome idea. I would buy your service if you did that. So if it's an unhelpful review, that's not good for us. But when should we take action? When should we be like, I got to get this thing removed?

Danan Coleman:

Okay, so let me start off by saying I can shortcut the whole, the answer to that question. Is it okay if I give them the link to the, okay, please. Alright, if I remember correctly, it's review gpt dot eCom triage.com. I hope I'm right about that. Hold on. Review gpt dot eCom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. So review gt dot eCom triage.com. So I built this GPT, so you don't have to bother asking that question. You just put the review in there and the GPT comes back to you and says, yeah, this is it. This is noncompliant, this is why it's noncompliant, and here's a template to send to Amazon requesting removal of that review. That's

Brett Curry:

Amazing.

Danan Coleman:

But don't just trust my GPT because GPTs can be wrong, AI can be wrong. It often is or has some aspect of it that's not correct. So here's what you need to know. Your Bible, your reference that you go to determine if a review is noncompliant is Amazon's community guidelines. And you can just search that on Google and you'll get right to it. It's a public document. There's a section in there called What's Not Allowed, and then it goes over a list of what's not allowed. Now there are about nine or 10 other policies, both public facing and behind Seller Central and in responses that I've found from Amazon Direct in the forums that I've trained this GPT on. So it has far more than the community guidelines, but no matter what, that's your initial reference. So familiarize yourself with the what's not allowed section of the community guidelines. And that is where what you're going to quote, if at all, when you are contacting Amazon requesting a review removal. So right off the bat though, these are the things you want to look for. Is it shipping or FBA related? Is there personal information in there? Is it defamatory in some way? And fairly often, is it just not a product review at all? Right?

This product sucks. I hate my life title and body. And there was, oh, another big one is unsolicited medical advice.

So that's kind of the list, the list of the biggest offenders and the most common offenders in the space in the review space and have the greatest possibility of being removed. Now I know every listener's response right now is, yeah, cool. I know, and I tried that and it didn't work. So first things first, when you see that negative review, like, ah, I hate this person. This is why that review is wrong. You need to remove all emotion when communication regarding that review. And with Amazon, no emotion whatsoever. They hire robots anyhow that read from scripts. So it doesn't, your emotions literally means nothing to them. So keep all emotion out of it. That's super important. The next thing is stick to the facts. Keep it short. Remember that the person that is looking at the person, if it gets to a person, the person that's looking at your case is probably English as a second language.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, good

Danan Coleman:

Point. Yeah, you don't want to go, this is ubiquitously unacceptably and it's paramount, therefore henceforth at Alia, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to use terms like that. Keep it super simple English and then keep it short. No stories.

Brett Curry:

We might be tempted. We're thinking like, Hey, if I can just convince someone at Amazon that I'm so great, so lemme tell you the origin story of my product. This was my grandmother's recipe, or this was that you're telling, you're laying at this whole emotional story like you're testifying before a jury in court. That's not it. It's either going to be someone overseas, there's going to be a robot anyway, keep it short, just the facts. That's it.

Danan Coleman:

And then you have to tell 'em what to do. So the solution is remove this review. If you don't do that, they go, all right, cool. It's noncompliant. So there's some sort of internal escalation process that Amazon has that I don't know how it works. And neither does anybody that I've ever spoken to at Amazon.

So when it comes to me removing reviews, my rate of review removal is somewhere between five and 10%. It can be higher, but five to 10% of the written reviews. But I've spoken, I've back and forth a lot of emails with a lot of different contacts at Amazon. Literally nobody knows where these go and who removes the reviews. So Amazon apparently keeps that super secret. Even in brand registry, every case that gets submitted through brand registry, 100% of them are transferred and there's no response ever again. There's no response anyhow. It just gets transferred and nobody at brand registry knows where they go either.

Brett Curry:

Interesting, really, really keeping that arms length distance and then some, wow, okay. So there's some serious protections there and some secrecy kind of makes sense. I mean, it's such an important part of the Amazon ecosystem. It's great for buyers. We all go there. We want to see the review before we buy something. It's important for sellers. And because of that, it's a place where lots of manipulation takes place. Lots of

Brett Curry:

Definitely

Brett Curry:

Dirty deeds happen there. So give me some examples or some parameters. Obviously we can lean into your GPT, which sounds like an amazing solution.

Danan Coleman:

No need. It's there. They can just

Brett Curry:

Use it

Danan Coleman:

Whenever they want.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome. When should we say something is when can we begin to think something is defamatory versus just a bad review? This is what I look for

Danan Coleman:

Is are they making really alarming statements, alarming statements will set off some sort of trigger inside of Amazon, potentially. That's what they're trying to do.

Brett Curry:

Got it.

Danan Coleman:

So if this were a webinar right now, I'd share my screen of a screenshot that I took. So I think I already showed you one that shows you the difference of going between a 4.2 and a 4.3 star rating. So this person saw a, let's see, what would it be? A one 750% decrease in their BSR, which is an improvement. Wow. Right?

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So it's going from a 4.3 to a 4.2. Say that one more time. What was the reduction in bsr?

Danan Coleman:

So sorry, this was going from a four two to a four three is what I meant to say. So they

Brett Curry:

Sold Got it, got it, got it. Got,

Danan Coleman:

Yeah. So they went from around 1500 to two 50 on BSR 1500 is already an incredible BSR. And every client that I've had, I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of brands, anyone that goes from a four, three to a four, two Cs, roughly somewhere between 25 to 50% reduction in sales overnight. Wow, wow, wow. But what I was going to say is when it comes to defamation, there was, I'd show you a screenshot. There's somebody that went to a bunch of different snorkels and said, killed my friends. That's the title, killed my friends danger. CO2 buildup might kill you. And that's on about five different products. So that could be considered product defamation. Now, that's an extreme example, but a lot of times what I see is, let's take a dog supplement, gave this to my dog. There was throw up everywhere they weren't eating and it was clearly super dangerous. So I didn't use it again. Right. Well, I guess it's not impossible, but if you see only three of those or two of those reviews and everything else is good, and the rest are like three stars, those are baloney because a one star review, a written one star review holds roughly the same weight as about ten five stars. Wow. It's backwards.

Backwards.

Brett Curry:

But

Danan Coleman:

Anyhow, so those are some of the things you should look for. And unsolicited medical advice in those cases, like a pet supplement said, yeah, my vet said that these ingredients aren't good. Well, alright, so this is Uncle Sam told Sally and nefarious this, that and the other, and therefore one star, these products aren't good. So that would be another example of unsolicited medical advice, even though it's a supplement for dogs.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. What about, and the next, we had a skin moisturizer client and it was getting attacked by competitors we believed, but one of them was caused a rash. Oh yeah. And we're like, well, this doesn't really cause rashes. We've never had that feedback from a single person ever. It's like your bottled water gave me a rash. Okay. So I

Danan Coleman:

Actually get those removed on the regular.

Brett Curry:

Do you really? Okay.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah. Yeah. I've got quite a few. It's beauty supplements, beauty clients. I actually get those removed regularly. It's also a crapshoot though, whether or not it gets removed depending on how they wrote it. So yeah, I always try to get those removed. Now also, there could be a brand, and there have been brands that come to me and they go, yeah, we've got a whole bunch of one stars. And I look, I'm like, all these one stars say that this broke. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we had a problem. I'm not going to help you. That's a legitimate problem with your product. It's like, don't

Brett Curry:

Come to me once you fix your

Danan Coleman:

Product. Yes,

Brett Curry:

Yes. Those are legitimate one star reviews. Sorry. Absolutely. You got a product problem, not a review problem. Yeah,

Danan Coleman:

Absolutely. And I have quite a few people tell me, come to me that have this. And I say, look, I'm not going to go after reviews that are legit cool. You've fixed your product. That's wonderful. But Amazon's not going to remove that review anyhow because it is fully legit.

Brett Curry:

And

Danan Coleman:

You have a density period and a time period where they can go, Hey, you shipped in an order at this time. I don't think they go this deep, but you shipped in an order at this time. You started getting a bunch of one-star reviews. You shipped in an order at this time, and you stopped getting those reviews. Cool. You had a legitimate product issue. You fixed it. Good job. Good on you. Well, that's why there is a time decay to reviews right now.

Brett Curry:

Can you explain that? What is the time decay to reviews? What does that look like?

Danan Coleman:

Okay. Yeah. So I'm actually glad you asked me this because this goes into much deeper than just time decay, but most of us assume that the review, the rating is a mathematical formula. It is far, far from it. So there are so many other factors. A lot of this Amazon doesn't tell you I'm making an educated deduction based on my experience. So I'm a Google local guide. So the star ratings that you see on businesses on Google. So I've rated hundreds and hundreds of businesses and done videos, thousand videos and stuff like that. I learned a lot about, because they give you, as a rating person, they give you points based on how good your review is, how many photos, how long is the video, how much content is in there. And so basically what I learned from that is that if I have at least 500 characters and X number of pictures or video, then I get the maximized number of points and those points lead to a level. So I'm a level eight out of 10 with Google level nine and 10. That is a ton of points a ton. But my point in that is that I can safely make the assumption that Amazon's doing roughly the same thing as Google.

So what that means is that there's a one star today doesn't hold the same value as a one star seven years ago. Right? Yep. Totally makes sense. However, the one star from seven years ago still holds so much more weight than it should that if it can be removed legitimately, it should be Also, you have, well, how many reviews has the reviewer done and how good are the reviews that the reviewer did? Do they do photos? Do they do videos? So there's a scoring system that Amazon has on how much weight does this one star have?

Brett Curry:

Right?

Danan Coleman:

And so

Brett Curry:

Not all one stars are created equally, and not all ratings are weighted equally, which makes sense.

Danan Coleman:

Yes, exactly. And if you've got a campaign to acquire a whole bunch of five stars legitimately not illegitimately,

There's a pretty good chance that if you've got some system in place where you say, Hey, give us star rating, get this, that, or the other, whatever it is legit, legit that a lot of the accounts that are giving those five stars, maybe that's only one or two or their third review or something like that. These accounts that illegitimately give you negative reviews, they know what they're doing for the most part. Most of them do. They're a company. This is a company that some brand is hired to do this. And so what they'll do, and this is another thing you can look for, is when you see a suspicious review, go look at the reviewer itself. Amazon will show you the last 20 reviews that they did. So let's say you sell here sunglasses. These are my favorite brand because they're like 30 bucks. And I have children, so knock around sunglasses.

Brett Curry:

Nice.

Danan Coleman:

So let's say I own knock around and I get a one star and the one star says, yeah, these are super sharp and dangerous, and it cut my head open. What? That doesn't make sense. So look at the reviewer. You'll see the last 20 reviews. If what you see is you've got a onestar, three other brands have a one star, and one brand has a five star where those sunglasses saved their life and cured their cancer a little bit suspicious, right? So what you'll find is that they'll batch these reviews where it's attack, attack, attack, oh my gosh. Greatest thing since sliced bread. And then there'll be nothing for one or two or three or four months. Then they'll come back to that batch 'em out again. So this is a common thing, fairly common thing that I see, but it's super hard to detect this stuff.

Brett Curry:

And so then if you see that pattern, are you able then to make a case with Amazon? Can you use that pattern as a case against that reviewer?

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, definitely. And so that's one that we go to seller support for because seller support doesn't support you when it comes to negative review removal. But that's one that we'll claim fraud on, that we'll do a fraud case.

Brett Curry:

Got it on that. Interesting.

Danan Coleman:

And we try to get as many of those types of reviews on a brand as we can and batch them because then Amazon can go, oh my gosh, look, look, look, look, look, look. And then they'll see a bunch.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting. But it totally makes sense. And I love the comparison between the Google Guides program and then Amazon reviews. And if you think about it from the platform's perspective, from Google's perspective, they love the local guides because you're leaving thoughtful, helpful reviews. You're posting pictures and videos and things like that. And I don't post reviews that often, I just don't think about it. But I have a few places when I travel, there's a couple coffee shops I visited that I really love or whatever, or there's an autobody shop that I visited. They fixed up my foreign looks amazing. I take pretty good pictures. Your four runner? I like photography. Yeah. I've got my wife's four runner and my wife has a four runner now, actually I had a four runner before my tundra that I had hail damage

Danan Coleman:

To six. So you are a Toyota family?

Brett Curry:

We are a Toyota family for sure. Love 'em.

But dude, I remember getting notifications from Google, your photo has this many views and it was a shocking number. One was for this coffee shop in California near Cardiff, and then one was this autobody thing. I'm like, I can't believe how many views these things are getting. Right? I know, but that's what keeps people coming back to Google to look for reviews. It's what people love about Amazon. There's tons of reviews there they can use to evaluate a product. And so it's extremely important to the platforms, but yet we've talked about it's a place where you can gain the system, but they also want to keep the integrity of the system as well. So they're motivated to do that.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think they made it so tough is because review manipulation is a real problem. If you look at, I think it's, they say that something like 60% of the reviews on Amazon are no bueno.

Brett Curry:

No way.

Danan Coleman:

It's a crazy percent. It's either 40 or 60. I forget. That's wild. But just a little side thing. Yeah, I've got 21 and a half million views on my photos on Google Maps. Yeah, that's insane. So yeah, that means something to Google. And I have to assume that that stuff like this means something to Amazon as well. And that's

Brett Curry:

Why all those impressions are opportunities for Google to sell an ad. All those impressions on Amazon are changed for them to sell a product or to sell an ad or both.

Brett Curry:

And

Brett Curry:

So they want to guard that very, very carefully. So what are some solutions for driving up our ratings and getting more positive reviews, but doing it in a way that's above board?

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, I mean that's such a tough question. And I hesitate, I've got some stuff, but I hesitate to even answer it because Amazon can just one day decide,

Brett Curry:

Hey,

Danan Coleman:

You're breaking the rules. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

That's no longer allowed to. OS has changed and you're screwed. Yeah.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that I did, I'm going to tell you some of the things that I've done in the past, I may or may not still be doing them and I don't suggest you do anything. All right. Ass is covered here. Good. I like

Brett Curry:

It.

Brett Curry:

I like

Danan Coleman:

It. So what I did, so I had a camping blanket and I would send them a follow-up message, the buyer seller messaging system with an attachment of A PDF. You could at this time, I don't know what it is today, but at this time you could have a 10 megabyte up to 10 or 12 megabyte, PDF when you reached out to a seller, this was before the time that they made it that you could only reach out to a seller for a major issue. And I debated even using that because I went, oh wait, you didn't get your care instructions with your order.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice.

Danan Coleman:

So I used care instructions and that was how I would go into the brand story. I had a picture of my daughter on one of the blankets of this is who you're supporting right now.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, make it personal. Let them see you're a small business owner. It's not some baseless corporation. It's not just Amazon type of thing. So

Danan Coleman:

Exactly. Because even professional Amazon purchasers that are, a lot of them, they don't even know, they're not purchasing actually from Amazon, but on Amazon,

Brett Curry:

They

Danan Coleman:

Think they're just buying it from Amazon. Right. That's a

Brett Curry:

Really good point.

Danan Coleman:

Now we're in the space, so we know we're third parties and small businesses and stuff like that, but a lot of buyers, they have no idea. So that was one thing that I did. If you're FBM, then sending them a written postcard. Thank you. Postcard has a crazy conversion rate on reviews. Right? You can't do that unless you've got the customer name and address. Right? Right. Then you've got inserts. So getting a warranty on a product and putting in them, basically what I'm saying here is that no matter what you do, there's got to be a flow. It's got to be a flow, a multi-step flow, and it has to be done in such a way that Amazon's not going to have any feelings hurt over there in Seattle. Right,

Brett Curry:

Got it.

Danan Coleman:

But unfortunately, everyone's feelings are hurt for any reason, and therefore you're on the hook. So there's a degree of risk no matter what you do, but there's a degree in risk on selling on Amazon because as I love to say, Amazon, it's a schizophrenic dictatorship.

Brett Curry:

There's some merit to that, man. It is one of the best tools ever to make money. Absolutely. Or the best shopping experiences, but schizophrenic dictatorship, there's some truth to that. All of those angles do have truth to them for sure.

Okay, fantastic. Love that. We got to mitigate negative reviews. If you think they're violating what's allowed, use Dana's GPT, confirm it, and then go after those negative reviews and it will make a huge difference. Even a 4.3 to 4.2 can mean a massive difference in sales. So great. In the time we have left, I want to talk about another really critical topic, and that is monitoring your products for critical issues that sabotage sales. So this is one of the bans of people's existence. It's all on Amazon as it feels like whack-a-mole, trying to knock down all the potential issues and challenges that keep my product from being visible or keep my product from being sold the way I'd like for it to be sold on Amazon. And so can you walk us through what are some of the things we should be monitoring? And I know you've got an awesome tool, we'll do this for us, but what

Danan Coleman:

Do you need to be monitoring and keeping an eye on that? If we don't, it's going to sabotage our sales. And my tool is geared towards bigger brands or agencies that have tons and tons of skews. If you're a smaller brand and you've got five 10 ASINs, then you can do this manually. You kind of probably already are, but some of the most critical things are orphan ASINs. So if you've got a parent child set up and one of those child ASINs, say, your pink sunglasses gets split off one, it takes with it any reviews that it's had in its history. And so it strips those reviews out of the parent relationship because all child ASINs share each other's or should. The next issue that we go over is split reviews. So if your child ASIN gets split away, let's say it's got no reviews, okay, cool. You didn't lose any reviews on your parent asin, but guess what? Now you've got an individual ASIN that's got no advertised going into it because it's not in the ads campaign and it's got no review. So literally nobody's going to buy it. And you wonder one day like, Hey, what happened to our pinks? They were selling like three a day and now they're not selling at all. So okay, take a look and wait a minute, where are the pinks? And so that's number one is an orphan ascent issue. Next is split reviews.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So let's talk about that orphan ascent issue. How does that happen? How do the pink sunglasses, how do they wander off or how do they get orphaned? We don't know.

Danan Coleman:

Literally have no idea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Danan Coleman:

I mean, it seems to happen with bigger brands than smaller brands, certainly more often, although smaller brands are not immune to it. It's happened to me. And at that time I was selling literally two products. So

Brett Curry:

Interesting.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, I literally have no idea why. I mean, why does Amazon, Amazon anything? So it happens. It's

Brett Curry:

An issue. You need to be looking for it for all the reasons you just laid out. Okay, orphan big deal. What was the next one?

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, split reviews. So you may not even realize that maybe one or two or three of your variations are not sharing the reviews with the perina. So a scenario of this would be, let's use the sunglasses again. I got my reds, my blues, my whites, my greens, and my yellows. And the yellows are not sharing the same reviews as the others. The others have a 4.6 star rating, but the yellows have only gotten three reviews and it's got a 3.8 star rating. Well, guess what? Nobody's buying those.

Brett Curry:

They're

Danan Coleman:

Going to look at it and go 3.8 on the yellows. I liked them, but now I don't.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, there's something wrong. The yellows are defective.

Danan Coleman:

Exactly. And so this is the power of the review system and the star rating is that it has the ability to instantaneously, if it's low, has the ability to instantaneously stop the sale. If it's high, great, now you're being compared against the others. But if it's low, it's an instant. No, unless you're a fat burner, you can run at 3.5 and still make a million dollars a week. Congratulations.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's high. Relatively speaking. Yeah, exactly. Fat burning category, so it makes sense. Makes

Danan Coleman:

Sense. So orphans, nations split reviews, but then there's a whole host of other issues like title issues, bullet point issues, text emojis, categories, browse nodes, image changes, just so many different things that could go wrong that you would never, ever, ever know and may not even cause you any known problems. But as these things start to stack up, it's a death by a thousand cuts scenario. You've got say, let's take the sunglasses, all your colors, everything is hunky dory, but your pink sunglasses for some reason they're in kitchen or home and garden. And so you didn't put them there, but somehow they got there. Amazon reclassified them for some reason, the AI messed up the image assessment and they went, okay, this is a pair of gloves, and so it gets recategorized. This happens awesome fairly often as well. And so now you've got a child ASIN that's in the wrong category, and maybe you're not allowed to run ads on that category or who knows. There's just so many different things. And so really all it is is a security system for major and minor issues that collectively cost you money.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so interesting, and I were talking offline about this. I gave the comparison of think about a store shelf of physical store shelf, supermarket or store, whatever. Yeah. Love this analogy. If you want your product to sell, there's a few things that are really important. You want to be in the right section of the store, on the right shelf. You want to have your product pulled right to the face, whether the angle is good. This, I used to work at a grocery store when I was in high school, and so we'd always face the shelves. You want to turn the labels the right way and get it to the edge of the shelf. It needs to look pretty. You want to make sure there's not something blocking the view of a particular product. And like you said, you want to make sure it's in the right place.

What if you had a great product, but in a couple of stores, the stock boy was confused and he puts your product on the wrong end of the store, and now you're not next to your competitors, people that are looking for your category, your product, they don't see you. Now you're screwed. And so I think you've got to think about all these angles of you're a merchandiser in this case, you're a marketer, you're a brand owner. How do I keep my products on the right shelf visible, and how do I make sure that they can fly off the shelf? I want them to.

Danan Coleman:

Yep. That was the best analogy I've ever heard. And so to put this in the context of Amazon and Orphan A would be you sell sunglasses in the beach section, but your pink bear of sunglasses are over with the fruit and vegetables. So nobody

Brett Curry:

Going same color is the fruit. So it's over

Danan Coleman:

There. Yeah, exactly. Your pink sunglasses are with the pink grapefruits or yellow sunglasses with the pink grapefruits or whatever. And so that's in the wrong spot. So therefore people, when they've come to see your sunglasses, won't see them. They're not there, right?

Brett Curry:

They're on Amazon,

Danan Coleman:

They're in the store, they're just

Brett Curry:

Elsewhere. Yeah. It's like, no, it's fine. It's here. There's inventory. It's on Amazon,

Danan Coleman:

But it's in

Brett Curry:

The wrong spot. No one's going to buy it there.

Danan Coleman:

And the same thing goes for browse notes. So let's say you're just in the wrong browse node. Now that one, there's a lot less likely for people to be unable to find it, but if someone's specifically searching in sports and outdoors and your product is in, I don't know, pool pumps, whatever that category would be, well, that's actually probably also sports and outdoors, but let's say grocery, well, you might have a problem with people finding you because they're not searching that category. So anyhow, there's all kinds of weird little issues that can happen. Like your buy box suppressed, the product page is still there, but your buy box is suppressed. Why Amazon doesn't tell you unless you're looking for other indicators, other data points to go, okay, so I've got a buy box, not authorized issue here. Oh, look, this browse node's different. Oh, it's a CD category. That's why.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's super interesting. It's one of those things where this is definitely not a, Hey, I've got a really great product. I made sure that it got to the Amazon warehouses. Now all I got to do is run my ads and hope for the best. Hey, my product got to Walmart. It's all taken care of now.

Brett Curry:

And don't worry

Brett Curry:

There a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, definitely. But don't worry, Amazon's still happy to

Danan Coleman:

Charge you for those ads. Yeah, yeah,

Brett Curry:

Exactly. And charge you storage fees. It's in the wrong place, but we're going to charge you storage fees and all

Danan Coleman:

That. Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's amazing, man. So I know there's a lot more we need to be looking at as well. Any other highlights there? And then talk about the tool you've built, because no one enjoys the manual process here. If you've got a few SKUs or a few ASINs, it's probably fine. But any other noteworthy things? And then talk about the tool you've built.

Danan Coleman:

Dimensional Weight can be a good one. I think it's gotten better over the last few years, but I've heard, so Amazon's got the system, they put the product there, it laser measures everything. You get your dimensional weight, and if anyone doesn't know what that is, that's basically the size of the box, plus the length, height, width, plus the weight of the product gives you your dimensional weight. So if you're selling one inch squared lead balls, it's going to be different than one inch squared lead feather thing.

Brett Curry:

Right, right, right. Yeah, makes sense.

Danan Coleman:

So that's something that where you can have a pretty big issue where let's say a box is crushed and now it's a one inch wider, but not necessarily one inch shorter. And that puts you into the oversized category. Well, now you're paying, let's say 30 cents more for every unit that gets fulfilled and you're selling a hundred a day. That adds up after a little while. And you'll never know. You'll never know, because Amazon just doesn't say, by the way, we're charging you more now because we notice that your box Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Change your dimensional weight. Yeah. So there you go. They just start charging you.

Danan Coleman:

Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Danan Coleman:

Amazon the shoot first and ask questions later. Amazon doesn't ask questions.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. We'll just keep shooting. Okay.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah. Right. So I mean, there's a lot of different issues that I check for. So this is called Catalog Defender, by the way. The website is just being built. It's partially functional, but you can also go to eCom triage.com and then get ahold of me and we'll do an audit and see. But the main things right now are, and our favorite, actually I'll go over our favorite one right now, is our image tab where you can get all of your products just listed down a list and then every image on that. And so you can quickly scroll through the images and go, wait a minute, why is there only three images there? Or, hang on a sec, this is a duplicate image over here. And so that got a lot more love than I actually anticipated that it would because, well, I don't know why. Should probably ask my customers why they love it so much, but

Brett Curry:

That's super important. You've got to have the right amount of images and quality images and not duplicate images for something to actually sell. And so critical that you're keeping an eye on that.

Danan Coleman:

And then the other thing that I would say is super important and a very undervalued tool in all of Amazon in all aspects would be a change log. So when we detect it, we push that data into a change log, and when it gets fixed, we push that data into a change log. So if you're a small brand, this doesn't really matter to you. If you're a big brand and you have brand managers or you're an agency or brand managers, that's one spot that you can go, this took eight days to resolve this issue. One of the things that I was a big supporter of at Managed by Stats was a statistical change log. So when you did some major action, you actually entered in today I did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it put a line on the graph, and then you could see a date coincident change of whether your statistics went up or down a result of that change.

Brett Curry:

Interesting.

Danan Coleman:

Freaking nobody else has that, and I do not know why.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's super important. We use this on Google Ads all the time. There's a spot to market change in the account.

Brett Curry:

And

Brett Curry:

That way as you look at the graphs and the performance, you can see these change big change markers where it's like, Hey, we launched YouTube here, or we changed our bid strategy for Performance Max, or we split the feed here for these whatever big change market. So then you can see the before and after

Brett Curry:

In

Brett Curry:

The data. So super, super important. And then you can also with that change log, see, okay, did this change to this asin? Did it make a difference or not make a difference? Right. It just allows you to keep track of those things.

Danan Coleman:

Yeah, exactly. And it's amazing. I think that's super important because then you don't actually know whether what you're doing is working specifically, especially if you are doing multiple things.

Brett Curry:

Right. But

Danan Coleman:

I mean, this is what I'm working on today is negative review, removal, catalog, defender, and then I'm actually thinking about building individual AI tools for dedicated purposes. Because what I'm finding is that usually a seller needs or wants to solve a specific problem. And a lot of times, if you need that done, you have to go to an agency that does a whole bunch of stuff, right?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Danan Coleman:

I want to try and help people solve an individual issue and then boom, it's done,

Brett Curry:

And

Danan Coleman:

Let them get on with their sales life.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. It's amazing, man. Well, this has been fantastic. We are officially out of time. Really appreciate you coming on. And so basically we got the negative reviews, we got the catalog defender. We can learn more about both of those at e-com triage.com, correct? Yep.

Danan Coleman:

Correct.

Brett Curry:

How else can people connect with you? Yeah, go ahead.

Danan Coleman:

LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me. So Danon Coleman, D-A-N-A-N. I'm pretty active there, but it doesn't actually matter to me what you need. Just let me know what help you need, and if nothing else, I'll point you in the right direction.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. Yeah. And that's one thing I've learned about you D and a lot about a lot of stuff you're pro when it comes to all things Amazon. And so yeah, you're stuck with something, reach out to I look develop, he's probably got That's awesome, man. And then also check out the e-com growth show. And with that, Dana, thanks again, man. This was awesome. Thanks, dude. Look forward to chatting again and maybe having a taco together again in the not too distant future.

Danan Coleman:

I'll never say a no to tacos. That'd be a cardinal sin.

Brett Curry:

Exactly, exactly. Thanks, Fred. All right, man, really appreciate it. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. If you've not done so already, leave us a review on iTunes. If you found this show helpful, please share with somebody else that'll make my day, make Dana's day as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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