621: How Amazon Sellers Are Still Gaming Reviews Without Getting Banned With Dave Bryant

621: How Amazon Sellers Are Still Gaming Reviews Without Getting Banned With Dave Bryant Speaker 1: Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now, in this episode, Dave Bryant from EcomCrew and I expose how sellers are still flooding Amazon with fake reviews, even after the major crackdowns you've been hearing about in the news. I'll show you the exact loopholes they're exploiting right now and why Amazon's detection systems just keep missing them. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Sellers Summit 2026 are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is in the trenches. People who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We have sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It's happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if you're doing over $250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher-level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they're ever going to be, so if you want in, go over to sellerssummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show. Welcome to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I am excited to have Dave Bryant on the show. Now, I've known Dave for over a decade now. He is one of the founders of EcomCrew, which was started in 2015. I think we met in 2014. It's one of the top blogs and one of the top podcasts in the space, and he also has a YouTube channel, which is pretty amazing also. Dave has bought and sold several e-commerce companies at this point and he's an expert at selling on Amazon. But in my mind, what sets the guy apart is that he doesn't hold back on anything and he'll talk about like the shady stuff that's going on Amazon. And he'll literally physically travel to China to visit the epicenter where all the large Amazon sellers live. And today we're going to talk about Dave's businesses and his advice for how to grow your e-commerce business today. How's it going, Dave? Speaker 2: Oh, thanks, Steve. I love the glowing endorsement, so thank you very much. Speaker 1: I did like that other video, too, I wanted to say, but I just wanted to say, though, your last video that I just watched, I really enjoyed it. It was about how Amazon sellers are getting illegal reviews on Amazon. I will link up that video, actually, in the show notes here, but you spent a lot of time on it. It was very well done. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well, and just to give a quick summary of it. So basically, Amazon claimed to shut down a bunch of fake review brokers, and it turns out they didn't actually shut them down. So they had kind of filed frivolous lawsuits against these guys, and they'd won default judgments. I shouldn't say frivolous lawsuits, but they basically won a bunch of default judgments against these fake review brokers. These guys are all based in countries like India and Bangladesh. And really, there's no way to enforce a US judgment in these countries. So these fake review brokers are continuing to operate. You can go onto their websites right now today, buy fake reviews for $4 to $5 per review. I did actually buy one of these fake reviews and they actually do a really good job of getting you reviews quickly. They look completely legitimate and if you wanted to, you could buy a hundred of these reviews. You could buy a thousand of these fake reviews for your product and very, very, very hard for Amazon to trace. Speaker 1: We'll get back to that actually, Dave, because I'm pretty sure the listeners are interested in it. I want to talk about you first, though. Now, here's my first question to you, actually. I want to say about four or five years ago, I remember you and Mike were on an episode of EcomCrew where you guys were both giving your own recommendations for e-commerce. And I distinctly remember And I think you and Mike differed on this. You recommend just going all in on Amazon because Amazon was just growing so quickly and your opinion was that websites would just get crushed and Amazon would just start dominating everything. Now fast forward four or five years later, do you still believe that recommendation today? Speaker 2: I would believe half of it. So yes, I believe your own website will be crushed for the most part. And there are exceptions to this. There are like the Ridge Wallets of the world, the Vessi Shoes of the world who absolutely dominate it just with their DTC websites. So yes, I do think your own website will be crushed, but I do think there is an alternative now to Amazon. And I think getting back to China, you talked about me going over to China and seeing what the e-commerce sellers over there are doing. And in China, anybody who follows e-commerce in Asia overall, whether it's China or Japan, Korea, they know that live selling and social selling is a huge, huge thing now. And I think it's making its way to North America now. And the biggest reflection of that Our TikTok shops. So I think that that is now a viable alternative to Amazon is social selling. I don't think live selling is quite here just yet, but I think TikTok shop is a really good example of how you can succeed outside of Amazon and not necessarily with your own Shopify store. And of course you do need to still have your own Shopify store. I just don't think it will ever be, I shouldn't say ever, but the vast majority of the time, I don't think it can be sustainable alone to sustain your e-commerce brand. Speaker 1: That is very interesting. I mean, that's where we differ. Like I have like almost the complete opposite philosophy because we make almost all of our revenue from our own store, right? But I do want to talk about live... Well, did you want to say something before? Speaker 2: No. I mean, there's definitely... And we're here to talk about situations where you can succeed having your own D2C website. And I think you guys are a great example of Bumble Bee Linens, where I imagine there's a fairly high touch with the customer, where you're doing a lot of back and forth with them in terms of their orders and customization. And I think when you get into the situations like that, it definitely makes sense. And there's a ton of other examples too. But for the vast majority of people, I think on its own, it's very, very tough to succeed in most niches. Speaker 1: I would argue that, like you mentioned TikTok shop, like a lot of products do not fall under TikTok shoppable territory in my opinion, right? In terms of the type of products. It's almost like you need to sell something that's super high margin to begin with. Beauty, supplements, anything just kind of unique, right? Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, there's no search intent with TikTok. It's all discoverability. So if you have a product that somebody discovers and goes, oh, wow, I need this. Yes, works great with TikTok shops. If you're selling a boat anchor, yeah, probably not the best for TikTok shops. Speaker 1: You know, Amazon, I want to say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Amazon cancel their live selling platform? Speaker 2: I don't know if they still have live selling on Amazon or not. I mean, they were going all in with Amazon Live, but with Amazon, Whatever way the wind is blowing that day, they could kill a project or start a new project. So I'm not sure how Amazon Live is doing right now. Regardless, it never took off the way they imagined, whether it's still around or not. And that's why I don't think live selling is quite here just yet in North America. I think we're seeing the effects of social selling overall, just through things like TikTok shops and influencers hawking products. But the whole live selling component, without a doubt, it's nowhere near like it is in Asia right now. Speaker 1: Actually, can we talk about that? Cause when you were there, you kind of witnessed this craze firsthand, right? Like what is it like over in China right now? Speaker 2: Yeah. So Steven mentioned a video that I put out basically going to the Mecca of Chinese e-commerce sellers. And basically what this Mecca was, it's a giant office building and by office building really is, it kind of rivals the Pentagon in size. And it's basically almost every major Chinese e-commerce seller is based in this one And we're here to talk about office building. So either they have their main headquarters there or they have branches there. But basically, almost every single major Chinese seller is based there. And a lot of the office space there is being repurposed from, you know, their marketing offices and doing the day-to-day operations of that office space was being repurposed into live selling studios. So you can go rent out a live selling studio within this office building and just do your live selling right there. And they had different scenes for everything. They'd have a Christmas scene if you were selling Christmas trees. And so you could live sell in a Christmas background. You could live sell in a Thanksgiving background. You could live sell in a forest background. And so there are just a ton of different variants for how you could sell, like the scenes that you could sell in. And it was just basically overtaking this office building in terms of live selling. And they were all curious in this office building. Everyone I talked to is like, look, Dave, we're killing it here in China with live selling. We have no idea how we could ever do it in America because language is a big issue, cultural differences is a big issue. So it's really easy for a Chinese seller to sell on Amazon, but they haven't quite cracked how to sell through live selling in North America. Speaker 1: You know, I want to say I saw a YouTube video not too long ago where there's this street in Shenzhen where it's literally just littered with people with a ring light and they're just live selling, like a whole street full of them. Did you witness that firsthand? Speaker 2: I've never seen live selling on the street. So this Mecca is just on the outskirts of Shenzhen. I don't know why you would sell on the street when you can just go to this office building and rent out like this nice, warm, insulated office. Well, the street is free. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I could see it, of course. I mean, if you're selling a food product or something or some running shoes, maybe it makes sense. But I didn't see it firsthand, but I definitely did see it within this office building. Speaker 1: That's nuts. And typically I want to say the US is like a couple of years behind China, right? So we're probably due for that wave coming pretty soon. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we see it though in a small, very small little trickle with the sudden like dominance of influencer-led brands. So whether it's like the Rocks, whatever he's selling now, Vodka. Speaker 1: Tequila or whatever. Speaker 2: Kim Kardashian's beauty line. All these influencers, obviously Logan Paul with Prime. A lot of new, very successful brands are being driven by internet influences. And I think this is kind of like the first baby steps towards getting to the point of live selling. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And we're the average guy where Steve Chou can all of a sudden launch a vodka or a whiskey or whatever product he wants to launch. So even a smaller influencer can have pretty big success. And again, this is my prediction. Who knows? Sure. The fact I'm predicting it probably means it will never happen, but it does seem that is kind of the way that we will eventually go. Speaker 1: Well, okay, well, let's talk about like this prediction in the context of your own brands. So I know we have, you have an off-road brand, right? Are you currently, is that mostly Amazon right now? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's mostly Amazon. Speaker 1: Okay, mostly Amazon. Do you have like a content part of it, portion of it that you're developing? Speaker 2: Well, you know, that used to be a pretty big component of, so we run three brands and that was a big component of two of the brands we run. Okay. We have pretty significant content sites, and a lot of that traffic was being directed to Amazon listings. Now, after the Google Helpful update of whenever it was, when was it now? It's still Helpful, isn't it? Yeah, it was, yeah. That basically eroded that side of the business, and it made that strategy very, very hard to succeed at. Now, I will say, with the off-roading side of The off-roading brand that we operated, that content site kind of went more or less to nothing because of the way that content was. Speaker 1: It was written content. That's why, right? Speaker 2: It was written content, but it wasn't very visual. Now, we also have another craft brand, which is extremely visual, which is hard for AI really to replicate. So if you're trying to show somebody visually how to do something, people still want to see images and videos for that. And that content business has done okay. And so that strategy is still Kind of working for that brand. So yeah, that was the overall strategy. Taking content, using that as a traffic funnel into Amazon. And Amazon really loved and loves when you send external traffic into Amazon. But yes, both of those brands are primarily Amazon. Speaker 1: Would you say it was largely because the one that succeeded was video content versus written content? Speaker 2: Yes, 100%. And not just video, just visual. So whether images or videos. And obviously video is typically Trump's images. But anything visual, I think that is still kind of a lame bat AI, ChatGPT. They can't quite replicate right this second. I mean, we've all seen it where any AI-generated hand seems to have six or seven fingers. So it's not quite there yet. Eventually, it's going to get there. But right now, that's still one space that doesn't seem to be too tarnished by AI. And in our experience with that craft brand, yeah, it's done pretty well after the helpful update. Speaker 1: I guess what I'm trying to get at right now is like, would you even bother creating written content even with a lot of images now to promote a brand or would you just jump straight to video? Speaker 2: I think there's edge cases where images do help. I mean, video is how most people want to consume content. So I mean, if I had to pick between one or the other, I would definitely pick video. But I do think there is a lane where you do want images. I'm this type myself where I do want to consume a lot of content just visually. I don't want to sit and click through a 10 or 12 minute video. So the best answer, the right answer is both. If I had to pick one, it would definitely be video. But video is time intensive. It's a lot easier to put up images than video. That's the big barrier. It's not that it's not better. It's that is the ROI on the amount of time that you have to put into video, is it there? It is, as we both know, it's very time intensive. Speaker 1: I mean, the only reason why I'm also asking is just the way things are going, like everyone's just doing research on AI. People might never even see that image that you're posting, right? They're just doing their research and then they go straight to your website or whatever to make a purchase, right? Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, like we talked about off air. There is still a significant amount of Google traffic that goes to the top two or three listings for certain topics, which aren't being AI generated by Google. Whether that's there or not in five or 10 years, probably not. It might be viable right now, but five or 10 years from now, definitely that will not be the case. So that's definitely where the puck's going. But right there, right now, I think the puck is still there where you can get a TopServ listing on Google and do okay. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. At least for like the next six months. I actually heard a rumor that Google was going to upend their entire search for a version of AI overviews. I don't know if that's going to come true or not. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we've all experienced it where it does seem to be overtaking search results for most searches. And I'm sure there is a time when it will become even more intrusive. And it's basically purely AI results. But we're seeing it now already. I mean, there's a lot of searches where basically all you're getting is AI results. Speaker 1: All right, so you're still all in on Amazon. Content in Amazon has all the increased fees and advertising and all that stuff. What advice would you give Amazon sellers today to stay profitable in the environment? Speaker 2: Well, it comes down to product ultimately. What I always tell people too is five or six years ago, kind of the rule of thumb is you basically needed a product that you can sell at 4X. So you buy it for $10 and you sell it for $40. And then two or three years ago after the Amazon fee increases, it changed more to like 5X. And now with all the tariffs, plus some of Amazon's fee increases, it's more like 6X. So I think that's the key. You have a product that you can sell at 6X, you're okay. If you're still trying to sell a $10 widget for $40, that's a very tough proposition, not only with Amazon fees, but plus tariffs. And most people are still importing from China and they're not importing from China. Basically every other country now, except for the US, has tariffs. So tariffs are Obviously a very significant additional cost for people. So both of those things, Amazon fees and tariffs, basically means that the magical formula now to stay profitable and profitable is probably 10% net margins. That magical formula is probably more like 6X. Speaker 1: Interesting. And I know you're in Canada, actually. For the Canadian listeners out there, what's it like right now over there? Well, good news is... We're pissing you off here from the US, right? And some of the old tricks you can't do anymore. Speaker 2: Yeah, we haven't become the 51st state yet, so I think we're all okay with that. I mean, that part's good. I know Steve is kind of licking his wounds because he can't get Canadians to travel down to his conferences, but it seems like the Americans are making up for that. So yeah, we are doing the good Canadian thing and being passive aggressive and just refusing to travel or buy American whiskey. So in that regard, you know, I think Canadians just have their feelings hurt. From a business regard, I mean, it's affected certain industries actually in Canada. So there was a very healthy percentage of e-commerce companies who were taking advantage of De Minimis and they would bring their products from China or whatever country into Canada and then ship across the border same day because 90% of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the U.S. border and they would just ship cross-border every day. So effectively, it was the same speed as shipping from the U.S. but no tariffs. So now De Minimis is gone. That little niche of e-commerce businesses who are taking advantage of that little loophole, they have all had their businesses totally disrupted. So on the e-commerce side, yeah, it's been a little bit disruptive depending on what business model your e-commerce company had. From a business side, like overall economy, it seems to have been doing okay right now. But yeah, obviously a lot of, I think anywhere in the world has been disrupted by Trump 2.0. Speaker 1: I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I'll send you the course right away. Once again, that's MyWifeQuitHerJob.com slash free. Now back to the show. Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I remember when I sold my business a few years ago, I thought, you know what? I'll take some of this money. I'll buy a warehouse here in Canada. And now with all these tariffs, I'll just take advantage of this. I'll be like the low cost provider because we'll have all our products brought to Canada and ship them cross border and there'll be no duties and we'll be able to undercut everybody on price. And never pulled the trigger on that, thankfully. But had I, I mean, geez, that entire business model would just be... Speaker 1: It's very unpredictable. All right, well, okay. Let's talk about the illegal activity on Amazon. That's a very juicy topic. Now, okay, so you just put out a video on this, and I do know that Amazon has been putting out these press releases over the years, that it's drastically cut down on illegal reviews, how it's actively trying to lose less merchandise in its warehouses. What's really going on, Dave? Speaker 2: In terms of reviews, so just to give a little history lesson, in 2022, they did suspend A lot of very major sellers on Amazon. And basically, they were all guilty of putting insert cards into their packages and saying, hey, buy our product, leave a five-star review, and we'll give you a $20 gift card. And that was very traceable. So Amazon, all they had to do was go into the warehouse, open up a box, and they could find these review insert cards. So you're caught red-handed with that. And they suspended a lot of very, very major sellers, like public companies in China. So definitely, That was a very real action that Amazon took and that had like a very material positive effect in getting rid of a lot of these bad actors who are basically paying for reviews by leaving these insert cards. That's fine. So they did a good job there. Now what's happened, it's gone from insert cards, which are very, very traceable to now people using these Review brokers, basically people who will get you fake reviews for five bucks a piece. And that's where all the actions turn to. And these fake review groups exist basically in one place, it's Facebook. So if you go on to Facebook, you search for Amazon reviews, you can find a million Facebook review groups where you can get free products all in exchange for leaving five-star reviews. And so now basically all the actions shifted From leaving insert cards to using these review brokers and Facebook groups. Speaker 1: Amazon did do a lot. Had like a rebate service that kind of got in trouble, right? Unknown Speaker: Well, yeah. Speaker 2: And that's a really good example of kind of also what exists today. So yeah, you're talking about one of our friends who had a rebate service. And the theory behind that service was it wasn't necessarily to get fake reviews, although we'll talk about that in a second. The point was to kind of do Amazon's algorithm and get some extra link juice and conversion juice for your product. So you give away a bunch of free products through one of these rebate services. Amazon would think, oh my gosh, everybody's buying this product. We should rank it highly. And so that was the overt reason why that service existed. The wink, wink, nudge, nudge side of the service was, yeah, buy our product for free. Great. And by the way, please leave us a review. So that was the other thing that was happening. And that still exists today. Like these wink wink, nudge nudge services where you give away discounted products and there's kind of an implicit agreement that yeah, you're probably gonna leave a five-star review because if you leave, you don't leave any review, that's probably okay, but you're definitely not gonna leave a one-star review because you'll get kicked off the platform. So that still exists today. Speaker 1: Okay, but what you're talking about here is completely different and sketchier. Speaker 2: With the overt buying a fake review. So I'm not going to mention the websites. You can Google, buy fake Amazon reviews. A ton of these websites exist and you can buy five review packages. You can buy 10 review packages. You can buy a hundred review packages and you pay a set price per review. Obviously you have to compensate the product costs as well. And within 7 to 10 business days, you get either 5, 10 or 100 reviews. Speaker 1: You know, realistically, Amazon could shut these sites down by just telling Google to just filing DMCA takedown requests with Google and they wouldn't be in search at least, right? But they're not doing that. Speaker 2: Yes. So that's one way to find these review groups, but any Amazon seller listening has probably at some point or the other had a little message, somehow get through Amazon's filters and say, hey, you want reviews? Message me, WeChat me. So there's these kind of underground ways where you can find these services where you buy reviews as well. And not to pick on China, but again, going back to like the Mecca of Chinese sellers, you walk through this shopping, It's half shopping mall, half offices. You walk through there and there's basically billboards everywhere for different Amazon services. Some of them are photography services. Some of them are listing optimization services. And some of them are review services. And they don't say fake reviews, but they call them review services. So there are more kind of grassroots ways that people are finding these services to get fake reviews. So you're right. They can stop it on the Google side and just like not have them show up in the search. But there's other ways that people can find these groups. Speaker 1: Okay. Let's get to the interesting part. You actually tried one of these services just for content reasons, right? Speaker 2: I did. Speaker 1: How does it work? Speaker 2: Yeah. So tried one of these services. So basically Amazon released a press release saying they shut down all these websites. I went to one of these websites, tried to buy a fake review. I messaged the operator of the website, said, hey, can you get me a fake review? They said, sure, no problem. By the way, though, I just want to hop on a WeChat call with you just to kind of verify your identity. And basically the identity check was to make sure I was Chinese. As I talked about in the video, I kind of smudged the camera on my lens a little bit, put on a hat, tried to give a broken English accent, and the guy more or less said, okay, sir, it looks like you might be in China, so yeah, go ahead, buy your review. Now, talking to this guy, he was very clearly South Asian. It turns out he's from Bangladesh. So that's where most of these fake review services are working. Speaker 1: How did you find that out, by the way? Speaker 2: It was in actually the court documents that Amazon had filed taking down these review brokers. So they actually had the names of the people and where they existed in the court documents. Now, they weren't able to take action against them, but they did find out their names. So yeah, it turns out most of them are in India and Bangladesh, probably not a surprise to a lot of people. Speaker 1: I just remember his name happened to be Steve, right? Speaker 2: It happened to be Steve. It was definitely not Steve. You can see it in the court documents. It was definitely not Steve. So yeah, not Steve, but Steve still managed to get the fake review. So paid $5 plus the cost of the product. I did not do it on my own product. Found another product with tens of thousands of reviews because I don't want either my products getting suspended or somebody else's product being suspended. And the truth of it is like the chances that Amazon is going to notice one fake review on a product with tens of thousands of reviews, probably not likely. So anyways, bought this fake review. I thought for sure my money's gone because I basically Bitcoin the guy because I didn't want any trace of this happening. Speaker 1: Did you really? You paid with crypto? Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, what else am I going to do? I'm not going to do it with PayPal. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: And again, to their credit, right? Like he could have just taken the money and run. Maybe there's a bigger scheme here. He wants me to buy the 100 review package for $500. Maybe that's the ultimate scheme, but I do legitimately think that He's actually just providing a good service and like he's not going to take the money. He's actually going to provide the reviews of I bought a thousand review package. So anyways, crypto the money over to him. And within about seven to 10 days, that review popped up. Right on the product page. Now, the other thing was, this is not some rudimentary operation. So I had to create an account on their website. I had to log in. They had a tracking service where I could number one, track the order that the person had used to order. And then also I could track the status of the review and it would say, okay, you need to wait a few days for the review to populate because we don't want to do it too quickly. Otherwise, Amazon's going to catch it. So the whole process took about 10 days from the time I crypto'd the money to the time somebody bought the product and ultimately left the review. Speaker 1: Sounds like this is a real business with like a software backend and... Speaker 2: Oh, dude, it's incredible. Speaker 1: All right, so where is this review coming from though? Is it someone in the US who bought it or? Speaker 2: That part, I mean, they're not going to reveal their secret sauce where they get their reviewers from. So I did ask Steve, I said, hey, where are these reviews coming from? Are they all coming from Facebook? And, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We have other sources. Truth of it is almost all of them are coming from these Facebook groups. So they operate these Facebook groups for the buyer side. So people buying products and leaving reviews. So again, like I mentioned before, if you go into Facebook, look for Amazon reviews, you'll find a million of these Facebook or Amazon review groups. And so all these guys who operate these services operate A few of these Facebook groups, most of them have thousands of members, and that's where they're getting the reviews from. So they'll post the product. Steve has his linen that he wants to get a bunch of free reviews for. He'll tell Steve. Steve will then go post that product in the Facebook group for all the customers and say, hey, if you guys want some handkerchiefs and linens, go to this link, buy it, message us your order number, leave a review, and then we'll reimburse you for your costs. So that's where they're coming from. They're almost all coming from Facebook review groups. They might say otherwise, but Even in the Amazon court documents, they've said the same thing. They're almost all coming from Facebook review groups. Speaker 1: Here's what I found nefarious about all this. You can actually pay for one star reviews too, right? Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. And that's what I was curious about because we've all, as Amazon sellers, been hit with one-star reviews. And so I asked Steve, I said, hey, you know, it's great that you can leave five-star reviews. Can you leave one-star reviews? He said, oh, yeah, sure. Unknown Speaker: No problem. Speaker 2: You want one-star reviews, three-star reviews, five-star reviews? No problem. Anything you want, we'll get it for you. Speaker 1: Okay, so I've had a rash of students in the class where they launch and before they even ship their stuff over to Amazon, they get a negative one-star review. So it seems like this is very common. I mean, what do you do in that case? Speaker 2: I mean, so this is the sad part about it. So a lot of people, what they resort to, you get hit with negative reviews and you know it's your competitor, what do you do? You hit them back. And so it goes for this tit and tat where people will buy fake reviews against their competitors. That's the natural reaction from a lot of people. In terms of if you don't want to get into that slugfest, what can you do? I mean, really all you can kind of do is cross your fingers and hope that Amazon catches these fake reviewers. So Amazon did claim that last year they shut down 250 million fake reviews before they ever got posted. They shut down that many. How many are getting through? Who knows, but it's probably a lot bigger than 250 million. So yeah, they're catching some of these and hopefully they catch them if you're getting hit with fake reviews. But other than that, They're very hard to trace, and that's the problem. They're real customers leaving these reviews. They're real customers, based in the US, leaving these reviews. Very hard to catch. Now, if somebody hasn't bought the product, then that's very traceable from Amazon. Like if somebody's just closing it. Speaker 1: It is, but it's still really hard to get it taken down, right? I mean, in this case, and this is, I get asked these questions, and I don't really have good answers for them. That's why I brought it up here. Like I had one student who was already, he spent a lot of time getting his product ready. Puts up his listing instantly. I think he got four negative reviews and he hadn't even shipped anything yet. Okay. And then he appealed to Amazon. Look, the listing isn't even live. I don't have anything, but he couldn't get them taken down, which is very frustrating. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, a few tactical things that people can do just to kind of make it meaningful. So first off, Amazon is being a little bit more receptive to review removal requests and it's brute force. Most of the time you just got to Email, email, email, case, case, case. The conversion rate on that is very low, but they are definitely a lot more receptive nowadays than compared to previously, where it was basically a blanket no, never a chance in hell that you'll get a review removed. They are more receptive to it now, so that still is an option. There are also review removal services now that exist. Steve, you might have had some reach out to you to sponsor podcasts and emails. And they're doing the exact same thing that like these account appeal specialists are doing when you get your account suspended. They're just doing brute force and they're just opening case after case after case trying to get your reviews removed. So it's something you can do yourself or you can use a review removal tool as well. And most of them you only pay per review that you get removed. So that is another option. And then the third more realistic option, you have to make up for it. If you're in a really competitive category where these bad actors exist, you got to be able to make up for it with a ton of five-star reviews and not buying fake five-star reviews. That's not a good option because eventually you will get caught. But you have to have that launch velocity when you launch to get a ton of reviews. So fine, there's your 30 free reviews. And then after that, you know, you really got to pump PPC and just get a ton of sales because you are going to get some percentage of people that are going to leave reviews. Hopefully it's a good product and you're going to get a lot of five-star reviews and not three-star reviews and just really blast in the beginning to get that order volume where those four reviews get washed away. That's kind of the only thing you can do. But, you know, sometimes you get four one-star reviews right out of the gate and you basically have to relaunch the product. Speaker 1: That's actually what I told him to do. He's like, you haven't shipped anything yet, so it's not a big deal. You'll have to remark your products. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Again, not a big deal. Just want to relaunch the listing. It ended up being good in the end, but like, it's just very frustrating and discouraging for someone who's new to hit that. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, it is. And the problem is with Amazon, They can't do anything against people buying either fake one-star reviews or five-star reviews because there was a time many years ago where if your product was getting a bunch of fake five-star reviews, you would have your product almost immediately suspended because Amazon can... Eventually, if you get enough of these fake reviews, Amazon knows that it's a fake review. At least one or two of their reviews will be detectable. They'll suspend the ASIN. And then sellers caught on, huh? Okay. Well, if I just leave Steve a bunch of fake five-star reviews, this product is going to get suspended because Amazon thinks that you're buying fake reviews for your own product. And Amazon realized that, that, oh, now this is just a technique. To get other people's products suspended by leaving them fake five-star reviews and you do it in enough quantity, they're going to get suspended. So now Amazon, they can't really suspend people when they're getting fake five-star reviews. All they can do is things like they're trying to do by taking down these actual review brokers, which they're not really doing a good job of. But actually suspending people who are buying fake five-star reviews, very, very, very tough for them to do anything. Speaker 1: Well, Dave, I know you do a lot more volume on Amazon than I do. What is your general feel of the landscape in terms of just bad activity? Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse? And what's your outlook on Amazon going forward? Speaker 2: I think Amazon is getting better at getting rid of bad actors. I think my best advice to people still though is avoid categories where bad actors exist. Things like off-roading products and boating products, really not a lot of bad actors. If you're selling supplements or beauty products, yeah, you're going to have a lot of bad actors in that space. Good reason to avoid those categories unless you're prepared to get into that fight. And if you are, I mean, some people are just more apt to participate in those things. By all means, go ahead. But if that's not a fight you want to do, avoid those categories. And those are the big two ones. Like, well, anything that's selling millions of dollars a month for top-selling ASIN, it's going to be a dirty, dirty fight. So avoid those categories. I think the best thing you can do We have a lot of products doing tens of thousands of dollars a month, not a single product doing millions of dollars a month. Speaker 1: Basically stay on the radar, right? Niche products, have a collection of them, diversify. If one gets hammered, you still have a whole bunch left over. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And if you avoid the categories where you're going to get into those fights, you're probably going to sleep better at night doing it. Speaker 1: I mean, one reason why I love just having the brand in the first place is because You know, people will actually search for your brand, right? Whereas on Amazon, like if you get taken down and the brand is in such small letters, someone will replace you eventually, someone will knock you off eventually. It's harder to do that when you have something recognizable or reputation out there, right? Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: I would argue that reputation is probably a lot of people think their brand reputation is more than it really is. I think actually having a brand that people are Googling on any volume is pretty rare and there are obviously brands that do it. But for the most part, I think we're kind of in a We're in a world where brands are becoming less and less important. And we're kind of just getting into just your plain Jane, private label products. And we all have Amazon to thank for that. Speaker 1: Interesting. I feel like it's going the other way now. Now that Timu has gotten drastically hurt also, right? Timu was like- In the U.S. Yeah, in the U.S., correct. In the U.S., yes. I'm very U.S. centric because I live here. Probably not in Canada, right? I mean, Timu is still probably going strong in Canada I would imagine. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And they're going all, I mean, they are definitely going very hard in Europe, Canada, Australia, trying to make up for that lost US volume. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So going forward, are you going to try any live selling with your brands or? Speaker 2: No, I don't think live selling is here just yet. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: Social selling, I do think, and that can be personally selling it yourself or working more aggressively with influencers. Definitely that is going to be a project for 2026 and going onwards. And it's something we have actually been pretty good about in the past, specifically working with YouTubers. So especially in the off-roading space, there's a very healthy community of off-road content creators there. So we've been pretty good with working with them in the past. And just going to continue down that path and breaking out to other platforms too, like especially TikTok and working with influencers there. Because again, it's very niche specific. When it comes to off-roading, there are a lot of content creators, both on TikTok and YouTube. So it makes it pretty easy to work with them. With something like a boating brand, there's actually not a lot of content creators there. So it makes it a little bit trickier. Speaker 1: I'm surprised. Okay. Speaker 2: Rich old guys, right? That's the problem. Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess. Speaker 2: You need young poor guys or girls. Speaker 1: So you're deciding to go the influencer route rather than creating your own content for the most part, it sounds like. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, create content for EcomCrew. That's actually what I'm kind of passionate about is creating content for e-commerce. You can only do so many things. I think if I was going to be the sole content creator for a brand, it would have to be something I'm uber, uber, uber passionate about because you can only fake it so much when it comes to a brand. Do I enjoy camping in the outdoors? Yes. Am I driving around in a lifted 4x4? No. You need to be the rule. Speaker 1: Of course, in the off-roading, you can't take your Prius off-roading, right? Speaker 2: You can get a Prius lifted, but yeah, it wouldn't be your typical day-to-day driver. Speaker 1: Well, what is the future of EcomCrew, actually? What's the goal there? Speaker 2: Well, first off, blogging has been very, very hit, especially in that space by Google Helpful. Again, speaking about social, I think definitely where people are consuming their information when it comes to e-commerce or really anything technology is more YouTube than anything else. So yeah, that's the big goal is to Get some traction on YouTube. I enjoy making the content there. I haven't quite succeeded in figuring out how to get it to stick there yet, but I think that's the transition is continue to go hard on YouTube, continue the podcast like we are. I think our email list and our emails that we put out weekly are really good as well. Those are kind of the three big ones. And then, you know, less emphasis on the blog. But like we were talking about offline, it's still a major component. To the brand, but definitely not as important as it was pre-helpful. Speaker 1: You know, I got to say, though, I think you're one of the few people that are still putting out blog posts on Amazon, and they're all really good. And obviously, I would trust your newsletter over something that AI hallucinates online. Speaker 2: So yeah, well, yeah. And AI has helped with repurposing content a lot. So it definitely makes it easy. And I'm here to talk to you about how you can make it easier to take something like a blog post and help regenerate that into content for your email list and into a script for YouTube. So AI has definitely helped in that part and just making jobs easier in terms of creating the content. Yeah, never in a million years could you trust it to give you any real e-commerce advice, but it definitely helps with some of just the day-to-day tasks with repurposing content because that's a big part about content is repurposing. Speaker 1: Yeah. So Dave, where can people find you online? Where can people sign up for your newsletter? Where can people check out your YouTube channel? I'll link all this stuff, of course, but say it verbally. Speaker 2: Sure. EcomCrew.com and anyone listening should go to YouTube.com slash EcomCrew. Subscribe. That would be great. But yeah, those are the two big ones. EcomCrew.com and YouTube.com slash EcomCrew. Speaker 1: And I will say this here first. I think the channel is going to break out this year. If you keep putting out hits like the last video, I think it's going to be really good. Speaker 2: Okay, am I nipping at your heels there? 400,000 subscribers? Speaker 1: You know what's funny about YouTube? I don't feel like there's any competition in the space, you know what I'm saying? It's like rising tide lifts all boats. It's not like we're going head to head on anything. So I'm always happy to help promote you with any of the content that you put out. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that is the beautiful thing about YouTube. You're absolutely right. You can have multiple topics or multiple creators on a topic and they don't cannibalize each other's content. They don't take away anything from the other guy. Some people like ketchup. Some people like mustard. Some people like mayonnaise. And so you can have something for everybody's taste buds. Speaker 1: Yep. So go check out the EcomCrew channel. Speaker 2: Thank you, Steve, for the recommendation. Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed this episode. Amazon is still getting the squeeze from all sides, so make sure you check my YouTube channel to learn how to fight back. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 621. And once again, tickets to Sellers Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellerssummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellerssummit.com.