The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
White-Hat Review Removal & Amazon Survival Tactics with Ecom Triage’s Danan Coleman | EP. #207
Want to turn harmful reviews into real revenue while staying 100% within Amazon’s rules? In this episode of The E-Comm Show, host Andrew Maff sits down with Danan Coleman, founder of Ecom Triage and long-time Amazon seller, to unpack a white-hat system for identifying and removing policy-violating negative reviews — and why each removal can be worth the impact of 7–12 five-star reviews.
Danan shares how he’s been selling on Amazon since 2010, why his supplement brand hasn’t run paid ads for seven years, and what those choices taught him about community, retention, and margin. He also previews Catalog Defender, his forthcoming tool for catching critical ASIN issues, and explains how he became the e-commerce world’s unofficial party-list curator for major events like Prosper and Accelerate.
From October Prime Day perspectives to account-suspension horror stories, Danan and Andrew get practical about omni-channel risk, fraud patterns in reviews, and the exact escalation paths that actually work. Whether you’re a founder, operator, or agency, this episode gives you a defensible playbook to protect ratings, profits, and sanity.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- The 7–12x Effect: Why removing a single non-compliant negative review can mimic the impact of multiple new five-star reviews — and how to quantify it.
- White-Hat Only: Danan’s AI-assisted process trained on Amazon policies to flag violations and file targeted cases (no customer contact, no grey-hat tactics).
- 10+ Escalation Paths: Beyond Seller Support — the lesser-known forms and routes that increase takedown success and how to sequence them.
- Fraud Pattern Detection: Spotting reviewer networks across ASINs and submitting fraud cases the right way.
- Operator Lessons from 2010–Today: Building during the “heyday,” avoiding ad dependency, and surviving platform changes.
- When Amazon Goes Sideways: Real account-suspension stories, the hidden costs, and why diversification matters.
- Event Strategy for E-Com Pros: How Danan curates must-attend meetups and why smaller rooms often beat big open bars.
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For every one negative review that I remove, it's like acquiring seven to 12 five star reviews.
Narrator:Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry, from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Ecomm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, today I'm joined by the amazing Danan Coleman, Dan. You are the founder over at eCom Triage. You're also the host of the ecomm growth show, which was I was lucky enough to be a guest on. So thank you, sir.
Danan Coleman:You're welcome.
Andrew Maff:I always like starting these off, kind of it's a little stereotypical, and that's okay, such is life. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started with ecom triage, where you're at, where you been. Let's go from there. I'll give you the floor. Go for it, all right.
Danan Coleman:So my name is Danan Coleman. I like long walks down short peers, and I started selling on Amazon in 2010 in heyday, yeah, heyday, for sure, back then. So there was no FBA. Was invite only and and ads didn't exist yet. That was in beta. And if you had an image, an image, you just made sales. Those days are long gone. They have developed into a much greater thing. I I did come from the silver bullet days, but I'm still an active seller today. We still sell supplements.
Andrew Maff:Wow, that's a crowded space.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, we have brand recognition, so I'm not suggesting this people, but we don't even run ads. We haven't run ads on on our product, and in seven years, our highest repeat customer has given us$8,900 and on Amazon. And we don't, we only do Amazon and yeah, so that's kind of my selling history. And I got into software in 2018 with managed by stats, and then actually started a podcast and a over there and and did all of the video and audio stuff, which was just an amazing time. I loved it, and I hated the editing, though, editing, but yeah, so and then, and then this year, end of last year, but really the beginning of this year, I started eCom Triage, and I removed negative product reviews for Amazon sellers. I am also a consultant, but I'm not the kind of consultant like, hey, how do I get this product from this much sales to that much sales? I'm more along the lines of, where are the where are the gaps and the fires in your company? Cool? I know somebody that can help you with that, or I can make suggestions based on my own.
Andrew Maff:Gotcha
Danan Coleman:Experience of being a corporate fireman, you know what I mean? Yeah, interesting, yeah. And then, and then, now, I've also got catalog defender, which is a software, fourth forth, forthcoming software that detects critical issues on ASINs. And then, as you said, my show and got a newsletter that's only about events, ecom events and so, yeah, if you've ever seen like, the parties list for prosper, show or accelerate, that's, I'm the one that puts that together, the big one anyhow.
Andrew Maff:Ah, wow. Those have to, how do you do that? That's got to be so complicated. Because I feel like, like, so as of this recording, where, I guess you would kind of early slash, mid August, will be going to Innovate in New York in a few weeks. And I feel like every three or four days, I get an invite to something new that someone decided they're going to throw together. Like, how do you how do you facilitate all that?
Danan Coleman:So I just get onto the lines of those people, like, obviously MDS is going to be there. So I just ask MDs, what's going on? You know? Yeah, I've been doing strategic partnerships in this space for, I think, almost five years. So I know a lot of the people and a lot of the companies that are in the space, and I'm starting to get known as, you know, Danan and the party guy, and not, not to be mistaken with party danaan, but Danan and the party guy, and they'll, they'll say, Hey, where's the list? This is what we're doing, and I'll just put it on the list. And then once it's gotten to be about, probably three weeks before, maybe two weeks before the event. Then I push it out to all my friends to help me promote the list and and just so this is purely to help all the companies in the space to drive traffic to their parties. Because, yeah, nobody wants to do a party and then have, like, only 10 people show up and they're all you service providers?
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I could see this podcast getting so interesting now, because I did not know that you were the E comm party guy. So I'll try not to make this about the entire episode, but now I'm extremely intrigued by this. So who puts who puts on great events. Who puts on bad events? What? Like, Give me. Give me. Give me. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen in an event? Like, let's go. What do you got?
Danan Coleman:Oh, man, anything good, yeah. Actually, the craziest thing that I it was a dance off. I should have been of it when you were in it. Fantastic, yep, but the fellow contestants, like, as I was doing the worm, decided to go on top of me and pretend like I was a horse. And then that won her mission. And then, yeah, it was a, I should have won it. But anyhow, that's you can't do that long time ago, folks, okay, and you know, truth be told, the parties aren't actually that crazy, and the best parties are definitely Prosper.
Andrew Maff:No, it's Vegas.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, It's Vegas. And my favorite city to dislike and but nobody really puts on a bad party. It's just, what are you looking for? Me, personally. I'd rather go have some scotch in a cigar with 10 people than go to open bar with 400 or even 100 Yeah, you know, yeah, I agree, yeah, even so. I co hosted a dinner at Accelerate with Trellis and a couple of other companies. And there was, we had 170 registrations for it, and only enough people. We could only let in, like 120 and that was a really crowded room. And I'll be honest with you, like at the at the party that I paid to be a part of, I just went and sat down with my friends.
Andrew Maff:We did we did something at prosper and shop talk this year with Amazon, and we did it at one of the ice bars.
Danan Coleman:Oh, yeah.
Andrew Maff:And so, like, we did it invite only, and we, I think we only. We limited it to like, 50 or 60 people. And even in one of those, it's like, this is too many people. This is, I can't I just, and I'm exhausted. I want to just have a nice drink and enjoy myself at this point. Yeah. But there's always so many of them. So it's like, a lot of people would show up for like, 20 minutes and then be like, Alright, I gotta go to this other one now. And so it's just like a revolving door of people the whole time.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, totally. It's, it's, you know, you get the people that are party hopping, you know, they've, yeah, that's one of the things was that wasn't shop talk on the Oh no. It was, wait a minute, what was the name of your party?
Andrew Maff:Oh, man, what did we call it was in a speakeasy. So I think we ran with that. It was, it was kind of with shop talk, more so than it was with prosper, because it was in, it was in the hotel, at shop talk, but we were actually at pro. Well, we were technically at both, but we were actually a prosper. Got it. I can't remember what it was actually called.
Danan Coleman:I had that. I had the shop talk beach party on my list. Yeah, I didn't really go there, yeah, yeah, okay. I didn't, I didn't have, don't really have a lot of people on the network of Shopify, so I didn't go.
Andrew Maff:I'll hook you up.
Danan Coleman:Oh yeah, no, I'll promote your parties. You know, cool.
Andrew Maff:I gotta, I gotta figure out another one, because that one was, that was a zoo. Anyway, we I won't, I won't hijack this whole thing to talk about partying. So tell me about good point. Thank you. So what made you start ecom triage? Where did you what kind of gap Did you see there?
Danan Coleman:So well, basically, the thing is, is, I've been doing strategic partnerships in the space for a really long time. I honestly I should have started my own company, like many, many, many years ago. But the truth of the matter is, is I really enjoy working with a team in my own company. It's It's me, occasionally, my wife, and then I've got one VA who's incredible, but he's not here with me. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I really like having a group where I can be like, Hey, let's do this project, and then I can rely upon people to be like, go do that research, put this document together, help me organize. I'm more of the dreamer in a company than I am like the doer, and I'm capable of doing the doing, for sure, but I really like to dream and come up with ideas and then put the right people in place to execute that and then manage the execution. I just feel personally I'm better suited at that. And so what led to me starting ecom triage was there's definitely a gap in the market for negative reviews and sellers not being able to get them removed. And I had some experience at another company that I helped build in the space, and then we parted ways. And so I went, you know what? I'll just do this myself. And there was a few ways that I prefer, would have preferred to have done business. And so I just implemented that into my own company. All all of my customers speak to the founder, which is me. They all have access to me and and then I also try to help them in other ways. So one of the, one of the ways that I ensure that I can, I don't know. I guess I'm just branded as like, Hey, I'm always there to help, like, you can rely on me if you need me, if you abuse it, I'll just let you know. But that's really, actually only happened, like two times where people are are abusing my network and stuff like that, through, through, like, just getting me to work for them for free. I'm like, okay, hey, you know what? I don't work for free, so, yeah, expensive, but exactly as you should be. Yeah, exactly. And I just, I try to help whoever's right in front of me. It really doesn't matter if I can help, I will try to help, and usually that's by way of introduction.
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Andrew Maff:So your your main focus, obviously, on the Amazon space. As we're having this conversation, we're on, what is it? Day two of October, Prime Day.
Danan Coleman:Oh, yeah, oh my gosh.
Andrew Maff:How any any initial thoughts on how have you looked into anything on how yesterday went for anyone you're working with. Yeah? Me, either. I gotta do that so much preparation that it's nothing. Although, tell me, what are your thoughts on October's Prime Day? I mean, in my opinion, at least from last year's, it was, like, all right, I can see some stuff, but like, it wasn't, it wasn't July's Prime Day.
Danan Coleman:Yeah. So, I mean, we don't do Prime Day deals. We don't do coupons, we don't do discounts, we don't do any of that. We, that being said, your own brand, right? Correct? Yes, yeah, okay, and I'm not. I don't manage anyone's brand either. So all I do is negative review removal, catalog defender, and then my own stuff with the podcast and the newsletter and stuff like that. And so we see an organic lift in our sales every holiday. We'll call it every holiday on Amazon, we see an organic lift as well, but we don't have to pay for it. And what's strange to me is that we're consumable, you know, like people come back every 30 days to get their product from us, and yet we still see a lift. So, you know, again, this is not something I'm suggesting, suggesting that anybody do. But, you know, I want the most amount of money and the revenue with the most amount of profit and the least amount of work and so if I don't have to run deals to see an organic lift, like, Haha, okay, is it less? Yeah, it is, yeah. But my wife doesn't have to, like, you know, put three children in a room. Be like, I'm locking this door. I'll let you out in one hour once I built this coupon and deployed it, you know, it's like, yeah, just, just be with family. That doesn't work for everyone, and I get that and and our, our Amazon at this point, is really quite a passive income for us, but, but it's 15 years old, so not everyone has that opportunity, either.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I was gonna say like you, as you've said a couple times now, not necessarily that you would suggest it from not running an ADS perspective, like I, you know, getting, getting in during the heyday is, is, was a game changer for so many brands, because you can do exactly what you're doing now, or you could be in another situation and be looking at it in a different light. But the like starting off now it's, I would say it is impossible to do well on Amazon without some type of advertising, ideally on the platform, but also even off the platform.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, or significant brand recognition.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, which, unless you're really leaning in, heavy into, like, social and influencers, then you're just paying someone else instead of the ads. But, yeah, yeah.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, and, like, if I launched a, I don't know, a Logitech keyboard, I might make sales without doing ads.
Andrew Maff:Yes, yeah, but you're, you're, you're benefiting, you're kind of piggybacking off their existing brand awareness and just leaning in on Logitech keywords.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, well, that's how I built my Amazon business was leaning on someone else's brand awareness. So to be clear, this is not a private label product. I have exclusivity to this product. And then we get the product on consignment, so we don't pay for inventory, and then we pay once a month for whatever sold the previous month.
Andrew Maff:Oh, that sounds nice.
Danan Coleman:It is and sit back and enjoy it pretty much. Yeah. I mean, there is some work involved. Amazon is still Amazon, and they still do what they do to all of us as sellers and like we've been suspended for no reason. Once we had a product suspended because there was an ingredient that was spelled somewhat similar to an ingredient that was banned, which I don't even know what that ingredient was, probably like, bone marrow extract or something it was some kind of marrow, Shark marrow, something like that. I don't know. And, and we're like, this is this? This is a different ingredient, and it for a year, we couldn't get that product sold back on Amazon. And we're like, all right, whatever. We're not selling this product. And then a year later, we see someone else on it, and we're like, hey, Amazon, what's this? Like, oh yeah, it's totally fine. Like, oh, oh cool. It's totally fine. We'll sell it to them listing. And then that was that so.
Andrew Maff:Got to love it, yeah, so many. This is why I preach, like omni channel stuff is just the horror stories of ridiculous things that happen on Amazon. It's just if that one product was your sole business, you'd be screwed.
Danan Coleman:Like we've almost gone bankrupt twice, just because of some the last time was during covid. So our our sales went gangbusters. 2020, 2021, and then so we had four Seller Central accounts, two in the US and two in the UK. And Amazon shut down, three of them with no communication, no warnings, no email, no nothing. And I we call them. We're like, what's going on? And Seller Support says, well, we don't know. Contact. Seller performance, like, Okay, what's going on? Like, no, it looks fine here. I'm like, it ain't fine. What's going on? Like, I can't log in. And, like, yeah, I have no idea what's wrong. It looks perfect over here, like you have an excellent rating. Like, yes, yes, I do. For 13 years we have a perfect rating. Why can't I sell? Like, yeah, I really don't know. And it took me four months to get my accounts back, and it literally killed us, and we paid long term storage fees during that time with no inventory going anywhere. Exactly, oh, man, I eventually had to leverage a friend inside of Amazon who was not in in the space of like, getting the stuff done. I just basically begged him, like, Dude, I don't know what's going on. I know, you know people in this in this section, I have tried everything. Here's 50 different case numbers, because this is also the time when, when you were submitting cases, that they would resolve them without any response. So we would just case, case, case, case, they get resolved, resolved, resolved, resolved. And that was part of the problem. So eventually that person came through for me, I think, because one day my account was just back.
Andrew Maff:Oh man.
Danan Coleman:So anyhow, I I know the pain, I know the pain, and I fully agree of being omni channel, fully agree, even though I don't actually do it.
Andrew Maff:Well, I mean, in your scenario, I totally get it. Plus you're, you know, you're piggybacking off of another brand's brand awareness. So it makes a ton of sense, yeah, for us, like my, my story was, this was 2015 I think it was, I was working, I was in house with a pretty good size, I think, really kind of low eight figure brand. I was running marketing just started, wife and I had just put a mortgage on a house, like we were there. Yeah, that was we start. I started in August by it was the first two weeks of December. So we're peak, peak q4 and back then, you know, you're changing out credit card cards, because you're you're hitting cap on spend. Yeah, so we change out the credit card, and for whatever reason, Amazon thought it was fraud, shut down the entire account for two weeks. And I'm freaking out. I'm like, I'm out of a job. We were like, 70, if I remember correctly, like 70-75% of the business was Amazon. So I'm like, I'm out of a job. They're going to fire me because they they don't need me anymore because this business is shutting down, yeah, and so I immediately sweat like we were getting we were able to get back up in a couple weeks, but it was just a switch of, like, we have to diversify. This is stupid, like we we can't run this risk of this just completely up and down business, that while it looks great and the numbers are fantastic, it's so risky. Yeah, what's the, what's the negative review side? So what's, what's the specialty there? What's your kind of approach into making sure that those are taken care of correctly?
Danan Coleman:Yeah. So we use a an entirely white hat method. I'll let everybody know I only do white hat stuff and we download all the negative reviews. We run it through an AI that's trained on Amazon's Terms of Service, community guidelines and about 10 other different policies having to do with what reviews are and are not and should be and should not be and stuff like that. Then we get a list of the negative reviews that violate those terms of service in some manner, and then we categorize them by well, we think we've got a good chance of getting these removed, and then we will individually file cases on every single one of those reviews over time. And ultimately that what that translates into, and what matters to any seller is that I can remove somewhere around five to 10% of the negative reviews. And you know that that for every one negative review that I remove, it's like acquiring seven to 12 five star reviews. Yeah, so if you have a strategy, if, let's say no strategy on acquiring five star reviews, average is one to 2% of your sales will leave a review. So if you want to acquire 10 five star reviews, you got to make 1000 sales, whereas if I remove just a single negative review that has rough, roughly the same weight, it's not the review system. It's not mathematical, just in case anyone thinks that it is nowhere, even close to mathematical, yeah, so, you know, that's a range, but that's basically what we do. And then we just keep track of every single review, and we we get after them, you know? And it's all Amazon, by the way, Amazon removes the review. We're not dealing with customers. We're not, we're not paying people off. You know, it's Amazon, so we are dealing directly with Amazon.
Andrew Maff:Is that through, like, once you kind of decipher what those reviews are, is it through, like, support tickets or, like, how are you actually getting them to take it down?
Danan Coleman:We have about 10 different methods, maybe more at our disposal to get reviews removed. All sellers know about Seller Support, and Seller Support will ignore you and tell you, we don't do this. You need to go to community help. So now they know about community help, and they know about the report button. I have seven plus additional methods and forms that I use on a designated escalation path depending on the type of review. And then we also go after fraud. So fraudulent reviews like we're looking for associations between all of your ASINs, and whether you've been hit by the same review on multiple ASINs, or even on the same asin or the same reviewer has left you multiple negative reviews across your catalog. So when we get a holistic view of everything, we start to see what's, what's going on, you know? And then we'll, we'll do a fraud case with Amazon.
Andrew Maff:Interesting. Makes sense.
Danan Coleman:Yeah.
Andrew Maff:Dan, this was awesome. I really appreciate your time. I don't want to take up too much more of it to let you tell everyone, man, where can they find you? Where I think coming find ecom Triage. What party should they be going to? Then? Now's your chance.
Danan Coleman:Well, okay, so we don't have the parties yet. I mean, we'll be at Innovate. MDS. Is going to do something? Are you doing anything?
Andrew Maff:I will be with MDS, so I'll see you there.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, good. So MDS and then capex will have a party. That party is going to be, I'm not going to say, because I can't remember, but it'll be on the list. And then to find me, I am on LinkedIn. I am absolutely atrocious at being like, Oh yeah, confirm. I would like to talk to this person. So danan at Danan enterprises, or danan@ecomtriage.com both of them.com go to the website, yeah, or find me at the party.
Andrew Maff:That sounds like a great way to find you.
Danan Coleman:Yeah, that's the way to do it.
Andrew Maff:Dan. Thank you so much buddy. Obviously, everyone that tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecom show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you next time. Have a good one.
Danan Coleman:Bye, everybody.
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to Ecom show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The Ecomm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth, go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the Ecomm Show.
