Frequently asked questions

The questions worth answering before you buy, and the ones that come up in the first week.

Before you buy

Do I need to pay for an AI subscription?

No. Vantage includes an analysis engine that runs on your own server and handles sentiment scoring, themes, SWOT, reports, charts and alerts with no external service. Connecting your own AI key is optional and upgrades the written analysis. If you do connect one, you pay your provider directly — typically a few dollars a year per store. Vantage never proxies or resells inference.

Does this need my Amazon Seller or Shopify API credentials?

No. Vantage reads publicly visible review pages and public review-app widgets. The one optional credential is a Judge.me API token, which makes Shopify collection faster and more reliable if your store uses Judge.me.

Can I use it for products I don't sell?

Technically yes — reviews are public. Whether that's appropriate is your call. Vantage is built for a store owner watching their own products, and the report recommendations are written on that assumption.

What happens when Amazon changes its page layout?

Collection for that source stops working until the product is updated. Vantage detects this specifically — it distinguishes "no reviews found" from "we no longer understand this page" — alerts you, and keeps everything already collected. In the meantime you can export reviews and import them via CSV so reports keep running. This is an inherent property of any review-scraping tool; Vantage is built to detect and survive it rather than pretend it won't happen.

Will this get my server blocked?

Vantage is deliberately conservative: it honours robots.txt, spaces requests several seconds apart with random jitter, identifies itself honestly, backs off exponentially on errors, and stops entirely for two hours if a site blocks it repeatedly. You cannot configure it to be aggressive. That said, no scraping tool can guarantee it will never be blocked — set an honest user agent and leave the delay generous.

How many stores can I connect?

A Regular license covers one connected store and 5,000 reviews a month. An Extended license removes both limits and is the right choice for agencies.

Does it work on shared hosting?

Only if your host allows cron jobs and long-running background processes. Collecting reviews is deliberately slow and cannot run inside a web request. Most VPS hosting is fine; the cheapest shared plans often are not.

Using it

How long until my first report?

Collection starts immediately. A report needs at least five reviews in the period, and generates on your chosen day covering the previous complete week. If your store already has review history, you can generate one immediately from the store page.

Can I analyze historical reviews?

Yes. Amazon and Shopify collection walks back through existing review pages, so your first collection picks up history, not just new reviews. For a complete back-catalog, a CSV export from the source is the most thorough route.

Why is sentiment different from the star rating?

Because the words carry more information than the stars. A four-star review that spends two paragraphs on crushed packaging is not a happy customer. Vantage weights both, with the star rating counting for roughly half. When they disagree noticeably, the text is usually the more honest signal.

Can I add my own themes?

The theme vocabulary is fixed in app/Services/Analysis/Lexicon.php and can be edited if you're comfortable in the code. It's deliberately a fixed list: free-text themes would mean "shipping delay" and "slow delivery" counted as different things, which makes trends meaningless over time.

Can I export a report?

Use your browser's print-to-PDF. The report page is styled to print cleanly.

Can several people use it?

Yes — create additional users against the same workspace. Everyone sees the same stores and reports. Users are separated by workspace, so one installation can serve several clients with complete data isolation.

What happens if I change AI model?

New reviews are scored with the new model. Existing scores stay as they are unless you use Re-score all reviews on the store page — which will consume tokens proportional to your review count, so consider it before running it on a large store.

Does re-collecting create duplicates?

No. Every review is fingerprinted on its content, so re-reading a page it has already seen adds nothing. You can run a collection as often as you like.

Can I delete a store but keep its reports?

No — deleting a store removes its reviews, reports and alerts. Print or export anything you want to keep first.

Data and privacy

Where is my data stored?

Entirely in your own database on your own server. Vantage has no phone-home, no telemetry and no hosted component.

Is my AI key safe?

It is stored encrypted with your application key and used only for outbound requests from your server to your chosen provider. It is never displayed after saving and never leaves your infrastructure except to the provider you chose.

Are reviews sent to the AI provider?

Only if you connect a key. When you do, review text is sent to your provider for scoring and — for the weekly report — a representative sample is included in the prompt. Reviews are public content, but if that matters to your compliance position, run without a key: everything still works.