How Tradeloper works

Setup takes about 2 minutes. The wizard walks you through four steps:

1. Business name — what your customers see in the message ("Thanks for choosing Your Name Here").
2. Business type — used to personalise the AI social post captions.
3. City — helps us find your business on Google Maps for daily review tracking.
4. Google review link — the URL that opens the "Write a review" dialog.

Three ways to find your link:

• Google your business name → click "Write a review" → copy the URL from your browser.
• Open Google Business Profile → "Get more reviews" → "Share".
• Look for a URL starting with g.page/, maps.app.goo.gl/, or google.com/maps/place/.

Three ways to add a customer:

• Tap ＋ on the Customers page — name + email (phone optional). Takes 10 seconds.
• Bulk paste / CSV upload — up to 500 at once. Format: Name, Phone, Email one per line. Header row is auto-detected.
• Text the command from your phone — see section 8.

Every review request uses a short tradeloper.com/r/… link. When your customer taps it:

1. We log the click — no raw IPs stored, just a daily-salted hash for privacy.
2. We 302-redirect to your Google review page in under 200ms.
3. The customer's row flips to Opened so you know they engaged.

When your Google review count goes up, we automatically mark the most-recently-clicked customers as Likely reviewed. Tap the green button to confirm with one tap.

Pick a tone or write your own. Five templates ship by default:

• Friendly — warm and casual, works for most trades.
• Brief — short and to the point. The only default 1-segment template (cheapest to send).
• After a tough job — for when you went above and beyond.
• Repeat customer — acknowledges loyalty.
• Custom — write your own. Must include {{review_link}}.

Placeholders {{name}}, {{business_name}}, and {{review_link}} are substituted automatically. The "Reply STOP to opt out" footer is added for you and is not editable.

A standard SMS holds 160 characters (GSM-7 plain text). Longer messages are split into multiple segments — you pay per segment.

Each template card in Settings shows the segment count and cost badge upfront before you save.

If a customer has an email address, we automatically follow up by email — but only if they haven't clicked the link, reviewed, or opted out. Right now we're email-first: the first request itself is an email, and customers with no phone on file get one gentle reminder email about a week later if they still haven't clicked or reviewed. Same branded redirect link, tracked the same way.

• Customers can unsubscribe per-email via the footer link.
• You can disable the whole email channel from Settings → Business profile → Send email follow-ups.

Text your Tradeloper number from your registered phone:

add Jane Smith 5551234567

We add Jane and reply with a confirmation. Within 10 minutes, reply SEND to fire the review request immediately.

We query Google Maps every day for your business. If we find it, your dashboard shows the live count, a "+N since you joined" delta, and a 30-day sparkline chart.

• The first count we capture becomes your baseline.
• If the auto-match fails (similar business names in nearby cities), use retry the lookup in Settings or enter the count manually.

"Give me a couple weeks then ask" — handled. On any active customer row, tap ⋯ then choose:

• Pause 2 weeks or Pause 1 month — auto-resumes after the period.
• Pause indefinitely — you resume manually when ready.

Paused customers are skipped by both the automated follow-up cron and the manual Send button.

Tradeloper is a Progressive Web App — pin it to your home screen and it opens like a native app (no browser chrome, full screen).

• iPhone (Safari): tap the Share button → "Add to Home Screen".
• Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu → "Install app" or "Add to Home Screen".

Tap the Tradeloper icon on your home screen — done.

STOP is mandatory — and Tradeloper handles it automatically. Every SMS we send includes "Reply STOP to opt out" in the footer. If a customer texts STOP back, our inbound webhook auto-marks them as opted-out and they will never be texted again from your account. This is required by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA, 47 U.S.C. § 227) and US carrier rules. You do not need to do anything — the footer cannot be removed.

10DLC carrier registration is required to send SMS in the US. 10DLC ("10-digit long code") is the carrier framework every business must register under to send application-to-person texts on a standard US number. Without it, messages get filtered as spam. Registration costs about $4 in one-time carrier fees and takes ~10 minutes. We walk you through it during signup — you provide your legal business name and EIN, we submit it to the carriers.

Explicit consent is on you. Before adding any customer to Tradeloper, you must have their prior express consent to receive SMS from your business. In practice this means: they gave you their mobile number for the purpose of communicating about the job, and they agreed (verbally, on a form, or via a checkbox) to be texted. The consent checkbox on the Add Customer screen confirms this — we keep a 4-year audit trail of who consented and when. Never upload a list of numbers you bought, scraped, or pulled from public directories.

Tradeloper has two AI tools that turn one good review into more business:

• Social post generator — paste a 5-star review snippet on Posts, click Generate post, and you get a ready-to-paste caption for Facebook or Instagram. Tone is tuned to your trade.
• Photo post (Pro) — upload a job-site photo and we generate a caption that pairs with it.
• Reply suggestions — on the Reviews page, every fetched Google review gets a Generate reply button. The tone changes based on the star rating (warm for 5★, accountable for 1–3★).

Daily caps protect you from runaway use:

• Starter — AI social & photo posts aren't included; they're a Pro feature. Starter focuses on collecting reviews.
• Pro — 30 AI posts + 15 photo posts per day, 200 + 60 per month, plus AI reply suggestions for Google reviews (30/day).

Pro plans can post replies straight to Google without leaving Tradeloper:

1. Go to Settings → Connect Google. We'll redirect you through Google's standard consent screen.
2. On the Reviews page, tap Generate reply on any review → edit the suggestion → tap Post to Google.
3. The reply appears under the review on your Google Business Profile within seconds.

We only request business.manage scope. Tokens are encrypted at rest and you can disconnect anytime from Settings.

Turn on Send personalised MMS image in Settings and every review-request SMS becomes an MMS with a 450×450 image that says "Hi Jane!" in your brand navy. Trade-show research shows MMS open rates are 20–30% higher than plain SMS.

Carrier fees for MMS are slightly higher per send — but the response uplift more than pays for it.

Two Pro tools for sending more than one at a time:

• Batch send — on Customers, tick the checkboxes on the rows you want and tap Send review request. Up to 25 at a time.
• Reactivation campaign — re-text every customer still sitting at "pending" or "no_response". One tap, daily-cap-aware, with a result banner showing how many fired vs skipped.

Both respect: per-customer pauses, STOPs, the cross-user opt-out registry, your 8am–9pm quiet hours, and your daily-send cap (50/day on Pro).

The faster you reply to a bad review, the less damage it does. Our daily Google Maps sync emails you within a day of a new 1–3 star review appearing — with the reviewer name, the snippet, and a deep link to /reviews where you can use Generate reply and respond within minutes.

• Quiet hours: we don't email between 11pm and 7am in your local timezone — the email queues for the morning.
• Hard cap of 3 alerts per fetch cycle — protects you from a blast email if 10 old reviews land at once on first sync.

Two printable artifacts for the truck and the job site:

• QR code — Settings has a high-res QR linking to your review page. Tap to download as a PNG.
• Yard sign / job-site card — visit /yard-sign for a print-ready 8.5×11 page ("Loved our work? Leave us a Google review" + your QR), or /yard-sign?size=card for a 3.5×2 business-card layout to drop on invoices.

Set a customer's language on the Add Customer modal or the detail page. We swap in our Spanish template pack so they receive: "Hola Jane, gracias por elegir Acme Plumbing! Si tienes un momento, una resena rapida ayudaria muchisimo — {link}. Responde STOP para cancelar."

Spanish stays English-quality but intentionally unaccented (no á é í ó ú ñ). Why: a single accented character flips the SMS to UCS-2 encoding which halves segment size to 70 characters and triples Twilio cost. Industry-standard for bilingual US trades messaging.

The STOP keyword stays literal in Spanish (Responde STOP para cancelar) so Twilio's opt-out detection still triggers from native Spanish speakers.

Two plans:

• Starter — $9/month or $79/year (save 27%). The core review-collection loop: up to 10 email review requests a day (with follow-ups), daily Google review tracking, read every review, negative-review alerts, click tracking, and a QR code & yard sign.
• Pro — $29/month or $249/year (save 28%). Everything in Starter, plus the whole get-found & growth toolkit: local rank tracking + heatmap across your service area, Google & Facebook profile scores, job pins, AI social + photo posts, the reviews widget for your site, post replies directly to Google (+ AI reply suggestions, 30/day), reactivation & batch send, custom review-request templates, funnel CSV export, and 50 review requests a day.

Upgrade Starter → Pro from /upgrade. Paddle prorates the charge so you only pay the difference for the rest of the cycle.

Pause for the season — if business is slow (winter for landscapers, summer for snow plows), tap Pause in Settings. Billing stops, no charges, your data and customer list stay intact. Resume any time.

Cancel anytime — /cancel-flow. We may show you a one-time save offer (annual discount, free 60 or 90-day pause, or a 15-minute call with the founder), but there's a clear "Cancel anyway" path. No retention runaround.

30-day money-back guarantee — if Tradeloper isn't working for you in the first 30 days, click Refund my subscription in Settings. We refund every payment in full and cancel the subscription automatically. No questions, no email back-and-forth.

The dashboard funnel shows the Sent → Clicked → Reviewed conversion in three windows: 7-day, 30-day, 90-day. Click rate and review rate are computed per window. Average Google rating across all reviews posted in that window is shown alongside.

Pro CSV export — on the funnel panel, tap Export CSV for a row-per-customer dump with timestamps, click count, and final status. Useful for trade associations, franchise reporting, or just spreadsheet sanity-checks.

Two small features that pay back daily:

• Notes — tap any customer row → type a private note ("Spanish-speaking", "prefers email", "Tuesdays only after 4pm"). Notes are owner-only — never shared with the customer. A 📝 marker appears on rows that have a note.
• Recently-deleted — when you delete a customer, they go into a 30-day soft-delete bin (/customers/recently-deleted). One tap to restore. After 30 days they're hard-purged.

Day-7 follow-up: if a customer hasn't responded after the first request, we automatically send a softer reminder a week later. You don't need to schedule this — it just runs.

Pro plans can let a second person add customers by SMS without giving them your login. Go to Settings → Add customers by SMS → Crew phones and paste up to 10 additional phone numbers, one per line. Anyone texting from an allowlisted number can use:

add Jane Smith 5551234567

Use cases: an apprentice out in the field, an office manager doing end-of-day data entry, or a business partner running a second van.

Starter accounts see an upgrade card here instead of the textarea.

A few things happen in the background without you touching anything:

• Day-7 SMS follow-up — if a customer still hasn't clicked the review link after 7 days, we send one softer reminder between 10am and 2pm in their local timezone. It's bilingual (matches the customer's language setting), and it's skipped automatically if they've already reviewed, opted out, been paused, or tapped the link recently. The "↩ Day-7 follow-up SMS sent" badge appears on the customer row when it fires.
• Day-3 email follow-up — already covered in chapter 7. Works alongside the Day-7 SMS as a one-two sequence.
• Weekly Monday recap email — arrives in your inbox between 9am and 11am your local time every Monday. It includes: review requests sent in the last 7 days, link opens, new Google reviews added, and your running total. Sent once per Monday and only if you had activity that week.

This is different from pausing a single customer (chapter 10). Pausing your subscription stops billing entirely while keeping all your data — customers, notes, review history — intact.

Tap Pause subscription in Settings. Paddle schedules the pause for the start of your next billing period, so you keep full service through the cycle you already paid for. After that, billing stops for up to 60 days and resumes automatically.

• Resume early — tap Unpause in Settings at any time. Billing restarts immediately.
• 90-day seasonal pause — available only through the cancel flow (chapter 26 → "Seasonal — coming back later" reason).

Settings → Cancel subscription takes you to /cancel-flow. There are two steps:

1. Pick a reason — the choice drives what happens next.
2. One contextual save offer (if applicable):

• Too expensive → switch to annual at $79/year (saves 27%).
• Not getting enough reviews → free 15-min setup call with the founder.
• Didn't have time to use it → pause billing for 60 days.
• Seasonal — coming back later → pause billing for 90 days.
• Found something else or Something else → no save offer, optional one-sentence feedback box, straight to cancel.

From the save-offer screen you always have three exits: Back to reasons, No thanks, cancel anyway, or Never mind, keep my subscription. The 30-day money-back guarantee still applies regardless of the path you take.

Every account has a unique referral link in Settings → Refer a business. Your link looks like https://tradeloper.com/?ref=ABC12345. Share it with another business owner and when they sign up via your link, we record the referral against your account.

• Share via SMS and Share via WhatsApp buttons are pre-wired with suggested copy — just tap and send.
• Settings shows a live progress bar toward your 3 paying signups — how many have signed up and how many have become paying customers so far.
• The attribution survives across page loads until the new user completes signup.

Once you've sent us 3 paying signups, email hello@tradeloper.com and we credit your account manually. No automatic discount mechanism yet — just a real human applying the credit when you reach the threshold.

Settings → Delete account is permanent and different from cancelling. Cancelling keeps your data so you can resubscribe later. Deletion removes everything.

When you delete, the system:

1. Re-verifies your password — you must type it, so a stolen session cannot wipe your account.
2. Cancels your Paddle subscription immediately, with no waiting for the cycle end.
3. Hard-deletes your account row, cascading to remove your customers, saved posts, and password-reset history.
4. Keeps SMS consent records for 4 years (US TCPA requirement) but strips all personal identifiers — your user ID is set to NULL and no data links back to you.
5. Ends your session and logs you out.

Reviews are only half of getting found — you also want to know where you rank in Google's local map results. Open Get found → Where you rank (or the rank card on your dashboard).

• Local rank tracking — add the searches that win you jobs (like "plumber near me") in Settings. We check your position and show it next to each keyword, with a little sparkline of how it's moved over time and an up/down arrow vs your last check.
• Geo-grid heatmap (Pro+) — you don't rank the same everywhere. Run an area scan and we plot your position across a grid of points around your shop, coloured green (top 3) to red (11+). It's the fastest way to see the neighbourhoods where you're invisible.
• Climb tracking — after a second scan we show the trend: "Average position #6 → #4" and "Top-3 coverage 22% → 56%", so you can watch your map turn green as the reviews come in.

A complete, active profile is what gets you found — and what AI assistants read. We score yours and show the exact next step.

• Google profile strength — a checklist scoring your Google Business Profile (categories, photos, hours, posts, responding to reviews…). Some items tick automatically from data we already hold; others you confirm with a tap. "Fix these next" shows your top 3 missing items.
• Facebook profile strength — the same plain-English checklist for your Facebook Page, the other place local customers look you up.

Find both on the Get found hub and in Settings. As you complete items, the percentage climbs — and so does how easily customers (and Google) find you.

The Get found tab (in the main nav) is your one marketing screen. It pulls together everything that helps customers find you:

• Your Google & Facebook profile-strength scores with the next step to fix.
• Your local rank for each tracked keyword, with a link to the full heatmap.
• Your reviews, job pins, social posts, and the buttons to connect Google / Facebook.

Show your best 5-star Google reviews right on your own website. In Settings → Website widgets, copy the one-line snippet and paste it into your site where you want the reviews strip to appear:

<script src="https://tradeloper.com/reviews-widget.js" data-token="..." async></script>

• It stays fresh automatically — new 5-star reviews show up without you touching the code.
• It adds the SEO markup Google likes, so your reviews help your site rank too.
• No Pro plan needed to display your reviews.

Drop a pin where you finished each job, right from your phone (Job pins in the nav, Pro). Add a photo of the work and an optional note.

• A growing map of real work nearby shows customers — and Google — that you're active in their area.
• Snap the photo on site; we attach it to the pin.

The Reviews tab is where you read and manage every Google review we've fetched.

• At a glance — your total review count, how many you've gained since you joined, your average star rating, and a 5★→1★ breakdown.
• Negative-first — 1–3 star reviews sort to the top with a "Needs reply" badge so nothing festers.
• Reply (Pro) — tap Generate reply for a warm, on-tone draft you can edit, then post it to Google in one tap (chapter 14).

Want to see exactly what your customers receive? From the dashboard Quick actions, tap Email myself a test. We send the real review-request email to your own inbox so you can check the wording and the one-tap review button before you send to a customer.