Your Guide to the Amazon Vine Review Program

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What Is the Amazon Vine Program?

The Amazon Vine Review Program is one of the fastest, safest, and most effective ways to generate high-quality, verified reviews for your products on Amazon. If you’re launching a new product on Amazon, Vine can help you build social proof fast.

Trusted Amazon reviewers (known as "Vine Voices") receive free products in exchange for honest feedback. Vine Voices are hand-selected by Amazon for their history of leaving detailed and helpful reviews.

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Vine Eligibility

Not every product can join the Amazon Vine Review Program. To qualify, your product must meet Amazon’s eligibility requirements.

• Your brand must be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.
• The product must have fewer than 30 reviews at the time of enrollment.
• The product must be FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) and have inventory available.
• The listing must include a live ASIN, product title, description, and image.
• Adult products, digital items, and virtual bundles are not eligible for Vine enrollment.

If your listing meets all these conditions, you can enroll directly from your Seller Central dashboard under Advertising → Vine, or you can click here.

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How Enrollment Works

You enroll a specific ASIN into the Vine program and choose how many units you want to make available. These units are pulled directly from your FBA inventory and sent to reviewers who are approved by Amazon.

If you are enrolling a parent product with multiple variations, you can select which variations are available for Vine Voices to choose from.

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Enrollment Fees

Amazon charges a one-time enrollment fee based on how many units you choose to offer:

• 1-2 units: $0
• 3-10 units: $75
• 11-30 units: $200

Also note that another associated cost with Vine is the COGS of claimed units. The true cost of using Vine ends up being the enrollment fee + COGS of claimed units.

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Billing

The enrollment fee is automatically billed to your account when the first Vine review is posted to your listing.

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Who Writes These Reviews?

Vine Voices are chosen by Amazon based on having a history of detailed and helpful reviews.

Vine Voices can claim any available, enrolled products that they are interested in, including the products you enroll.

Sellers have no say in who claims the products.

If your product can only be understood by a very specific customer, it may be a good idea to not use Vine.

For example, we work with a high-quality baking and cake decorating brand. Some of their products can only be understood by professional bakers and cake decorators. Using Vine could be risky and lead to negative reviews if average customers claim and use the product incorrectly, or if they simply don't understand its purpose.

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What Should You Expect?

Review Count: We typically expect to get reviews on 85% of claimed units. So if you enroll the maximum of 30 units and they are all claimed, we typically get around 25 reviews. Note that not all enrolled units are always claimed.

Review Score: Assuming there are no major issues with the product customers receive, we expect to get a 50/50 split between 4-star and 5-star reviews.

A good outcome when enrolling 30 units is getting a 4.5 star average on 25 reviews.

If you do receive negative feedback and 1-star or 2-star reviews, this is usually valuable feedback you can use to address and fix problems early before investing thousands of dollars into paid advertising.

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Timing and Review Cycle

Once enrolled, your product will be shipped to Vine reviewers through Amazon’s fulfillment network.

Most reviews appear within 3-4 weeks after Vine Voices receive their product, with a few trickling in during weeks five and six.

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Is Vine Worth It?

For most brands, the answer is yes, especially when launching new products and trying to build credibility quickly. Vine reviews can boost click-through rates and conversion rates, improve ad performance, and establish early momentum on new Amazon products.

In cases where you receive negative reviews, this accelerates your learning of what needs fixed without spending thousands into advertising and finding out later. This could be as simple as updating the listing page, or as nuanced as improving the packaging or fulfillment process.

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Why Vine is so Valuable

Amazon is strict with seeded reviews. Amazon monitors both your "order-to-review ratio" and the IP addresses of who is leaving reviews. If they notice a higher than usual order-to-review ratio, or reviews from IP addresses that have overlapped with employee IP addresses, they may remove reviews posted to the listing or, in extreme cases, remove the listing altogether.

Overlapping IP addresses means that if the reviewer ever joined the same WiFi as an employee while on the Amazon app, the review could be flagged. This could be at the office, at the reviewer's home, at the employee's home, at a coffee shop, etc.

This makes seeding initial reviews from friends & family difficult and risky. Vine removes that risk, and removes the effort of reaching out, sending directions, and reimbursing reviewers. Also, the inconvenience of not having guaranteed 5-stars reviews from friends & family tends to make sellers extra cautious on their listing design and first FBA shipment, improving the overall product launch.

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What if My Product Launch Gets Delayed?

If your product launch gets delayed or you have samples available before your official launch date, there’s no need to worry. As long as your listing has fewer than 30 reviews and FBA inventory available, you can enroll it in the Vine program at any time.

Vine reviews typically roll in over four to six weeks after being delivered to the Vine Voices. Reviews from Vine will appear on your listing regardless of if your offer is active, or if your product launch gets delayed.

Amazon does not set a deadline or expectation for when your product must officially launch or start receiving traffic. Your listing will continue to collect reviews regardless of your launch schedule or any delays you may face.

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How to Enroll Your Product into Amazon Vine