Exciting news was recently announced by Amazon! As the holiday season approaches, you can enjoy the benefits of the Amazon Vine program at a discounted rate of $100 per parent ASIN enrollment (50% savings) until October 31, 2022.
Unfamiliar with Amazon Vine? We’ve Got You Covered Below:
One of the largest challenges for new brand owners after launching a new product on Amazon is to get reviews. However, if it’s difficult to convert a sale without first having reviews, how can you get sales from which reviews would then be a bi-product? It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg dilehma.
One solution could be to get enrolled in the Amazon Vine program which is comprised of product reviewers known as “Vine Voices.”
This community of what Amazon claims to be unbiased and insightful reviewers (not always our experience) will order your product, receive it and may (not always, but highly likely) leave a review that can add that much sought after social proof for your product. According to Amazon, participating in Amazon Vine can help boost sales up to 19% on new or slow-moving products.
For a product without any existing reviews, you can enroll up to 30 units under one parent ASIN and therefore have an opportunity to receive 30 reviews from Vine Voices. On the other hand, if your product already has 25 reviews the maximum number it can receive through Amazon Vine is 5 reviews.
The Amazon Seller requirements to participate are:
- Be brand registered in Amazon Brand Registry.
- Have fewer than 30 reviews on the product detail page.
- Have a buyable FBA offer in ‘New’ condition.
- Not be an adult product.
- Have already launched at the time of enrollment.
- Have available inventory.
- Have an image and a description.
So far this sounds promising, but it is Amazon… what’s the catch?
There are several significant risks and obstacles to the Amazon Vine program as it exists today, which are worth taking into consideration as part of your decision-making process:
- It’s NOT free, but instead a pay-to-play program. Normally the enrollment fee is $200 per parent ASIN (but now only $100 through 10/31/22), which is charged to your account once the first Vine Voice review comes in.
- You are giving away your product for FREE. Once a Vine Voice selects your product, it will still show as a transaction, but with $0 in sales. If you have a high product cost, eating that cost may not be feasible.
- Amazon will ALSO collect not only their FBA fulfillment fees (shipping and handling, which makes sense), but also their Selling Fee (typically 15%). Again, for higher priced and bulkier items with high shipping costs, this may be difficult to swallow.
- The Program doesn’t guarantee reviews as Amazon has to abide by their own ToS. While this is true, in our experience working with multiple brands through this program, we’ve seen around 90% review rates, so while a risk, we believe it’s a relatively low one.
- The Program doesn’t guarantee positive reviews. Vine reviewers do leave genuine feedback about products, but there is no guarantee of getting only positive reviews. Remember, these Amazon “reviewers” are still ordinary people and not specialists or professionals in the area where they are claiming products and writing reviews (to be fair they can’t have knowledge about all of Amazon’s products). Sometimes these reviews are simply hilarious (not in a good way) and very strange. You can immediately understand that they don’t have any experience in this area and often have unrealistic expectations.
- Some product categories are at higher risk of negative reviews. If you have a product in the health or beauty area, we strongly encourage you to avoid this program as we have seen Vine reviews sink listings of actual quality products out of the gate. In some cases the listings were able to recover and in others, not so much. This was due often to ignorance of the reviewer as to how the product is suppose to work. However once the review is out there, it’s not going anywhere, whether it was “fair” or not.
Despite all of the above risks, the Vine program can yield some really beneficial results in the right situations. You can relatively quickly get those first critical reviews, which can help provide the momentum your new (or stale) product needs to get on the Amazon success cycle.
We suggest you take a few moments today to review your products to see if the Vine Program may be just what the doctor ordered. If you’re unsure or need help implementing the Vine program, feel free to reach out to us here at Retail Sages as we can analyze your catalog for Vine opportunities and help walk you through the process or manage it for you entirely so you can rest easy.