This podcast episode delves into Amazon Vine, a program designed to help sellers gain reviews for their products while ensuring Amazon's standards are met. Amazon Vine invites trusted reviewers to share their opinions on new products.
The episode outlines the criteria for sellers to join the program, as well as what to expect in return.
Key takeaways:
Amazon Vine is a program that helps sellers gain reviews.
Participating in Vine can boost product awareness and help drive sales through reviews.
Receiving reviews through Amazon Vine is not guaranteed to be positive, but it can be beneficial.
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Transcripts
Vicki Weinberg:
Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.
I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.
Vicki Weinberg:
Hello. Welcome to another Amazon made easy episode. As promised, today we're going to talk about Amazon Vine.
We're going to cover what it is and how it works.
So Amazon vine is, in really simple terms, a way of you getting some reviews in a way that Amazon is happy with, mainly because it makes them some money. So Amazon's description of vine is.
Amazon vine invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new products to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions.
Amazon invites buyers to become vine reviewers and then owners vine voices based on the insightfulness of the reviews they publish on their Amazon purchases.
So what this is saying is that to become a Vine reviewer, in case you're interested in that, you need to buy a lot of products on Amazon and leave product reviews. And then, as you know, people can vote on whether reviews are good or not.
And if enough people, if you review enough products and enough people say, oh, these are really useful reviews, you might get invited to be a Vine reviewer.
So for you, if you decide as a seller to participate in Amazon vine, it basically means you provide some free units of your product to vine reviewers.
And the idea is that Amazon will offer your product to their vine reviewers and then some of them, or maybe lots of them will come back and say, oh, we'd like that, Amazon.
I don't know how they decide who gets them, but then those selected people get your products and the idea is they use them and then they post reviews for your products. So this is really good for building awareness of your product.
If you've got something really new, it can be good for boosting sales if perhaps something's selling a bit slowly.
And it really helps customers make informed decisions about your product because they get that social proof, they can see what somebody else thinks about that product before they buy it. As you know, reviews super, super important.
So there are some criteria if you want to participate in buying as a seller, which of course is what we're talking about today. So the first thing is you need to have a professional selling plan.
If you have a individual or free Amazon selling plan, you won't be able to participate. You need to be a brand owner, so you need to be registered in Amazon brand registry. And the products you offer have to be your own branded product.
So let's say you have a brand, you're in brand registry, but you also maybe sell third party products. You won't be able to enroll those, they have to be your own products.
You also have to be offering FBA on any products that you want to enrol and buying. And that's because Amazon will use that FBA stock to send the units that you're offering out to reviewers.
So you need to have FBA stock and you don't need to just be enrolled in fba, you actually need to have stock sat in an Amazon warehouse ready for them to send out to reviewers. You need to have 30 or less reviews on the product detail page, which is actually pretty good.
It used to be lower than that, But I think 30 is actually okay. I think at one point it was really, really low. So as long as you've got less than 30 reviews, you can take part in Vine.
And it also doesn't matter if the reviews you get take you over 30 as well. So that's good to know. You can't be selling an adult product, a digital product or heavy and bulky item.
I guess that's to do with shipping them out to customers. And the others obviously make sense. And you need to have an active product page.
So the product needs to be active and stock needs to be in the warehouse.
So once you enrol in vine, the reviewers then have the opportunity to request your product and you will get charged an enrolment fee once, depending on the tier you enrol in. And you get charged 30 days from the date of enrolment if you've received a review.
So if you don't receive a review in the first 30 days, you won't get charged until you get that first review. So how this works is it depends how many units you're enrolling to, what the fees will be.
So if you're enrolling one to two units, then there's no fee to pay. If you're enrolling three to 10, it's £60. If you're enrolling 11 to 30, it's £140. And obviously 30 is the maximum that you can enrol.
By the way, I would say that if you are wondering how many, if you like going in that three to 10 units, if you can, I would obviously do 10 because you're going to pay £60 whether you enrol three units or 10 units.
So if you can afford to, and obviously you need to, you know, factor the Cost in because you are, as well as paying the 60 pound, you're effectively giving away units. If you can do that, I would go for the higher amount.
And how this works is so say you say you're going to enrol 10 units and Amazon go out to their reviewers and then people say, yes, I want them and then they get them and then they leave reviews. You won't pay anything for 30 days anyway.
If after 30 days your product has received at least one review, then you'll get, then you'll pay the enrolment fee.
If after the end of 30 days you haven't received any reviews at that point, either because nobody's taken up the product or because people have had it, but they just haven't got around to submitting their reviews yet. Because you think people would do them really quickly, but actually not always the case.
So sometimes you might submit products for vine and then it's a couple of weeks before you actually see a review. But until you receive your first review, you won't pay anything.
It's worth knowing you will also not get charged at all if you don't receive any reviews within 90 days. So if nobody wants your product for any reason, then you won't pay anything because you won't be getting any reviews. But do you know what?
I've never actually seen that happen. I am sure that you've got a great product and if you've got a great product, I think this is always worth a try.
You're not guaranteed, I should think I should say this. You are not guaranteed to get positive reviews from using Vine.
I can't promise you that everyone who takes you up on your vine offer is going to give you a five star review. But if your product's good, and you know your product's good, what you know, why would it, why would it not be a good review?
I definitely think it's worth giving a go. So if you have any questions about vine or anything else, you know where to find me. And this will actually be the last episode of this year.
So I am going to be recording more of these Amazon Made Easy episodes. I am going to continue, but we're going to take a two week break because it's Christmas, it's New Year and I'm taking some time off.
I hope you're going to take some time off. Have a lovely Christmas.
If you're listening to this in real time, if there are any topics you'd like me to cover off in these episodes next year, again, you know where to find me. Vickyweinberg.com I always love to hear your feedback. The Friday episodes will continue as usual, so there'll be no break those.
It's just going to be these Tuesday episodes that are going to take a really short break. So I'll look forward to speaking to you next year.
Vicki Weinberg:
Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.
Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickiewinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think.
