Extend Your Product Marketing With Amazon Vine

In the highly competitive e-commerce market, any advantage you can secure for your products makes a big difference. Online product reviews influence the purchasing decisions of 93% of consumers, and a product with few or no reviews is a red flag for many potential buyers. 

The Amazon Vine program is a great way to quickly acquire some of those all-important reviews, even if your product is brand new. While it is not a panacea for all e-commerce struggles, you can use it to help a particular product gain some momentum in the marketplace early on. Done correctly, this can have a rippling effect on your other offerings as well, making Vine a high-value prospect for many Amazon sellers.

How It Works

Amazom Vine's function is to connect retailers to special users called Voices. When the company notices that a particular user seems to have a strong knowledge base in a particular product category and tends to review many items within that category, they may invite that person to become a Voice. These people are not paid for the reviews they leave for the program, so shoppers know that they can rely on them to be impartial.

Once you've signed a product up for the Vine program, you are responsible for sending Amazon a set of samples of that product (up to 30 depending on how many reviews you need) for them to send out to Voices. Those people then try the item out and see what they think of it, then detail their thoughts in a review that is publicly posted to the site. Voices get to try out a large range of interesting products for free and retailers get in-depth, credible reviews on their products from someone that the Amazon community trusts: everybody wins.

This program was previously open only to Amazon vendors and not sellers, but as of late 2019, it can now be accessed through Seller Central as well. This gives smaller businesses the opportunity to use Vine as well, provided that t...