Boost your product reviews with Amazon’s Vine program!

It is no secret that product reviews are essential for your visibility and conversions, but getting reviews can sometimes be tricky. Here’s everything you need to know about the Amazon Vine program to help you get more reviews and grow your business!

Think of the Amazon Vine program as a machine made for generating reviews.

The Vine program allows Vendors and Sellers to submit products to be reviewed by Amazon’s consumers selection. The objective: generate a lot of reviews for one specific product in a short period of time. The expected result is to improve your SEO, optimize your conversion rate and thus, boost your sales.

Getting reviews is key to selling on Amazon. Amazon’s Vine program is there to help you do that!

How does Amazon Vine work?

1. Campaign creation

Brands can set up their campaign on a self-service platform through Vendor and Seller Central. In most countries the Vine campaign helps you reach 30 product reviews (including organic reviews). All products are eligible unless they are hazmat items, sample products, items sold in bundles, heavy or bulky items, drop-ship items or adult-only products.

2. Stock attribution

Brands need to send/allocate products for the Vine campaign. Vendors need to create a specific shipment to Amazon warehouses (following the logistics step by step process on the platform).Sellers allocate FBA stocks for the campaign. The reserved products won’t be available for sales until the Vine campaign is live.

3. Vine campaign release

Amazon releases the Vine campaign to the selected reviewers.

4. Product selection by reviewers

Vine reviewers are called Vine Voices. They are selected by Amazon as the best reviewers.Reviewer ranking is determined by:1. The number reviews posted over a period of time2. Upvotes from other customers (indicating the helpfulness and trustworthiness of the review).Vine Voices will select products they want to test on the Vine platform. Amazon will send them the products for free.

5. Reviews creation

Once the product is received, the vine voices need to write a review. There is no directive to influence their review.

Side Note: Brands do not have any interaction with Vine Voices. Reviews provided by Vine Voices must bereliable to consumers. Amazon also doesn’t change or edit reviews except if a review doesn’t follow Amazon’s posting guidelines.

How much does Amazon Vine cost?

The cost of launching a Vine campaign depends on the country you are in and the category of your products. At Seelk, we saw the price of one campaign range from €250 to €2,500 with an average of €500 in France.

What are the benefits of activating a Vine campaign?

1. Fast & Efficient => Once the ASINs are selected for the campaign it only takes 10 minutes for a brand to set-up a Vine campaign! They also have up to 30 days to see the reviews on the product detail page before Amazon makes the product page public. 
2. Trustworthiness => Amazon uses its FBA program as an intermediary between the two parties so that brands don’t potentially influence Vine Voices to write fake positive reviews.
3. Increase CVR =>  Vine increases conversion rates as reviews are vital in convincing the consumer to buy a product. When you start with product reviews on day one of your launch, you have an edge over the competition. You want your product to look new and innovative, but still provide proof of quality, which is achieved with a wealth of reviews.
4. SEO optimization => Amazon listing optimization is the process of upgrading product pages to improve their search visibility, click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR) to finally generate more sales. This process includes: keyword discovery, optimizing listing text and image content and increasing the number of reviews. 

Are Vine reviews generally positive?

The Amazon Vine program is a double-edged sword. Brands should keep in mind that Amazon Vine’s goal isn’t about maximizing as many good reviews as possible, or to give every item’s product page a 5 star rating. The goal of the program is to provide product pages with not only lots of reviews but also qualitative and accurate ones, regardless of them being negative or positive.

Three situations for you to take advantage of the Vine program: 

Here at Jellyfish, we think there are three specific scenarios for brands to submit their items to the Amazon Vine program: 

Product launch:

• Only applies when you launch a new product through the Vine program
• When launching a new product for sale, Vine’s main goal is to attract a maximum number of 30 reviews in a short period of time and to drive traffic on the item’s product page. this will help Vendors generate Amazon’s orders.

Breathe new life into products

• You launched your products a while ago, and you haven’t reached your sales target because of SEO ranking? Is your product underperforming on Amazon while the product page is optimized? 
• If the content of your product page is optimized, then the next step is to run a Vine campaign to give a boost to Amazon’s algorithm. It’ll lead to more reviews and it’ll help your product page’s conversion rate due to the attraction of more reviews on the item. Reviews written by Vine Voices include pictures, videos and other forms of content, which is great for consumers as it’s proof of the quality of the reviews. 

To decrease the rate of negative ratings and reviews on a product: Has your product received fake or unfair negative reviews? We recommend you run a Vine campaign to increase the number of product reviews so that you can dilute fake ones with the trustworthy ones.

Warning: Some categories are more prone to fake reviews than others!

➡️ In conclusion, Vine campaigns are an easy way to improve your review score and thus increase visibility and conversion rate.Want help setting up your first campaigns or defining the strategic ASINs you should focus on.