Once you have established product-market fit, the next key goal on your list would be to get more reviews and ratings. In this blog post, I will cover the Amazon Vine Program which can be one of the ways to acquire reviews and ratings for your product.
Customer feedback and reviews are some of the key factors that determine the acceptance of your product on Amazon, which is essential for your product to sustain the competition on Amazon.
If you have launched a new product and if you are confident about the quality of the product that you are offering, then Amazon Vine Program is a good way to gather reviews for your newly launched products, albeit a tad expensive.
What is Amazon Vine Program?
Product reviewers can only join the “Vine Voice” program through an invitation after reaching a specific Reviewer Ranking threshold to be a “Vine Voice”. Amazon Vine helps your product with reviews from a pool of “Vice Voices” and they will give honest reviews about the product. The reason I am insisting on honest reviews is because honest reviews may not necessarily be good reviews.
Sellers and Vendors who enroll for the Vine program send products to Amazon that will be distributed to Vine Voices for authentic feedback. Vendors have no say in which Vine Voices review their products and cannot contact the reviewers directly. Since Amazon matches the products with the most relevant reviewers and tags their reviews with a Vine Voice Badge, customers can confidently trust the content.
What is the eligibility to register products for Vine Review?
· You should have your Brand Registry for the Specific Brand you are trying to enroll
· The product should not have more than 30 reviews.
· Your product must be in Amazon Warehouse and the condition should be “New”
· The product detail page should have an image and description of the product.
How much does it cost to enroll a product for Vine Review?
The fee for Vendors is on the higher side as they pay a premium of $2500 per ASIN. In Seller Central, as of October 2021, Amazon has launched it for a fee of $200 per Parent ASIN. The products are given to the Vine reviewers for Free. You can enroll up to a maximum of 5 Parent ASINs.
What happens once I enrol my ASIN?
Once you enroll an ASIN, Amazon shows the items to targeted Vine Reviewers based on the category that they review. If all the items part of the Vine inventory are not picked up in 28 days, the products are opened to the complete pool of Vine reviewers.
How many reviews will I get as part of the Vine Program?
The maximum inventory that can be enrolled is 30 units, so you can get up to 30 reviews. If your product already has 10 reviews, you can get a maximum of 20 reviews from Vine Program. In addition to this, it is not mandatory for a Vine reviewer to leave a review for your product.
Conclusion
If you are planning to launch a new product on Amazon, Amazon Vine is one of the best programs to bootstrap reviews and especially if you are a seller, you don’t pay a premium to get honest reviews for your product. Since these are trusted and high-quality reviews, it is worth the spend to drive sales for your items on Amazon.
Blog Post by Giri Prasad