Amazon Vine - Understanding the Value of Your Investment
Customer reviews are the currency for marketplace platforms like Amazon. Reviews determine whether your product establishes trust and credibility with potential customers or disqualifies your product as they work through purchase consideration.
Accumulation of reviews can be challenging for new sellers or brands launching new products, and even when successful - brands may be frustrated or discouraged by the quality of feedback or average ratings their products obtain.
In this article we’ll discuss the Amazon Vine program – what it is, what the opportunities are, and what the associated costs are – and help you determine if it’s a fit for your brand. If you are looking for commentary on how to mitigate negative reviews or drive increases to your average customer rating – please read the post: Taking the Good & the Bad In-Stride: How to Drive Improvements to your Product Review Ratings.
What is Amazon Vine?
Vine is an Amazon program that gives Vendors & Sellers an opportunity to put their product in the hands of Amazon’s top reviewers with the goal of generating initial product reviews. The mission of Vine is for brands to cultivate unbiased, detailed, high-quality reviews giving products an improved prospect to generate sales.
How does Amazon identify these top reviewers?
Vine reviewers are Amazon customers who have demonstrated a track-record of leaving high-quality, in-depth reviews, and whether other customers found their feedback to be helpful in their purchasing decision.
Program Specifics:
Must be a Vendor or brand registered seller
Products must be in-stock through Fulfillment By Amazon
Sellers & Vendors can submit up to 200 ASINs
Up to 30 units (per submission) can be made eligible for Vine
Each enrollment is valid for 90 days or until all units are consumed, whichever is first
Products must have less that 30 reviews to be eligible
Is there a cost associated to Vine?
Vine is a paid program; in Seller Central Amazon charges a program fee of $200 per product submission to participate in Vine. For Vendors the program is $1,750 per ASIN, but Vendors are often given credits to offset the cost of the program. Regardless of the platform, any units submitted to Vine are given to the reviewer for free.
What are the potential benefits of Amazon Vine?
Building Your Initial Reviews
The immediate benefit to Vine is growing your review count, and parlaying this into increasing product sales. A lack of reviews discourages even the most brave of customers – and this point cannot be understated. Amazon itself has communicated that products with a single 1-star review will still outsell an item with no reviews. Building a review base is essential for any growth on Amazon.
Vine also helps brands exceed the minimum benchmark to effectively use other programs. While not a requirement, Amazon Advertising provides a benchmark for “retail readiness” at 15 reviews – leveraging Vine enable brands to quickly exceed this total. Other programs do require a minimum of a 3.5 star average to participate, and Vine can assist in meeting this expectation.
Establishing Credibility
A growing number of reviews will help establish credibility with customers, but it will also impact your detail page conversion rate and also your ability to advertise your products, participate in other Amazon programs, and impact your search results. Products that receive a high number of Vine reviews are more likely to rank higher in Amazon's search results, making them more visible to shoppers.
Vine may also help in offsetting instances where products received negative initial feedback or feedback related to circumstances outside of the sellers control (FBA delivery, damaged packaging, etc).
Fixed Investment Costs
Vine can be an attractive proposition as any Seller or Vendor can calculate the exact cost of participating in the program. Through the enrollment fee and the total value of goods, brands can incorporate the program investment into their advertising or launch budget.
Vine can be vastly more affordable than other methods such as advertising or incentivizing initial purchases through promotions. Without any customer reviews, brands who seek to promote a product launch may find that the cost of customer acquisition far exceeds the cost of implementing Vine – as there is no credibility or trust in their new products.
Informative, High-Quality Reviews
Beyond the quantitative benefits of Vine – there are significant qualitative benefits to Vine. Put simply, Vine reviews are the gold standard for product reviews on Amazon. These reviewers put in considerable effort to provide an unbiased experience of the product, and to provide in detail the details about the product that they feel other customers should know. Feedback left from Vine Reviewers are given special labelling to highlight the review to other shoppers.
Drive Improvements to the Product
Reviews through Vine tend to have more thoughtful and detailed summaries than general consumer reviews. Leveraging the content of Vine reviews, brands can identify if product information is lacking/missing or if there are features that resonate with customers that should be expanded upon. This can drive improve understanding for future customers and potentially mitigate negative reviews before they happen. Brands can also see where their product design, packaging, or materials may be lacking, and incorporate feedback into product improvements.
Through implementation of Vine, brands can create a springboard for their product launch and improve the efficacy of their future marketing efforts by begging to build their customer review base.
But not every brand may be suited to leverage Vine - read on in Part II of this series - Amazon Vine: Considerations to Make Before Enrolling, to see reasons why brands may not leverage Vine due to specific considerations related to the cost and impacts that Vine may have to their products.
Interested to learn how Amazon Vine can accelerate your Amazon sales? Connect with ARMR and we’ll identify opportunities for your business to craft and deploy an effective review accumulation strategy.