Amazon is about to charge for this service! Will it be more beneficial to sellers?

Recently, a number of sellers have received official emails from Amazon, informing them that the free testing period for the Vine program will end next month, and that each newly registered product will be charged $200!

In fact, this notice was sent to some sellers last month, and it has only been notified to sellers on a larger scale recently. It seems that the Vine charges that everyone has been concerned about are finally going to be implemented.

Amazon said in the notice that reviews from Vine have helped sellers increase their sales by an average of 19.6%. In order to ensure the vitality and sustainability (profitability) of the Vine program, Vine will charge a fee of $200 for each newly registered product starting October 12, 2021.

The charging model is the same as the Early Reviewer Program. The fee starts 7 days after the first review comes through the Vine Program. It is $200 per registered product and is non-refundable once the fee is paid. This means that if there are no Vine reviews by the end of the program (usually one year after registration), Amazon will not charge you. And unlike the Early Reviewer Program, if the first Vine review comes after 90 days of product registration, there will also be no charge.

However, this does not mean that there will be a lot of reviews within a year. When Vine was decentralized, Amazon's policy stated that Vine can currently only be registered by products with less than 30 reviews . If the total number of reviews of a registered product exceeds 30 during the validity period of Vine (regardless of whether they are Vine green-label reviews), the product will automatically cancel the Vine plan.

Products registered for the program before Vine officially started charging (October 12th) can still be used for free, and based on the feedback I collected from our seller base, Vine is likely to have undergone favorable changes!

Although the threshold for the Vine program is not high after decentralization, basically any brand registered seller can participate. However, Vine test users generally have high requirements for products. If the quality is not up to standard, it is easy to get a 2-3 star bad review. In addition, because Vine's bad review weight is very high, if a bad review comes, it will have a huge impact on the overall traffic of the product. In addition, Vine orders will not display user information, and it is basically impossible to contact consumers, so there is no way to operate. Therefore, if you want to participate in the Vine program, you must ensure the quality of the product.

After Amazon announced last month that Vine would be charged, the overall effect of the Vine program seemed to start to improve. Not only are reviews coming in faster than before, but products that had been unpopular for a long time are now receiving frequent orders for testing, and even the chances of receiving positive reviews are a bit higher.

In fact, the reasoning here is very direct. It is difficult to accept that Vine has changed from a paid project to a paid one, and the cost of a product of $200 is not low. If the effect does not change, the seller will spend money and face the risk of bad reviews or only one or two reviews. No effect or even counter-effect will definitely discourage a large number of sellers. Therefore, it is natural for Amazon to secretly adjust Vine to let sellers taste some sweetness.

It seems that if Amazon can keep the reviews coming in quickly and keeping the ratings high, charging for Vine is not necessarily a bad thing. Many people are willing to pay money in exchange for positive reviews.

In order to allow more sellers to accept this paid service, Vine is expected to make some changes behind the scenes before officially charging. Generally, this cannot be seen from the background policies and can only be obtained from real seller feedback.