Friday, September 12, 2025

Index

Index of articles, which I will try to keep at the top of this blog.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and not representative of Amazon or its affiliates. The information presented is my interpretation of the information provided by Amazon, from interactions with Vine customer service, and people on vine forums who have interacted with vine cs. This information could change without me knowing it, and I will do my best to update the information as it becomes available. If anything I post does not make sense blame that on Amazon's lack of transparency on how the program works. All information presented here (as far as I know) is publicly available on forums, and other sites. In the event I am no longer part of the program I will indicate that in this index and this blog will no longer update.

This is not a public forum, and I reserve the right to censor anyone, and ignore comments I deem incorrect. If you present an issue to me, and have proof I MAY change my posts. 

So you want to be a vine reviewer

How to find stuff 

Navigating Vine

Criteria for staying in vine and for being Gold tier

Ordering your first junk product

What happens when you order something 

How to write an insightful review 101

What products are available on Amazon vine

Why you should avoid ordering supplements

What are 0 ETV items and why people want them

Why is there so much junk? Caveat Emptor!

Other sources and forums related to vine and Amazon

Save Your Reviews and causes of rejection

Why you should put the title description in your review

What is Recommended For You and how does it work

What is Available for all and how does it work

What is Additional Items

Taxes and Vine

What not to do in Vine

Getting rid of product

Dealing with Vine Customer Service

Common Amazon Vine errors

Sellers trying to bribe customers for 5 star reviews

Vine browser extensions and what they can and cannot do

Parsing the Vine account status page

What is Gaming the System and why it will never go away

Drops Pauses and Purges

Things I want Amazon Sellers to know

Coming up with a consistent star ratings system

Disappearing reviews

How to do a review of a battery 

Types of viners you will run in to on the forums

Formatting reviews to read easier

Strange listings

How to review security cameras

Adding images and video to reviews

Product safety 

When you get the wrong item or no item

 

Sunday, September 7, 2025

When you get the wrong item no item or too many items

Amazon is a large corporation with thousands of workers, at dozens of warehouses dealing with hundreds of thousands of items.

There is a 10% chance they will ship the wrong item, no item, or your item will just disappear.

Why does this happen? Amazon warehouses use robots to pick items, and to stock items. There is almost no quality control when it comes to checking if an item that is being packaged for shipping is the correct item, or if there is any item at all in the package. When an item is ordered and paid for the order goes to the nearest warehouse (that has it) to your location. A robot picks the item, and takes it to a human, the human has little say as to what type of box or envelope it gets shipped in. The human must pack a certain number of boxes per minute or they can be fired. So there is no time to figure out or confirm that the item going in the box is what you ordered.

In some cases the item is shipped by the seller, and this can take months to ship to you depending on where it is shipping from.  

Then there is theft. Theft from trains, or trucks in transit. Theft by amazon delivery drivers that put the item on your porch take a picture of it, and then steal it, and last of all are porch pirates. 

The one place that your item will not be thieved from is at the warehouse since there is no time to steal something, cameras everywhere, and workers purses, back packs, and lunch boxes are searched before they leave the premises.

So what do you do if an item is stolen, lost, or arrives but is wrong? You CANNOT RETURN OR EXCHANGE items. Some people have reported being able to do it, but they were not supposed to. If an item is stolen? Contact vine customer service and they will take it out of your queue. 

If it is lost? usually Amazon will report it as such and cancel the order. So if your ordered a widget and never got it, amazon canceled it, then in your itemized report for that year you will see an item for 1 widget at $10 ETV and then another item for 1 widget at -$10. 

If you got the wrong item (and not a variant) then contact vine CS and have the item removed from your review queue. If it is a variant then review it but report that you did not receive the correct color size, or whatever.

If you get too many items then just do the review on the original amount ordered, and do not mention that you got more than whatever was supposed to ship. Do not try to return the extras, 95% of the time amazon (or the seller) will just tell you to keep it.  

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Saturday, September 6, 2025

Product safety

This is a contentious subject and there are people who say it is none of our business, and others that know that it is.

Sellers in other countries don't give damn about whether their product hurts or kills someone. They don't care if it makes someone sick.

What can you do about it?

Depends on your skill level, knowledge, and expertise. If you can identify unsafe devices, and can offer a reasonable explanation as to why the product is not safe, then you must do so.

BUT tread carefully. Amazon does not take kindly to reviews that call a product fake, or counterfeit. They also will not allow you to directly state that an edible item is dangerous. I do not review potentially dangerous edible items so I cannot offer much advice on what to do other than to notify the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or your countries similar agency.

You can point out that devices are not safe as they are described. Here are some examples of products that are making unsafe claims:

The device has a standard nema15 plug on it (2 or 3 prong). 

These types of plugs are rated for 15 amps or less, and usually a maximum of 12amps. The rating may be printed on it. But basically if it looks like the above plugs it is not rated for anything over 15 amps. Some sellers will list a product with wattage or amperage ratings that far exceed the ratings of the plug. You can figure out the wattage of a product or device by taking it's maximum amperage rating and multiplying that by the voltage. so a 15 amp plug at 120 volts is 1800 watts.

If a listing says that the consumer level device that runs on 110/115/120 volts can handle 40 amps? NO IT CANNOT. There may be a component in it that is rated at 40 amps, but if any other part of the device cannot handle 40 amps then the rating of the device is that of the lowest rated part. rated for 40 amps but a 15 amp plug? then 15 amps is what it is rated for. If the wiring in the plug is not 14awg but a smaller gauge like 16awg, then the device is rated at 13amps. If the circuit board traces are only rated at 10 amps, then the real maximum rating of the device is 10 amps. Anything larger than 10 amps will cause the device to get very warm or hot, and anything 15 or more amps could cause the device to melt and/or cause a fire.

A simple rule of thumb is if it plugs in to standard wall socket in the US it cannot possibly handle more that 15 amps, or 1800 watts without causing a problem.

There is even more to it, if there is a switch or relay that has a rating, they have different ratings for different voltages, AC/DC, and different types of loads: resistive, tungsten, and inductive (motors). Some of these will require looking up data sheets, some of the information will be on the component itself. A common toggle switch might be rated at 13 amps at 220vac, 15 amps at 120vac but maybe only 6 amps at 12/24vdc. Same for relays.

Now what can you put in the review? If you have the expertise you can write up what you found, and why you wrote what you did. I have done many reviews like this, and all have gotten approved. If you do not have the expertise to do this, but you have a hunch it is not a safe product then at least mention that the product seems sketchy, and articulate why you think this.

If you think a product is extremely dangerous you can report it to the Consumer Product Safety commission.

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Friday, September 5, 2025

Adding images and video to reviews

First I don't upload videos. But I will say that if you do, consider the following:

I don't care to see you, your dog/cat, or kid. If there is no reason for any of these things to be in the video then do not put them in your video.

Don't post an unboxing. Save it for youtube.

Don't waste peoples time. I watch videos in the hopes of seeing or hearing about something that is not in the description. If all you are doing is parroting the listing then DON'T!

I want to see the product work (if it does something).

Clean your house, or shoot the video in a tidied up room.

Shut off all the background noise. No one wants to hear a baby crying, a TV playing, or a dog barking. If any of these things are present in your video, you are probably not making a useful video.

TALK! no silent videos just showing the product from various angles. Your video is pointless. You can do all that in pictures.

Do not post a video just to up your numbers. 

All the above applies for pictures:

Do not just post pictures that are no better or anymore informative than the ones in the listing. 

If your review is taking more than 7 days to get approved then there is something wrong in one of the pictures, or in the video.

Blur out barcodes, other product names, email addresses, websites, physical addresses on labels. Sometimes some other object can cause a picture to stall in the approval process.

Some people recommend to only add videos or pictures AFTER a review is approved.

If a product has a side that was not pictured in the list then take a picture of that side.

Pictures and videos do not have to be perfectly lit, or artistically presented, and if they are that is considered by some as suspicious. I don't care if you are a professional photographer. Just take a basic picture with your phone. I want to see details of the product not your artistic expression. 

If it is an electronic device of any kind, and you can easily open it. Take pictures of the inside. This is VERY important to some of us. I can tell more about an electronic or electrical device from what is inside it than from what most people will talk about it. 

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Thursday, September 4, 2025

How to review security cameras

This is another technical way to review things. So skip it if you don't want to do things right. 

Please do the following: attempt to access it from your web browser by going to it's IP address

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xx

Where the x's are the IP address of the camera. you should be able to get the IP address from the app that most of these cameras have.

Mention if it only works with an app. Cameras that require an app are toys, and not serious security cameras. Do you have to have an account somewhere to use it?

Mention whether it is PAN, TILT, and Zoom. many cameras are listed as PTZ that either have no zoom or are digital zoom, which is the same as no zoom. Some cameras look like they might be PTZ but do not say in the description. some cameras have 2 cameras one that is wide angle and the other is fixed zoom. 

If at all possible report if the camera supports ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum), and or RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol).This is very IMPORTANT information.

To find out if it supports ONVIF or RTSP download a free app called Onvier, and try to connect to the camera using onvif. I would say try to connect to it using RTSP but that requires knowing the exact URL and often that is VERY difficult to find.

Talk about the connectors that it has. Comment on how fast it pans and tilts, how good it follows objects. Is there anything really annoying that it does; like telling a non moving object (repeatedly) to leave the area (had that happen once).

Describe the behavior it has when first turned on. What does it do? Does it have a manual? Is there a website where you can get updated firmware. You can't link to it on amazon but you can describe how you found the website. 

Report any issues connecting to it. Did it require using Internet explorer, or does it work ok with modern browsers but has features missing that you can only get through internet explorer. This is hard to do on a windows 10/11 computers as microsoft hates you, and wants to get rid of internet explorer. 

Anything more than: it worked good and was easy to setup.

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Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Strange listings

This information I learned from an old viner. I cannot as of yet verify how accurate it is.

It appears that in some cases Amazon sellers will put offers on vine that are also visible to the public. What they will do is put a low ETV value, but make the listing unappealing to the average shopper. Viners in the know can often get "good stuff" because of this. Some sellers know that viners often skip products because of high ETV values.

What are strange listing? They are listings with strange pictures, and/or contradictory information. 

A bad drawing of a clothing item. with a detailed description, and sometimes the actual picture of the item below the description where you have to look for it.

The same for certain electronic devices. A picture that seems to be unrelated to the listing, yet the description shows what the item would be.

A picture of a beat up old office chair, with detailed description below of a brand new office chair.

Sometimes no picture, or a blurred out picture. 

In all three reported cases above, a viner ordered the item just to see what they got, and were quite happy with their order. In the case of the chair they got a brand new chair. 

I must admit that I was not aware of this, and did not order certain thing because I don't like to order things that are not 100% clear as to what you are getting. 

Most of the things that I have seen like this are things I would not have ordered anyways. 

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Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Formatting reviews to read easier

Not everyone will agree on how to do this, so this is my take.

Do not write a wall of text. 

Divide sections of reviews in to paragraphs. 

Get to the point.

Use pro/con lists, but no bullet points 

Do not use emojis.

Do not use disclaimers.

Do not explain how you rate things.

Do not explain the vine program.

Do not write about taxes.

If you must write about personal feelings save it for the end paragraph.  

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