Drops Pauses and Purges

Drops

Amazon does not normally drop (add) items in to vine constantly. No one knows the exact criteria for when drops occur. Drops can happen at any time of day, and any day of the week. Though they do seem to happen in a sort of predictable pattern. With many people noting that Mondays are particularly slow.

Drops can start and stop in a schedule that varies throughout the year, sometime happening in the middle of the night. At the time of this writing drop start at around 08:30 Eastern US time, and can last at a fast pace for around 3 hours before slowly tapering off around 14:00 EST. There is no indication that drops are happening unless you use an extension like Vinehelper and have the notification monitor open. The only way to start seeing them without an extension is to pick a category and at about the time they would start dropping refresh your browser page (F5). 

When drops start, a feeding frenzy develops. People have seconds to order things. If you are the first one to see an item drop you have at most 30 seconds for food items or some highly desired 0 ETV items to order them. Other items go quickly, some items stick around for minutes, hours, days, or weeks. Many of the things I am interested in, or need tend to be around for a while.

Pauses

Pauses can happen at any time of the year. A pause is when the normal drop cycle stops for as short as a couple days, to as long as several weeks. I think there have been at least 1 time when a pause lasted over a month. When a pause happens there maybe zero items dropping with very occasional single drops. No one is quite sure why pauses happen. Some speculate that they happen when the system is getting a major update, or because of holidays in china, or for totally made up, and unknown reasons.

Purges

Purges are related to pauses, and some people claim they do not exist. In this instance we are talking about Amazon purging the categories of products that have aged out, or nobody seems to want. If major purges happen they seem to occur during long pauses. I think they occur regularly in small increments. 

What I witness is that everyone is complaining that there is nothing good to order, and they have not ordered in days or weeks, yet the total item count is constantly dropping, sometimes rather quickly. As an example during the great pause/purge of early 2025 late 2024, there were over 130,000 items. Over the course of the purge The total items dropped down to around 40,000 before drops started up again. This also coincides with a bunch of changes to the program, and how product was ordered.

When I started in late 2023 there were about 23,000 items and it appears during that pause/purge the total item count went down to about 1500. 

Pauses are a source of great panic, wailing, and gnashing of teeth on the forums. With people speculating that "vine is going away", or that some of us are being "shadow banned" and all sorts of superstitious nonsense. 

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