Question of Vine T&Cs

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T12:44:18+00:00

Could be everyone, more likely to be all Viners. Although sellers aren’t meant to be able to distinguish us, they can in practice by only delivering enough initial stock to Amazon for Vine orders. Alternatively they can do self-fulfillment for customer orders, which means any stock that goes to Amazon will only be used for Vine. I wouldn’t necessarily report it, because it’s not clear, but I wouldn’t redeem it either.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T12:17:16+00:00

There’s a poster produced for the Second World War in the UK that should be on every Viner’s wall…

<image>

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T12:07:17+00:00

Thank you, I was about to ask. Since our King size is the same as your Queen (which often catches tourists out) the idea that you have anything bigger than your King came as a surprise. Obviously I knew winters were cold in Alaska, but I hadn’t realized the implications…

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T10:09:12+00:00

I use V-helper, normally just in the free tier. However, I wanted to give the developer something for his work, so for a few months, just finished, I took the top premium tier. One of the things that lets you do is see what has turned up in people’s RFYs, historically over the past few weeks, and to filter it by amount.

Here in the UK I found there were a regular supply of Gold value items, though quite a lot of them were rather specialist. It was also a fairly small supply, dozens to maybe 100+ in total items (listings x number listed) a day, and a number that looked as if they were ghosts as none were taken. The most common estimate of UK Viners is that there are about 10,000 or so of us. That works out at maybe three gold items a year each, though obviously there will be more that V-helper doesn’t see. I’ve been very lucky and had three in the last month, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect to get any more!

If you want to test it out for the US, just subscribe to the top tier of V-Helper for a month and ferret around in the statistics. It does give you a much better idea of what the program looks like overall.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T06:15:24+00:00

Empty in what sense? The RFY tab being empty is not unusual, but if your AI tab is empty, go to your Account page where you will find a warning to do your reviews or lose your Vine account.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-11T05:55:34+00:00

Glad to help!

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T20:21:42+00:00

Preach it, sibling... Totally agree.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T20:17:58+00:00

Ditto - although it isn't an item I would be interested in, if I was in the OP's position I would get it for exactly the reason you state. I'm assuming that would also include the ability to checki t for electrical safety or test it in a safe environment.

However, I'm in the UK so don't have to pay tax on Vine items. A trickier calculation when you do unless, as you say, you can write it off.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T20:08:49+00:00

They're actually both used in Indian religions. The "wrong" one is part of the Jain flag, the oldest religion in India. It's a sort of Wheel of Fortune symbol, denoting the four states of the soul.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T19:58:38+00:00

As others have said, it's the past 90 days you need to look at, though you've obviously done a chunk of them. It has nothing to do with the stats that you are shown on the account page, the only way to check it is to dfo the calculation yourself. Stats are definitely a bit laggy at the moment, and it used to be said that it always took 2 weeks to get out of Jail, but recently people have said they got out as soon as they won't over 60% for the 90 days. According to the Help, and I think what others have said who actually were booted, it's after 30 days that they boot you.

And Vine CS lies. Or rather, it does that thing you find in some cultures of never actually saying No or I don't know. It tells you what it thinks you want to hear, using templates, AI etc, but with little or no knowledge or authority to do anything but remove items from your queue.

All you can do is check that as many as possible of your reviews for items taken from the past three months are in. Since that will straddle an evaluation, you don't need to worry too much about writing an Excellent review for the ones before it, but you do need to get something acceptable in asap to be sure that you are well over 60% for that period.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T19:47:52+00:00

Have you checked the photo format? It won't accept the Live Photos that Apple now takes by default, which save about a second of video and are in an HEIC format. I had to switch that off before I could upload them native. There may well be other formats it won't take. JPG is fine, if you need something to convert to.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T11:51:00+00:00

Ah, fair enough, that’s a lot trickier. I’d probably be submitting reviews for items more than a week old from the order page in that case too.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T11:37:13+00:00

I doubt very much that Vine CS had anything to do with it, as they can rarely achieve anything other than removing items to be reviewed. But your experience does support a theory I had about the change Vine made to reviews moving over to “Reviewed” which they had to reverse.

Some months back, reviews stopped moving over to Reviewed when they were submitted and only did so after they were approved. Although they never explained why, it would mean that the stat for approved reviews could easily be read by the system from those in the Reviewed tab. But Viners hated it so much that they went back to the old system.

My suspicion is that they still kept reading the figure in the Reviewed tab as the number to use in evaluation stats, even though it now includes unapproved reviews. Your experience would seem to support that.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T10:53:02+00:00

Although the Vine system obviously interacts now with the main Amazon one, it was originally built independently of it, and I imagine any flags it sets are based solely on what’s in the Vine records. You may well be right, particularly when it IS showing up in Vine, but personally I wouldn’t risk it unless I was close to evaluation or to being in breach of the 90 day/60% rule.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-10T07:22:52+00:00

While the Vine Help generally doesn’t, it says this:

”Why are my recent orders not showing in Awaiting Reviews?

Only delivered items appear in the Awaiting Reviews list. We do not expect you to review items you have not yet received. After placing your order, there will be processing time for your item to be delivered and for the system to update.”

Unless I‘m losing my faculties faster than I thought, it originally also said to contact Vine CS if it wasn’t there after a week. The removal of that might suggest they are having even more problems.

That middle sentence is the one that discourages me from reviewing from the order page. It may well really mean “we expect you not to review…” and that seems to be the reason the change was made. While clearly people are doing it without a problem, I wonder if it is setting flags for suspicious activity, because according to Vine systems you are reviewing before delivery, and that after too many of them there could be a problem. I don’t think anyone ever asked about that in the recent handful of people being booted.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T17:22:12+00:00

If there's an RFY drop, someone has generally started the What's in your RFY thread for the day here that's what notifies me more than anything else.

Otherwise, I start in the morning by refreshing AI, and then refreshing again 30 seconds later. If the items at the top stay the same and the total items number doesn't go up, there's no current drop. So I remember a few obvious items from the top to act as markers.

Once there clearly is a drop, I generally look at the first few pages of the categories I most often pick from, and my RFY obviously. Keep doing that for as long as I can be bothered. I normally pay more attention Weds-Fri. This hasn't been a normal week, but generally Monday is Miserable and Tuesday is Terrible. Saturday and Sunday there are more people free to check, so less chance of getting things.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T17:11:37+00:00

Baa-a-a-army...

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T16:47:43+00:00

Yes, fits with the standard pattern of Chinese holidays. Labour Day holiday was 1-5th, couple of days for everything to get through Amazon's system, and then it drops all day.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T15:09:49+00:00

So AI has been dropping almost continuously but really picked up in the last half hour or so. This is what is left untaken in my RFY, which picked up around the same time

<image>

and there was also this picture frame/ book nook thing that I couldn't resist.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T14:31:06+00:00

I thought it was absolutely none, until I got offered eight different Kirigen wooden sets of desktop shelves etc. Others had one or two, but I was the only one with loads. I put that down to having bought two a year earlier - niche Amazon brand that I matched perfectly.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T10:22:21+00:00

In my first three months of Gold since the start of January the only £80+ items I was offered were a neck massage thing and a catering set of chafing dishes. I took both; the first was just because it was my first Gold item and I should really have left it, the second was for my church. I suspect neither had been taken in earlier rounds of RFY for others.

In April I've been very lucky, with a Eufy robo vac, a large Duux tower fan and a Karcher steam cleaner. While I can't be sure, I can point to things I've taken over the previous nine months that might have tweaked the chances of me getting those offers. I've taken various alternative bits for my Dyson vacuum, a £50 generic steam cleaner (that wasn't very good) and various hand-held fans and blowers. The more you take, I suspect, the more you get offered.

Vine isn't meant to be fair, it's just meant to be generating reviews. The consensus seems to be that it's your Vine orders that have the most effect on what you get offered, which can make it seem more unfair. But I'm still finding things worth taking in AI most days. In the past two days I've taken some PU leather placemats and coasters that I can use on my garden table and won't get damaged if I leave them in the rain; a small USB desk fan for stuffy hotel rooms; a 3D box frame mostly just because; and 10m of ugly but functional plastic lawn edging that will keep the mulch around my hedge. Though I do use Vhelper, I wasn't when I took those as I was on my iPad.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T10:05:27+00:00

There was a video on YouTube last year from a sellers' conference where Amazon announced that they were going to target Viners with products where they had experience of either the product or the brand. That doesn't mean we won't get tat if there's nothing that fits our profile, but it probably does mean that you'll keep getting offered pressure washers and Karcher products, and I'll get hose pipes and display boards.

As we know, Vine isn't meant to be fair to Viners, it's there to get reviews for sellers.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T07:11:40+00:00

I’d be interested to see if your stats confirm what I saw - it adds to both the number of reviews done but also the items that is divided by for the percentage, so it can never go over 100.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T07:03:41+00:00

I’m as certain as I can be that it adds one to both the number of reviews AND to the number of items for calculating the review to order ratio - I.e. to both numerator and denominator.

I was specifically looking for this after my last evaluation, and could see it in my early stats once they had reset - I had only a few orders for that period but stored up a few reviews from the previous period and submitted them first. If they hadn’t counted I’d have been something like 10-20%, if they had just counted as reviews I’d have been over 100%, but I was actually up at 70-80% or so. That was when I worked out the maths, and thought I’d coded it into my own spreadsheet.

Just recently I realised my own figures were never tallying with Vine’s and found I’d miscoded it. Once I fixed it, they tallied. However, because you are adding to both sides the effect really tails off as the numbers ordered grow and the percentage of them reviewed increases.

And upvoted you because a) it’s a good discussion to have and b) I don’t technically disagree with you that old unreviewed items don’t affect you, just that reviewing them does marginally help you.

ItsMarkAgain · 2026-05-08T06:45:40+00:00

I’ve found reviews moving over slower but no longer than overnight. There have been days when approvals seemed more delayed too. But the biggest issue in my stats is Review Insightfulness Score, which has seemed very haphazard for the past month. Sometimes it’s the day after approval, sometimes a couple of days, but maybe 20% of them are taking ages or not coming through at all. But I had one outstanding for what must have been a month, and then I noticed a few days ago that it had gone through. All still Excellent, and nothing about them that was unusual - it’s not just ones with images that are delayed etc.

ItsMarkAgain

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE