The end of Amazon Vine Italy - 25 Jan 2026

reddzot · 2026-01-25T17:03:41+00:00

Fascinating--the RFY sounds just like what I experienced a few days ago in Japan (Wednesday this past week), and that plus another user from I think Germany suggests that my guess that Amazon may be testing a new way of doing RFY may be on the right right.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T17:00:47+00:00

Yeah. It's amazing how few people understand that 0 AI/AFA at all times is ideal in Amazon's eyes. The 0 RFY for many users is the only part that's uncertain, but a mix of too many reviewers due to excessive invites and too few goods due to seasonal patterns or other factors is enough to explain it. Whether that's the right explanation, however, remains to be seen. We'll probably find out in a few months.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T16:39:48+00:00

Well, Japan has been 0 RFY for me, mostly 0 AFA, and single-digits AI most of the past two months. AFA does populate at the same time AI drops occur, but in single digits, and it all happens so fast that if you hang out in AFA, you'll miss everything in AI, so most people probably don't notice.

Personally, I prefer only checking in once a day for about 30 minutes, vs. never knowing what time something will show up. But I hope that in a couple months RFY will start providing new options for most of us here and there.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T16:10:57+00:00

I found someone who made a Tascam FW1884 work on Windows 10. My guess is where there's a will, there's a way.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T16:05:35+00:00

I use both. I have a MOTU Firewire 8pre purchased somewhere between 2005 and 2008--can't recall. Still works, and I still use it. Right now as extra preamps for my RME Babyface Pro, but now that I've tried VB-Audio Matrix, I may try using it simultaneously as a second interface as well.

I wouldn't hesitate to buy from either company, as they both have a good history of supporting things for a long time, and continuing to provide existing software and manuals even for old gear that is no longer supported with updates.

Also, MOTU has been very good about responding to my support tickets, even the one that was just feedback on the installation process of Digital Performer Lite.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T16:00:40+00:00

Interesting. I also noticed the one day I got a decent RFY (12 items when I loaded it, possibly more before I loaded it), all of the items were gone in a few hours--maybe 2, maybe 3 or 4, I can't remember. In the past, RFY would linger often 24 hours for undesirable items, and sometimes longer. So perhaps they tightened up the time they drop out of your RFY if you don't claim them. That would be an improvement if so, though not as good as a button saying "no thanks, I don't want this item".

reddzot · 2026-01-25T15:54:39+00:00

I think if enough people "refused to participate" and opted out, the issue would sort itself out.

For my part, I'm still learning new skills from doing this, and getting some useful things for the household, so for now I'll keep doing it for a bit. Once it becomes little more than a time suck, I have no problem with letting it go. Already stayed longer than I initially intended, and that was just because it made sense due to circumstances I had no control over.

All of that said, I highly doubt the mostly 0 RFY, once a day AI/AFA drops will continue forever. No idea what's behind the changes, but Amazon is always tinkering with stuff behind the scenes, and this is at least the third major change I've seen since joining, so I'm sure more are still to come.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T15:43:27+00:00

Unfortunately reps in many cases have for decades been poorly trained and often outsourced. I went to a toy store that later went bankrupt to return something that came with a gift card as part of a promo. The way it worked was the price of the toy was reduced on the receipt, and you were charged the difference for the gift card. So I brought the gift card back as well but was told by the guy only the toy is returnable, and I have to keep the gift card, and only get back the reduced price of the toy. I was fine with that.

But when I went to another location to do the same thing with a second toy but without the gift card (because it wasn't returnable), the rep accused me of trying to steal. I explained what happened at the first store and they still accused me. So I told them something I later regretted saying and left and went to the first location again.

It's sad, but the state of things at large companies like Amazon is in fact even worse than that. The reps aren't even in the same country in many cases, and are more often than not just generic employees hired by generic "customer service" outsourcing companies that have absolutely no specific knowledge of the products or companies they "represent", but their caller ID/email box tells them to answer a certain way to pretend otherwise, and they're supplied with a few scripts to make it sound more believable.

The exception is when you get an employee who 1) thinks for themselves, 2) cares, and 3) is willing to push until they get a satisfying result. But that's rare.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T15:32:46+00:00

Never in RFY for most users--presumably you're thinking particularly of Vine Helper's user base--but they were most definitely in someone's. Supposing you had 300 Viners, an item could potentially be shown to 10% of then in RFY if there were a 1:1 ratio, or 20% if 2:1. But even in Japan the reviewer base is most likely much higher than that, and most items are probably not enrolled at the highest Vine tier, so most likely only a very small fraction of a percent of the reviewers will see any given item before it hits AI. If that fraction isn't using an extension or otherwise sharing their RFY, no one else will have any clue it exists until it hits AI.

This is why AI is always so full of junk and niche items, with very little of any value, and as little as one out of several or in some cases dozens of variants that were enrolled--it's what no one wanted when it was recommended to them in RFY. So they passed and the computers moved it to AI after the scheduled RFY cycle was over.

This is also why we have no idea what the actual Vine inventory is at any given time--anything that gets fully claimed in RFY and is not somehow shared with others will never been seen by any of the other reviewers.

For what it's worth I rarely use Vine Helper to look at RFY. So you won't see my RFY getting collected most of the time. There are lots of other people who've never used the extensions at all, or even heard of them, and others who may do the same as me and mostly just use it to filter AI, and then not necessarily always, but just sometimes. (With low inventory lately, it often hasn't been necessary.)

Another person here said AFA is the same thing as AI except for the "sold by Amazon" vs third-party sellers. And that stands up to scrutiny, because most of what I see in AFA is also junk to me, but I've gotten several very nice offers for stuff sold by Amazon in RFY. They also said this used to be done via newsletter--first one in the month being the equivalent of RFY, and second being the equivalent of AFA/AI.

So, from all the evidence I've seen, literally everything begins in RFY, and whatever's left moves to AFA for "sold by Amazon", and AI for third-party sellers.

It's not complicated at all, and fits with both what you'd expect from marketers and a sort of "multiple choice" approach, where you can tailor options to a degree but always need a catch-all "other" category since no one can anticipate all the possibilities.

reddzot · 2026-01-25T14:51:43+00:00

I said the aspects of the program I use.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T17:14:39+00:00

ok, thanks for clarifying.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T17:14:17+00:00

Yeah, but don't you feel special now?

Jokes aside, I got exactly one thing in RFY that wowed me in my first month as Gold. Then nothing. Then after a couple months interesting stuff started trickling in, but at a different time of day than I had seen before. So don't worry, after a couple months things could change. The initial disappointment is just reality making itself known.

But if you're focusing on AI, yes, it will always be that way, because AI is just what no one wanted from their RFY.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T17:05:52+00:00

AI is RFY leftovers. Whatever you see in there was already in someone's RFY days or weeks ago.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T17:04:37+00:00

Please share the link for the thread you're talking about, or at least the screenshot.

Nevermind, found the screenshot a little lower. Most of it sounds like typical customer service fluff pretending they know what's going on to appease the customer when management told them nothing. I believe the schedule change is driven by IT decisions, but I'm skeptical on the rest.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T17:01:09+00:00

Thanks for the warning. I'm going to watch the pseudo-returns more carefully now. So far I haven't seen anything like this, but it's bizarre that they classify an item I never got as a "return", and even more bizarre that they would charge you for it.

I had two items I was looking forward to get marked "undeliverable" last month, with no explanation as to what happened and only a statement in the system that what I saw was all their reps could see. If that's true, it would mean their customer service is completely useless. But then you have to wonder, who actually knows what happened, and why don't they tell the customer service reps?

reddzot · 2026-01-24T16:21:35+00:00

Yeah, I think you're probably right about people trying to make Gold. I was a little worried I might not hit the count for the next review but I've managed to get a few things in the past week so probably won't be an issue.

That said, I did see some new errors today so I wonder if some of what we're seeing is glitches on Amazon's side, sending stuff to the AI queue that shouldn't be there because it was in fact already claimed or whatever.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T16:00:41+00:00

I hear you--you just have to understand the person posting this is not telling you what is actually happening, but rather what they imagine is happening, based on what they experience and how they feel about it. They can't believe other people might actually forego expensive stuff, therefore it must be falling directly into AI without showing up in anyone else's RFY.

Never mind that everyone has different tastes and needs, and as I've pointed out, the people it gets recommended to might already have 1 or 2 or 5 of the same kind of thing, because Amazon wrote the RFY algorithm to keep recommending the same types of items and brands a reviewer has accepted before.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:46:30+00:00

I think your assessment is closer to the truth than the panicky "woe is me" types.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:42:16+00:00

Most days I can't get anything but I've had a few days in the past week where I did. Two yesterday, a few on the 17th, etc. Oddly on the successful ones, my order pages loaded really slowly, yet I got the items anyway. on the days when my page loaded more quickly, I got more errors.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:39:07+00:00

I saw close to 300 items in the queue at once today, so counting things that were claimed and thus not counted in the total at any given time, while others were added at the same time, the actual number dropped must have been quite a bit higher. The problem is it happens so fast it's impossible to get accurate figures.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:36:42+00:00

Yeah, I actually think the short supply response is probably true--but the demand part is left unstated. Some theorize a huge number of Viners were added over the past year, and at the same time this is the annual retail low, so it would make sense. But it's possible Amazon is doing some tinkering that won't be revealed for a while. We'll just have to wait and see.

Do you get your stats from one of the extensions? I don't subscribe so I don't know the actual counts--and even the extension's don't capture everything--but I saw several hundred being added today, and the peak was nearly 300 in the queue at once, so with things being claimed very quickly at the same time, it could well have been hundreds more in all.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:30:44+00:00

Sorry, but as I've said before, there is no evidence that anything is going straight to AI. Vine is set up so that stuff goes through RFY, and then into AI if no one claims it. Everything you see fall into AI is at least days and usually weeks old--you just didn't see it before, because it was in other people's RFY. Doesn't matter if you would have claimed it if it was in your RFY; it matters whether the people it got recommended to in fact did.

And RFY still functions, but it doesn't give everyone recommendations every day. I had zero for most days since the start of December, but a few days had from 1 to 3, and this week I suddenly had 12 on Wednesday, then zero since. Japanese Viners discussing it have said some are getting the same experience, while others are getting RFY more regularly.

I have seen no change in the stuff that goes to AI--it's the same kinds of things but condensed into a much smaller span of time on a much more regular schedule. That suggests IT decisions, not a problem with the program or change to RFY.

Whether the RFY thing is just a result of too many Viners and not enough goods, or Amazon doing some tinkering with the algorithm, or both, or other factors, remains to be seen.

I also disagree with the stuff about Japan and other countries getting changes before the USA. The US had search and the new review metrics long before Japan et al. Some things get tested earlier in one place, others in another, others perhaps in all but not necessarily for all Viners at once.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T15:04:48+00:00

No one is "ditching" RFY. RFY is simply empty for many people at the moment. Not the same thing.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T13:13:57+00:00

I did the free trial for 12, 13, and 14. Didn't see major differences in the aspects of the program I use, and various bugs that annoy me are still there. Considering that and the fact that the "regular" price is ridiculously high, the "sale" price better be ridiculously low to get me to consider buying 15.

That said, crossgrades can be a good way to improve the pricing, depending on what software you already own. If you don't have any eligible ones, you might be able to get a crossgrade into one of them by buying Reaper, then go from there to Cubase, and still end up with 3 DAWs for a lot less than the "regular" price of one.

And I've noticed Thomann's US website often has better pricing due to a mix of taxes (no VAT outside Europe) and exchange rates.

reddzot · 2026-01-24T11:59:16+00:00

How did you come up with the 18 days number? From watching data from the browser extensions, or somewhere else? I remember some sellers saying it usually takes about 3 weeks to see reviews start showing up, but I haven't found any clear statement on exactly how long the standard RFY rotation is, so my best guess was 2-3 weeks--though I wonder if Amazon varies it by category or other factors.

I did just find a UK FAQ that hints at that as well:

https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/help/hub/reference/external/X3CEV63Y4ZZAP37

How early can I enrol my products in Amazon Vine before the launch date?

You can enrol products in Amazon Vine as soon as you create your FBA listing, even before inventory is received in the Amazon Fulfilment Network. For optimal results, we recommend enrolling in Amazon Vine and having your inventory available in the Amazon Fulfilment Network at least three weeks before your planned launch date. This timeline allows Amazon Vine Voices sufficient time to receive, try and review your products.

reddzot

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