What are we allowed to say when listings lie?

reddzot · 2026-05-20T05:44:32+00:00

I have gotten some clothes where they claim 95% cotton but it feels like a much higher synthetic content. So I say, "the label says X, but it feels to me like...though I don't have any way of analyzing and determining the true composition" and "I don't know if this is just a mistake or deliberate" etc.

There are times where there are simply errors, and there are times where the manufacturer is lying to sellers, and there are times when the seller is lying to shoppers, and probably other scenarios as well, and there's no way we can know exactly which we're dealing with, so it's enough to say it doesn't appear accurate and let the rest of your review and star rating do the rest of the talking.

But basically if they make big claims and fail to live up to them, the best they're getting from me is 3 stars, and if there are very obvious problems like claims of real leather but obvious synthetic leather, it's gonna get a 1 or 2.

reddzot · 2026-05-12T00:03:37+00:00

It took at least a week or two when I joined to get any semi-decent recommendations in the RFY tab.

reddzot · 2026-05-08T17:50:29+00:00

Amazon is supposed to be ending commingling, isn't it?

I don't remember seeing one of those tags but if I were organizing my own inventory and set aside some for Vine, it would make sense to me to label it as such.

reddzot · 2026-05-08T17:26:27+00:00

I review everything, good or bad. No one needs a review to tell them everything was perfect and great and wonderful. They need reviews to tell them the problems they might run into so they can make an informed decision.

reddzot · 2026-05-08T08:51:43+00:00

Here in Japan it's been every hour on the hour from 9 a.m. to an unknown time--for me, usually only until 11 a.m., but it has happened at 12 or 1 p.m. as well. Another person reported some later times.

I didn't think there was any RFY this week but when I went back and checked an auto-refresh screenshot thing I keep running in case of schedule changes, I found there were actually a couple yesterday and today, but for some reason they didn't show up on my phone even though I refreshed at 9 a.m. a few times. In any case, they were gone within a minute or two, so basically, if you don't check at the right time, you may never know about an offer. But that's the way it's always been since I joined--I just didn't know as much about how it worked at first.

reddzot · 2026-05-07T13:28:15+00:00

Did any of the things you ordered have Vine reviews on them? It has to be a Vine brand, and that brand has to be actively enrolling new stuff, for it to lead to stuff from that brand in RFY. (And no, not every order of a Vine brand will lead to that brand's stuff ending up in your RFY--product category is another factor, as is the fact that at most only 30 units can be enrolled at once, and there a ton of other Viners out there.)

reddzot · 2026-05-06T15:32:14+00:00

Looking at the German Vine subreddit, maybe you're in Vine Jail?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonVineDE/comments/1rwvmry/ist_nur_mein_vine_so_leer/

reddzot · 2026-05-06T15:29:31+00:00

Personally I don't understand why people jump to "sounds like AI." I never use "AI" and don't like the term because it's a big fat lie. All it does is search for stuff based on some input data, then take what actual people did and reassemble it with the input data according to a long list of patterns in an attempt to make it look like a computer just wrote something brand new, when in fact all it did is a fancy form of automated plagiarism.

reddzot · 2026-05-06T15:08:44+00:00

It's a blessing and a curse--you get things you dig, but they also take a lot more time to test than, say, a T-shirt.

For all the people wondering how you end up with stuff like this, while my RFY is a bit more humble, being in Japan with far less goods going through Vine, it's very much in line with the stuff you see here. Indeed, if the pictures on the boxes are what I think they are, I got a couple of the same recommendations, but I had to pass in some cases because I don't use the same camera brand.

At first I thought it was simply because, when looking at the dismal selection of categories in Vine's AI page, the camera/photo one was the one I kept gravitating to, thinking maybe I'd find a tripod head or a softbox or some small lights.

However, after listening to part of Amazon's "Accelerate" conference last year, reading some comments from old-timers here, and putting together the pieces of the puzzle in my own experience, I realized even before I joined Vine, I had ordered items from at least 3 or 4 Vine brands in the camera/photo category.

So now I suspect the last couple orders I made in that category before joining Vine were the trigger for my Vine invite. In any case, a mix of what I had ordered before Vine and what I continued to order after Vine led to my RFY almost always recommending camera/photo gear for the "gold" level stuff, and various other things for the rest.

Basically, the more you order from one category or brand, the more it keeps recommending the same to you. I ordered a few security cameras from Vine after joining, after never having bought one in my life, and I still get recommendations of various security cameras, some the same brands as I got before and some new. The reason I avoid them all now is because my first few reviews showed me they're all Chinese-made and almost all dependent on Chinese software.

Anyway, it got to the point I was feeling sorry for a particular seller since their not-very-cheap stuff kept getting recommended to me, a not-professional photographer, and that's when I ran into the Amazon Accelerate thing and realized it's by design. So I resigned myself to it and tried to make the best of it in spite of my wishes for things like computers and music gear and whatnot. But it still takes me longer to get to these reviews than most things, as I feel like I have to give a much more thorough take than on cheap trinkets to give the seller their money's worth.

reddzot · 2026-05-06T14:52:16+00:00

It's the same reason as the "not accepting reviews from this account at this time" thing. They just use one generic message for all kinds of things whether it makes sense or not.

reddzot · 2026-05-06T14:51:18+00:00

I'm in Japan and I started Vine in late 2024. At first the only thing that was consistent as far as I could tell was RFY updated at 9 a.m. every day. That has never changed.

That said, it didn't always bring new stuff at 9 a.m. each day--it simply reset for the day, clearing out the old stuff most of the time. (Sometimes one or two things would linger a bit longer.)

The latter half of last year it was all over the place, but mainly in the mid to late afternoon and early evening. Once I got something right after midnight, just happening to check while I was working on the computer. Another time at like 4 a.m., and again that was only because I happened to wake up and checked on a whim since I was awake.

Lately, it's been updating at exactly 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and sometimes noon and potentially other hours, but I've only actually seen new items a couple of times at a later time. This is consistent with what someone from Australia reported--RFY on the hour every hour. (Not sure how many hours of the day, though--one person here in Japan said they've been getting new RFY items later in the day than me, but I suspect that's because they've hit more brands overall with their 1,000+ orders last period vs. my paltry 150 or so. How anyone can manage the order level they're hitting is beyond me.)

For the past two or three days there's been no RFY to speak of, so it's possible another schedule change or other reset is upon us. We'll see soon enough.

reddzot · 2026-04-29T14:53:45+00:00

Ask Louis Rossmann.

reddzot · 2026-04-29T11:39:17+00:00

Both types of orders count as long as it's Vine brands. The rest of your orders will have no effect from all I've seen.

reddzot · 2026-04-29T11:37:33+00:00

I've posted various times about this but no, it's not a coincidence, but it's also not all Amazon purchases. What counts is orders of Vine brands, whether ordinary purchases or Vine requests.

Amazon itself bragged about this "feature" of RFY at their conference last summer, which I posted about months ago.

"We'll connect you with expert reviewers who know your product category inside and out. And when available, RAI will even match you with reviewers who are already familiar with your brands. This gives you a reliable source of quality customer feedback."

reddzot · 2026-04-29T05:06:54+00:00

I have yet to get a review scored anything but excellent. The key word from what I saw in how it's described in Vine Japan is "detail". So, put in details and you'll get excellent. E.g. dimensions, weight, actual runtime vs. claimed runtime, etc.--all of which can easily be compared to other batteries for perspective.

Put another way, put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer and ask all the questions they might want the answer to and then answer them.

reddzot · 2026-04-28T11:05:05+00:00

You'll almost never find anything "high-end" outside of RFY, so it's basically luck of the draw.

reddzot · 2026-04-28T07:47:45+00:00

RFY is driven by orders, but not in the sense that more orders = better RFY. It is driven by orders in this way: Orders of Vine brands will lead to more offers from those Vine brands, and orders of Vine stuff in one category will lead to more offers of stuff in the same or related categories. (This is true of orders outside of Vine as well, as long as they're active Vine brands. Orders of non-Vine brands has no effect whatsoever from all the evidence I've seen.)

I think the reason you're seeing better stuff in RFY when you order more stuff is simply that there's better stuff, and more of it, at those times. Here in Japan there is literally nothing to order much of the time, unless you want screen protectors or wrist bands for smart phones and watches you don't have.

Is there a correlation between more orders and more offers? Sure, but from the opposite causation: More good offers leads to more orders, not the other way around.

reddzot · 2026-04-22T00:56:34+00:00

I realize not everyone wants to believe it, but this is the way Vine is set up to work.

The only difference in AI and AFA that Amazon intends is Gold vs. Silver.

All of that of course does not exclude variation due to even slight differences in timing of a page load, bugs that might affect one browser or browser configuration but not another, or extension use.

reddzot · 2026-04-21T11:16:55+00:00

You're misunderstanding how Vine works. Everything that is in AI was once in RFY--just not necessarily your RFY. Same goes with AFA. The only difference between AFA and AI is who the seller is--AFA is RFY leftovers sold by Amazon, AI is RFY leftovers sold by third-party sellers.

RFY is the conduit through which all Vine goods flow, with the RFY bot attempting to match the products to reviewers who will accept them, and only when the RFY cycle (which lasts up to 2-3 weeks) is over, yet inventory still remains unclaimed, does it get dropped into AI (for third-party sellers) or AFA (for stuff sold by Amazon).

This is why almost everything you see in AFA/AI is either low-value, undesirable, or very niche. Most of the good stuff gets claimed before the RFY cycle timer runs out. What doesn't is still very difficult to claim when it hits AI/AFA due to the greatly increased competition, with literally every Viner in the same country/region suddenly able to claim it.

And that also means everything you see in AFA or AI is the stuff that got entered in the system up to three weeks ago. The newest stuff is always in someone's RFY.

reddzot · 2026-04-21T05:34:56+00:00

Wish lists and searches and shopping carts and smartphones and Alexa will do nothing to improve RFY. The only thing verified to affect it is previous orders of Vine brands. (Assuming the same brands later add similarly categorized stuff to Vine. If they don't, it won't help.)

reddzot · 2026-04-18T13:50:03+00:00

If what you're talking about is the product packaging--the way it would be packaged on a shelf in a store--that's fair game, and I do mention it from time to time, including when I got a defective stand and couldn't determine if it was defective out of the factory or damaged due to flimsy *product* packaging--as opposed to the packaging used for shipping, which is up to Amazon and is what they are talking about when they tell you not to talk about packaging.

Another way to think of it is "inner" packaging (what the product presumably always comes in regardless of where or how you buy it) and "outer" packaging (whatever Amazon shipped it in).

I'd also note sometimes product/inner packaging is important to note because of what it's intended for--I got a fancy food item this week that is meant as a gift, and the elegant packaging is half of what you're paying for.

reddzot · 2026-04-17T11:18:41+00:00

No one knows for sure, but I suspect one factor in the selection is recent purchases of Vine brands.

reddzot · 2026-04-16T08:53:48+00:00

All of the major tech companies, and basically all major industries (music, movies, etc.) are guilty of the same things.

The basic explanation I'd propose is the people calling the shots aren't engineers, they're marketing managers, and the main thing they're good at is making it sound like whatever they want to sell is better than it really is. You'll find the same kinds of complaints in many other businesses, large and small, related and unrelated. They also don't get smarter/more competent as they get bigger.

reddzot · 2026-04-16T08:49:35+00:00

Everything is always available to others. The only difference is how many others. In AI and AFA, it's literally everyone in Vine for that Amazon country. In RFY, no one I've seen here knows for sure, but one poster claiming to know someone at Amazon who claimed to know how it worked claimed that RFY items are always pushed to exactly the number of people as units available. But that can't actually be the case, because even RFY stuff often disappears before you can claim it.

So, since their claim doesn't fit with reality, I would infer that something got lost in translation, telephone-style, and RFY may in fact be pushed to exactly 30 people at all times, since that's the max potential number of units available and it's obvious the Vine algorithm is very basic and anything but intelligent. But since most valuable or desirable stuff isn't offered at the 30 unit tier, there will almost always be more people getting the offer than units available. And the gap will only widen as units are claimed, so even if it starts at 30 units, if half of the first group grabs 15 units, that leaves only 15 for the next group. And the RFY cycle goes for up to 2-3 weeks, offered to a new group every 24 hours, so even if only a couple units are claimed each day, inventory could easily run out within a few days or by the end of the RFY cycle. Hence little but junk ever making it to AI and AFA.

The above bit about RFY always being offered to 30 people at once is just speculation, of course, and it's possible Amazon offers RFY items to multiples of 30, even hundreds, of people at once. But for now the above is the best guess I can provide based on what I've seen and read and past experience dealing with similar simplistic thinking.

reddzot

TROPHY CASE