My Love Hate Relationship with Amazon Vine -- a Long Story

Right now, I am on the outs with Amazon. Or actually, they are on the outs with me. They kicked me out of their Vine review program – more on that later – and erased 20 years of product reviews I wrote, and have banned me from reviewing products. And all for no good reason except they outsourced the Vine program – more on that later – overseas to a bunch of flunkies who cut and paste irrelevant replies to inquiries and issues, and if you get one of them on a bad day, they completely delete you from Amazon. I was, after 20 years, in the top 4,000 reviewers as far as “helpful” votes. Now I don’t exist.

In the early days of Amazon, they just sold books, and I would occasionally order a software book. It was the 1990s, and I was updating my skills in order to stay in the workforce. Then I started to find bargains – used books at 99 cents, $3.99 postage. Even at $4, it seemed like a deal. I found the histories and biographies I enjoyed and couldn’t get at the library. In the early days of my non-starter journalism career, I reviewed books for the local newspaper and enjoyed it, so I wrote reviews of the books I bought from Amazon. Some people would rate my reviews as helpful.

One day, my account said I was in the Vine program. (People online say the program started in 2007 or 2008. I don’t remember, but that’s possible.) I could click on a link to a list of advanced copies of new books twice a month, the paperback editions that book reviewers receive. They usually had no art or photos inside. There would be typos in the text. Parts like indexes or introductions would be left blank. We were told to pay no attention to those flaws as these were not the finished books, just review the content. So if I saw a book that interested me on the list, I clicked on it and it came in the mail with a big Not for Resale sticker on it. After a few years, I had to dump all these books into recycling. There was no room for them in the house, and they weren’t nice editions anyway. You couldn’t even donate them to a library.

The Vine program evolved from here. Apparently, vendors were offered what seems to me to be a bad deal. Pay Amazon several thousand dollars and let them give away free samples of your products to reviewers in order to garner some reviews and jumpstart sales. The vendor is taking a chance the reviews might be mostly bad. How is that a deal? But that’s what happened.

So the Vine list began including things that weren’t books, just as Amazon began selling things that weren’t books. There were beauty products, household products and pet foods. I had cats. I washed my hair with shampoo. I lived in a house. So when they appeared, I clicked. Sometimes you got one can or bottle. Sometimes you got a whole carton. Sometimes you got a case. More and more items were added to the Vine program. The list came out every other Thursday at 3 p.m. (on the East Coast), and I began to notice if I looked at it around that time, there was a lot on it, brand names, new products, sometimes very nice things! But if I waited a few hours or days, there would just be the usual books. The other Vine reviewers caught on to the system and got on early and kept refreshing the page, and snatched up the good stuff within seconds. I was often busy working on Thursdays, so only rarely hit a bonanza. My first was a storage cabinet.

The Vine system otherwise worked very well. You could only have five unreviewed things checked out at a time. If you were behind in your review posting, you could not click on anything new. The website kept accurate records of what you had out and what you had reviewed. There were strict rules about what you could say in a review, so I assume there were actual people reading the reviews before they went live. I never had any reason to email the Vine customer service people.

Then everything changed. First Amazon did away with the Vine reviewers forum pages. I was in agreement with that because it was a hotbed of meanness and gossip. They knew how to work the system, and they were policing other reviewers, reporting those they felt were writing fake or lazy reviews, reporting people they claimed were reselling products – which was not allowed – you couldn’t even give them away for six months. Not everyone was seeing the same lists of available products, so forum people were reporting on what was on other lists for reasons I could never fathom. They talked about people who had been kicked off Vine.

Then Vine changed the frequency that the list refreshed. Instead of every other Thursday, it was constantly. And you no longer were limited to five unreviewed items. You could select dozens of items -- everything on the list, if you wanted -- and take as long as you needed to review them. You could never review them at all and it didn’t seem to matter. Your list kept refreshing with more stuff.

The website no longer worked efficiently. Before, once you posted a review, the item disappeared instantly from your queue of Items Awaiting Review. Now, sometimes it would, but mostly it wouldn’t. You’d click on it to resubmit your review and your original review would pop up. It just wouldn’t go through. Or it would, but the text and the item would stay stuck in your queue.

This issue and the change in rules is what I thought lead to my demise as a reviewer, although the more I read other people's experiences on Reddit, I am not as sure my situation was unique or even my fault. It started when my husband was home for three months on disability and said he would write the reviews, so I gave him my password and he began looking at the list on Thursdays when it came out. He knew to get on early and refresh until the list appeared. He scored some big items and became a junkie.

It was manageable at first because he was restrained by having to get his reviews in before he could click again. When they stopped that requirement, the UPS truck was pulling up on a daily basis. It was too much. It was Christmas morning every day. It was stuff that was fun or interesting for a few hours, but then he’d lose interest. He fell behind on his share of the reviews.

Vine also had a bad habit of piling on with similar products. Like, they’d put up a vacuum cleaner, and you’d think, great, I can use a new vacuum cleaner! Then a week or so later, there’d be another one, a better one! So you’d get that one. Then a month later, an even better one! Before you knew it, you had eight vacuum cleaners. There were printers, computers, furniture. If you didn’t mind that none of your chairs matched, you could have a house full of chairs. One year, there was a lot of costume jewelry. We each ended up with a box of watches. There was clothes, shoes, vitamins, over the counter medicine, household cleaning products. Always too much. Instead of a package of paper towels, you’d be sent a box of 48 rolls. 

Over dinner, I would read out the list of items my husband had clicked on and force him to verbally review them. There was usually 15-20 items, and I could get him to talk about maybe 10. Being a wildly efficient person, I would then write his 10 reviews and post them. This would trigger an algorithm at Amazon that I was a spammer and half or more of them would be rejected as "unverified purchases." I would be blocked out of resubmitting the reviews that didn’t go through.

Meanwhile, my own, timely, efficiently submitted reviews of my items were going through, but the items were staying stuck in my Awaiting Review queue. I was writing weekly emails to Vine customer service asking for help fixing this situation and they were cutting and pasting irrelevant answers back to me. I was reviewing unverified purchases, they said. But they’re Vine items, not purchases? I had a personal relationship with the Vine vendors. But I did not know the Vine vendors and no one was paying me for a good review? My review violated community guidelines. But my review is five stars and just says it’s a great item that works well?

After enough of these irrelevant and untrue warnings, they closed down my Vine list. One day you log in and you’re locked out with the little goodbye, good luck, don’t try to change our minds notice on top. All your Vine reviews are erased. In my case, it was approximately 1,200.

About a week or two after the first time this happened, I suddenly appeared back in the program again, and a week after that, all my reviews magically reappeared. (On Reddit, I read this happened to a number of people. It was a computer glitch, and many were reinstated.) So for six more months, we pulled down a number of kitchen appliances, toys, clothes and electronic junk. My husband fell behind in his reviews again. Vine was dumping a lot of off-brand, rip-off Made in China products into the lists, poorly sewn clothes, things that didn’t work, things missing parts, things that required you to send your personal information to China in order to download an app to make it work.

It seemed like they were clearing out warehouses of discontinued products at times. You’d get a piece of furniture that had to be assembled and was missing parts, and you’d call the company’s customer service and they would say they no longer made that item. No parts. Send it back to Amazon and get a refund. But you couldn’t return Vine items. You had a pile of particle board and screws you had to haul to the dump.

Amazon had an in-house line of pantry food products and toiletries, but for some reason, clicking on them triggered error messages. The olive oil and toothpaste request went through, but the items never shipped. I should have done nothing, but I kept trying to bring order and reason to my queue, and once again was contacting customer service for help, and once again they dropped me out of Vine, only this time, they also banned me from reviewing even items I purchased. All my reviews, thousands of them over 20 years, disappeared from my Profile. And I could never review again. Don’t even try. You are blocked.

Meanwhile, Vine customer service sold or gave away my email address to Chinese vendors and I was getting emails daily from sellers of junk wanting me to buy their junk and in exchange for a review, they said they’d refund all or part of the purchase price into a Paypal account. I delete all of them. They keep coming. Who sold my email address to them? It does not appear on my Amazon profile. Between the rip-off non-brand products from Asia, the lack of incentive to actually review, the discontinued stock dumps, and the outsourced customer service reps, Vine was becoming an unpleasant chore.

Still, when you’re dumped off the gravy train, it’s like coming off heroin. How will I live without checking the list two or three times a day? How can I survive without boxes coming every day? We got a second recycling container to hold all the cardboard we flattened. True, it’s not like it was completely free. A few years ago, Amazon required you hand over your social security number to continue in Vine and they report the tax value of what they sent you to the IRS, so you have to report it as income on your taxes. Some items like food or beauty products had no tax value, but some crazy things had a tax value higher than the selling price. Vine was a mess. (And in early 2019 the New York Times reported that a glitch had delivered all the Vine email addresses into the hands of the Asian scammers, so possibly our social security numbers as well?)

Looking around my house now, it’s like 80 percent Vine things. I will miss being introduced to some really nice things I liked and would not have been brave enough to try or buy otherwise, like a citrus juicer and a toaster oven. On Facebook, I posted links to the 30 or so items over a couple of thousand that won my heart. I will miss the cat food that not only helped me support all my cats, but fed the neighborhood strays as well. I will miss the improvement Vine made in my husband’s wardrobe.

Thinking my situation was unique and unfair, I searched the Amazon website for the very well-hidden telephone number you can call to actually talk to a human. But the first human I got was Muhammed with a British accent, so I figured I was outsourced again to India where they really didn’t care about anyone’s Vine issues. The second time I got Crystal, who sounded possibly like she was in America, but she had never heard of Amazon Vine. I had to explain the whole program to her. She pretty much told me she had no idea what to do about it. I got form letters after the calls from both of them. They didn’t do anything to help, but asked me to rate them.

Amazon still sends me questions from customers about products I bought or received. Can you answer their question? I do, then they delete it with the message, you are not allowed to help customers. You are a bad rule violater.

I started to search the Internet for other Vine victims and found a bunch on Reddit, all with identical stories to mine. The one thing we may all have had in common was writing too many reviews at the same time. Several of the other victims talked about how they went months and months without reviewing anything, getting dozens and dozens of reviews behind, and the cut-off came not long after they finally sat down and caught up. One poor guy used his time getting chemotherapy to catch up on reviews, and he got dismissed.

I heard on the news this week that Amazon was now the biggest company on the stock market, toppling Apple and Microsoft. Jeff Bezos, the man who started Amazon selling books online out of his garage, is the richest man in the world. In the whole world! Today, the news says his net worth is $137 billion and his wife is divorcing him.

Amazon is so huge, you can’t quit them. I love my Echo, which I bought, and it requires an Amazon prime membership. Amazon has things you can’t find anywhere else. It would take me driving from store to store to store to search for some things and possibly not find them, but I can find it on Amazon in minutes and have delivered in two days. If I can't find it on Amazon, it doesn't exist. So I can’t really quit Amazon in protest over my hurt feelings about being falsely accused and convicted of writing reviews for unverified purchases or colluding with Chinese vendors. I am in too deep.