What the Tech: Amazon Vine Voices

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - If you ever shop online, you probably read customer reviews of the products. As almost everyone knows, many online reviews are fakes.

Amazon does its best to remove those reviews. Amazon also sends out thousands of products for free, in search of honest reviews.

When looking through reviews for a product on Amazon, you might encounter one labeled “Vine Voices.” It’s a program Amazon launched a few years ago to solicit honest, in-depth reviews of products.

Here’s how it works

Customers receive free products from Amazon in exchange for a well-written and helpful review. Companies provide items free of charge and shipped by Amazon. When the product arrives, the Vine reviewer tries it out and submits their review.

Amazon says the reviews are not required to be positive and neither Amazon nor the manufacturer has any input from the customer.

One Vine reviewer has received and reviewed hundreds of items, like a cordless battery-powered weed eater. His review is clearly marked as a Vine Voice, so other customers know he received it for a review.

Wouldn’t want to be a Vine reviewer if you get free stuff like that?

The process of being chosen is complicated. Customers can’t sign up, but Amazon browses through reviews and when it sees a customer leaving lots of in-depth and helpful reviews, Amazon will invite that person to the Vine Voices program.

So if you want to be part of the program, go back and write in-depth, helpful, and well-written reviews of things you’ve purchased on Amazon and hope you are selected.

By the way, Walmart and a few other online retailers have similar programs.

Walmart’s “Spark” program works much the same way as amazon’s vine program. You can learn more about those two programs by checking out their websites.

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