Welcome to Amazon Vine Help
Amazon Vine is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon Vine provides members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Since Voices will receive access to products that are not yet available on the market, their opinions may be among the first posted on a product’s detail page. Amazon does not influence the opinions of Amazon Vine members, nor do we modify or edit their reviews.
Access is granted to the Vine program based on your standing in the Amazon reviewer community. If you missed your invitation e-mail and want to determine if you have access to the vine program, visit https://www.amazon.ca/gp/vine. Once you have completed the enrollment agreement, you will be a full-fledged Vine Member, being able to access the free items you can order as well as a Vine Member badge. If you have multiple accounts, the one with the highest reviewer ranking is most likely to have been invited.
At this time, participation in Amazon Vine is limited to select customers who have been invited to join the program.
Amazon.ca’s Privacy Notice applies to your participation in the program and describes our practices regarding collection and use of personal information. Amazon does not share your identity or contact details to any product suppliers who participate in the program without your permission.
Amazon Vine product will be delivered straight from Amazon.ca.
Per the Amazon Vine Terms and Conditions, you may not sell or give possession of the products to any other person or entity for six months following your order.
All Vine items must be reviewed within 30 days of receipt of the item. For purposes of calculating the date of receipt, we assume Vine shipments take 7 days. For example, if you order Vine items on May 16th, and the items are shipped one day later on May 17th, you will have until June 23rd 11:59PM PST to submit your reviews.
These actions are not yet supported.
No. As stated in the Vine Voice participation agreement Amazon employees are not eligible.
Vine membership provides tiered access and rewards based on contributions to Amazon Vine.
Silver Tier: This is the base tier that allows you to request up to 3 items per day from products valued at 129 CAD or less. To be upgraded to the Gold tier, you must order 100 products and review at least 90% of your orders within the evaluation period stated in your Account page.
Gold Tier: This is the premium tier that allows you to request up to 8 items per day from products of any value. To remain in this tier, you should order 100 products and review at least 90% of your orders within the evaluation period stated in your Account page.
To maintain an active account, be sure to review at least 50% of your orders at all times. If less than 50% of your orders are reviewed, your account will be placed under review. However, you will still have access to Vine, but the new product recommendations will be turned off and your account will be at risk of being closed. You can recover your account once you have reviewed greater than 50% of your recent orders for at least two weeks in a row. If we don’t see any improvement in review levels, we will unfortunately close your account after 30 days of monitoring.
In the Silver tier, you can request up to 3 items per day. Once you are upgraded to Gold tier, you can request up to 8 items per day. The “Request Item” button will be deactivated once you have met the request limit for the day.
Under the “Your Vine activity” section of the Account page, we use the below metrics:
“You have reviewed X Vine items this period” tracks the total reviews that have been submitted and approved by the Amazon Customer Reviews team within the evaluation period.
“You have reviewed X% of your Vine items this period” tracks the total approved reviews as a percentage of total orders placed within the evaluation period.
Amazon Vine monitors Voice activity and has guardrails to avoid program misuse. This ensures we deliver value to customers from this program.
The Evaluation period is the duration over which your review contributions would be analyzed to assess your tier status.
If you joined Vine prior to October 6, 2022, your Evaluation period end date (or your “Re-evaluation date”) has been randomly assigned six to nine months from your Evaluation period start date. After your first re-evaluation date, all future re-evaluation dates will be set to six months from the last re-evaluation date.
These metrics reset to 0 at the beginning of each evaluation period.
Submit reviews at least two weeks before your Re-evaluation date to allow for review processing by the Amazon Customer Reviews team. If your Evalution period ends on April 6, 2023, then you should plan to submit your reviews by March 23, 2023.
This is a courtesy warning to remind you to submit reviews on the Vine items you’ve recently ordered in the last 3 months. Once you have reviewed 50% or more of your recent orders for at least two weeks, the message will be removed.
The Amazon Vine Program is only open to non-U.S. persons who reside in Canada outside of British Columbia, Saskatchewan or Manitoba. If you do not meet these criteria, you are not eligible for the Amazon Vine program and you do not need to fill out this questionnaire.
In general, you are considered a U.S. person if you are a (1) U.S. citizen, (2) U.S. resident, or (3) entity organized under the laws of the U.S.
No. You can choose to complete the tax questionnaire, but unfortunately you will not be able to continue to participate in the Amazon Vine Canada program. The Vine Canada program is only open to non-U.S. persons living in Canada outside of the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
Amazon requires all Vine Voices to provide valid taxpayer identification information in order to comply with requirements under the Vine Program.
Until your tax status is Completed/Validated, you will not be able to participate in the Amazon Vine Program.
The tax questionnaire is secure and uses an encrypted format to store your information for audit purposes.
Is the value of the products I receive considered U.S. or Canadian taxable income?
The value of the products you receive may constitute taxable income to you. Please consult a tax advisor to determine if you should pay taxes on or report on an income tax return the value of the products you receive.
No, you will not receive a tax reporting form as part of your participation in the Amazon Vine Canada program.
This is your physical location at the time you receive and test products you requested through Amazon Vine. You must be physically located in Canada outside the provinces of British Colombia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan when receiving and testing products through Amazon Vine.
A foreign tax identification number is a tax identification number issued by the local tax authority in your country of residence for income tax reporting purposes. For example, for Canadian individuals, this would be your Social Insurance Number.
To comply with U.S. tax regulations governed by the U.S. Tax Authority (Internal Revenue Service “IRS”), Amazon requires all non-U.S. Amazon Vine participants to provide valid taxpayer identification information through our questionnaire and complete an IRS Form W-8 to certify their non-U.S. status.
Note: Your activity will not be considered from U.S. sources given that you must be physically located outside the U.S. to participate, and as such, your activity will not be subject to U.S. tax withholding or reporting.
Form 1042-S is an information statement that the U.S. taxing authority (called the “Internal Revenue Service”, or “IRS”) requires Amazon to send to non-U.S. payees that received U.S. sourced income during the calendar year. Given that you must be located in Canada outside the provinces of British Colombia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan when receiving and testing products through Amazon Vine, the value of the products you receive will not be reportable on Form 1042-S.
This is the rate applicable if receiving U.S. source income. If you see any rate other than 0%, you are not eligible to participate in Amazon Vine, as you have indicated in your questionnaire that you are physically located inside the United States when receiving and reviewing products, which is not permissible.
If you do not consent to provide an electronic signature, you will need to print, sign, and mail the paper tax form to Amazon at the address listed in the tax questionnaire. If you do consent to provide an electronic signature, you may print it out and keep for your records, but are not otherwise required to take any action.
Amazon keeps this information on file for audit purposes.
No, you will not be able to participate in the Amazon Vine Program if you do not provide your tax information.
In most cases, your tax information should be validated within a few minutes of submission. In rare cases, the validation process could take 7-10 business days.
Once the validation process is complete, the tax information status will show Completed/Validated on your Amazon Vine account page. Please note that while the validation process is pending, you will be unable to make changes to your tax information.
• Not Started – Required tax information has not been submitted. Please complete the tax information questionnaire as soon as possible by clicking the Start/Update Questionnaire in your Vine Account tab. Until your tax status is Completed/Validated, you will not be able to participate in the Amazon Vine Program.
• Completed/Validated – Your tax information is complete. No further action is required at this time. If any of your information changes, return to take the tax information questionnaire again.
• Pending Validation – Your tax information is currently under review. You cannot change or update your tax information during this time. We will let know you by email if further action is required. Until your tax status is Completed/Validated, you will not be able to participate in the Amazon Vine Program.
• Pending Additional Information – This could be one or more of the following: 1) You did not consent to provide an electronic signature and we have not received your hard copy forms. Please mail your form to: Amazon.com/Attn: FinOps Tax/PO Box 80683/Seattle, WA 98108-0683/USA. If you already mailed your form, please allow 7-10 days after receipt for it to be processed. You can retake the tax information questionnaire at any time and provide consent to expedite this process. 2) Tax information submitted for your account does not match IRS records. You must retake the tax information questionnaire by clicking on the Start/Update Questionnaire link in your Vine Account tab. We don't know why your tax information came back as invalid, but here are some things to consider: If you are submitting an International Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), use the number issued by the IRS. If you are submitting an Employer Identification Number (EIN), use the exact same name that appears on the first line of the address header on your Notice CP575A from the IRS. Misspelling your name, not including your middle initial or middle name, or entering an incorrect Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) may cause a mismatch between your tax information and IRS records. 3) Your tax information is incomplete. There are some discrepancies with the information provided and we require additional information. Please click on the Start/Update Questionnaire link in your Vine Account tab to provide this information. 4) Based on the information you provided in the questionnaire, you were instructed to download, complete, and mail a hard copy form to: Amazon.com/Attn: FinOps Tax/PO Box 80683/Seattle, WA 98108-0683/USA. If you already mailed your form, please allow 7-10 days after receipt for it to be processed. Until your tax status is Completed/Validated, you will not be able to participate in the Amazon Vine Program.
• Not Eligible to Participate in the Vine Canada Program – Unfortunately, you will not be able to continue to participate in the Amazon Vine Canada program based on the information you provided in the tax questionnaire. The Vine Canada program is only open to non-U.S. persons living in Canada outside of the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
Products can appear at any time on any day in your personal queue. We hope to surprise and delight you by targeting you products at all times.
At this time, we will not be offering a notification service.
You should check in whenever you have the capacity to order another product to review. We want you to feel free to check in whenever you are able and not be required to come to the site on a specific day and time.
There will not be a specific day or time when items are added to your queue. As we receive inventory from manufacturers, we will target the product using our current targeting system.
We will target some of the products based on your purchase and review history. We will also include some products that are not targeted that we hope you will enjoy. Rest assured we are continuously working to improve our targeting system to suit your needs. In the future, we hope to use your preference page information to guide targeting as well.
We are following a “Library” system. You “check out” a product by ordering and having it sent to you for review. When you post a review we will consider the product “checked in”. You may check out five products at a time. If you have all five products checked out, you will need to review a product before you are able to order another.
There are four reasons you could not see products in your queue. 1) You have all five products checked out at this time. 2) You have an outstanding review(s) that needs to be completed. 3) You have submitted an outstanding review within the last 48 hours and our system has not refreshed. 4) There are no products in current inventory targeted to you based on our current targeting system.
When you check in products, it could take up to 48 hours to see more products in your queue. If products do not appear at this time, do not worry - it may be that we are out of inventory and you will have to wait until we receive inventory matching your targeting criteria.
You must review 100% of the products you order within 30 days from delivery of the product to check the product back in.
You may take as many products as you can review. If you do not have the time or the capacity to do an honest and unbiased review – please give yourself more time before taking another product.
Yes, you are not guaranteed a product until you have placed an order for it.
Can I take products from Vine for All and not from my queue?
Yes! There is no limit on how many products you can checkout from Vine for All, but you still must check them in by posting a quality review within 30 days of the product arriving at your door. You are not required to take any of the products in your queue if they are not of interest to you.
Not at the same time. Products will go through the targeted queue first where you may or may not have been offered them, and after a period of time, will move to Vine for All.
Can you please stop sending me books (or something else that I don’t want)?
We understand that there are some products in your queue that you do not have interest in. We try and do our best to make sure that products are targeted to the best of our ability, but some products have no history and need to be offered up to several people that may or may not enjoy them. We encourage you to try something new every now and then - you never know, you might like it.
Vendors may nominate any products they wish for inclusion in Amazon Vine. We encourage you to browse your queue for books, music, movies, software, video games, and other items that catch your eye.
Selection is based on the manufacturers that participate and the products they choose to offer in the program.
Amazon Vine is a promotional program, so Vendors submit a limited quantity of product. We encourage you to visit our website often so that you can get copies of items of most interest to you to review before the inventory runs out.
You should receive your Amazon Vine item(s) within 5-7 business days of shipping it. You may track your orders by visiting the request status page.
Since Vine items ship at standard ground speeds (3-7 days), we provide the benefit of the doubt and assume that it will take 7 full days to reach our customers. The 30 day review counter will begin after the 7 day shipping period.
Please visit the request status page to view the status of your order.
Unfortunately we cannot support international Vine shipments at this time. We hope to provide this capability in the future and apologize to our valued international reviewer community.
All Vine items are handled separately from the rest of our Amazon products. Vine items currently ship at standard ground speeds (3-7 days).
The Amazon customer community highly values your opinions. We require that you write a review for every Vine item ordered within 30 days of receipt of shipment.
We encourage you to post reviews as quickly as possible as long as your review contains quality feedback that is expected of Vine Voices. Doing so will increase the likelihood that your opinions will be among the first to appear on the detail pages of new and pre-released items. However you have 30 days from receipt of shipment to provide a review before you are blocked from ordering more items.
Please click on the “Your Vine Reviews” tab on the Amazon Vine website to post your review. Please follow Amazon's General Review Writing Guidelines as outlined on that page in crafting your review
You may edit any reviews submitted to the Vine program by visiting https://www.amazon.ca/gp/vine/review?view=reviewed and clicking ‘edit review’ for any Vine product that you have reviewed.
No. All Amazon Vine reviews will be posted on the product’s Amazon.ca detail pages unedited, regardless of whether it is a favorable review or not.
What are the different statuses and what do they mean?
Pending Shipment: Item has been ordered but has not left the Amazon fulfillment center.
Item Has Shipped: Item has left the Amazon fulfillment center.
X Days To Review: You have X number of days remaining to submit the review.
Review Due Today: You have 24 hours or less to submit the review.
Review Past Due: The review of this item has passed the due date. At this time, your account has been suspended and you are no longer able to order items until the reviews has been submitted.
We’ve done the work for you in the new and improved your Amazon Vine page! In the Your Vine Reviews tab, to the right of each item ordered will be a counter that shows the number of days remaining for the review to be submitted.
If reviews are not submitted within 30 days of receipt of shipment, your Vine account will not allow you to place any orders until the pending reviews are submitted. However, the Vine team has provided an added level of benefit offering Voices a 10 day review extension of up to 10 uses per calendar year.
We understand that there are times you just need a few more days to complete the review. If you are not able to review a product within the 30 days, you can email Vine customer service at vine-support@amazon.ca and request a 10 day review extension. Requests must be made before 11:59PM PST of the review due date. This will add 10 days to the original review due date, giving you a total of 40 days to submit the review. Each Vine member is allowed to request a 10 day review extension of up to 10 times per calendar year. Each product is only allowed one review extension. Any remaining extensions at the end of the calendar year will expire on December 31st 11:59PM PST.
Amazon Vine reviews appear on the product detail page, in the same location as other Amazon customer reviews. Amazon Vine reviews are distinguished from others with a special badge and the mention “Vine Customer Review of Free Product”.
Do I need to return the item after reviewing it?
Amazon Vine items are yours to keep, unless a return is specifically requested by Amazon.ca.