I reached out to seller support and they told me this question is outside of their scope so posting here to see if anyone knows the answer or can point to Vine Program Terms and Conditions for the participant reviewers, not the sellers looking for a review.
I was doing some product research for items I am selling (I am both the manufacturer and seller) and stumbled across a listing on a popular auction website for one of my products that is brand new in box. At first I thought someone may be using my name and copying my products or that a previous customer of mine maybe was not happy with the product and I wanted to understand why. I reached out to the seller on this platform and got no response but did notice that this seller had multiple items (100s) for sale on this platform. I know for this specific product, I got 1 Vine review and it is the only sale I have ever made where I don't know the customers State, City. I did some digging on other items being sold by this seller on this other platform and found that for many of the items they are selling there is a matching Vine review from this exact reviewer. I have proof for 2 listings other than mine so far and have not really dug deeper into this yet.
So the question I posted to seller support was "Is a Vine Reviewer allowed to get products via Vine and then turn around and re-sell them?". One thing I am grateful for is that this reviewer left a 5-star review on the product and said a bunch of nice things about it, however on this auction platform the reviewer has this item as "new" (never opened, in original box, etc.). Which makes me feel like the Vine review left isn't actually genuine for the product, and that does violate Amazon's policies around authentic and genuine reviews.
Anyone have a similar situation happen before? Is this ok for the vine reviewers to do? Is there someone else, other than seller support I should be reaching out to?
Would love to hear your thoughts :)
