A few months ago, I was invited to join Amazon Vine, an in-house review program where sellers have Amazon send out free products in exchange for reviews. There are a lot of oddities about the program, including the presence of an enormous amount of auto parts, most of which seem to never be claimed. But, if you’re willing to poke around, there might a few things out there.
Amazon Vine Products
Okay. Apparently, back in the good ol’ days, you could get tons of free stuff from Amazon Vine without lifting a finger. These days, there are a lot more reviewers and a lot more of them have bots and scripts and virtual assistants and whatnot to ensure that they snag as much of the good stuff as possible.
Amazon sort of helps this behavior by loading most of a day’s products onto the site in the middle of the night when your average American Joe would be sleeping or at least not staring at their computer for free goods. The result is that most of the stuff you might actually think about owning is gone before you even take a look. Even if you were sitting there watching the products come in, you have to make a split second decision to want something and click quickly, or it will be gone before you can check and see what colors it comes in.
The result is that I don’t necessarily get much stuff from Amazon Vine even though it is free. Amazon is sure to send 1099 forms if you get more than $600 worth of stuff which means you have to pay taxes or figure out how to write off everything you get, so just clicking any old thing might not be the best move. Plus, who wants a house full of junk you just have to donate.
Vine Unique Treasures
There is one area where Vine has come through recently. You see, there are a bunch of parts, and parts of parts on Vine. Car parts takes up well over half of what you might see on an average day. Not universal car parts, either. We’re talking gasket covers for a specific make and model… just the gasket covers, not the gaskets.
One day, one of my electronic devices stopped working. I checked the errors, hit the internet, and figured out I probably needed a battery. At $20 for a no-name, hope it works, off brand, battery, I figured this device was headed for the basement. Where it would eventually be moved to a box before being donated or thrown away. But on this day, fortune smiled upon me.
Right there, in the electronics category, was a battery that looked just like the one I needed. Unlike, say, some sort of plus size wrap around dress, or maternity blouse, random batteries don’t disappear in seconds. I clicked. It said it was for something else, but I checked dimensions and specs and connectors and, it looked like what I needed. So, I clicked order this. I bet the seller was shocked that one of them was ordered, but Amazon shipped it out.
A couple days later it showed up. I put it in and voila. It worked. Just like that. It worked. No more choosing between $20 and more electronic waste. After that, I started going through those things in the basement that hadn’t made their way to boxes yet. Sure enough, more than a few had batteries, or fans, or whatever that were just sitting there for free.
Turns out the most effective method is to figure out what is wrong with the thing and then go to Amazon to find the part. The pictures and descriptions are often times the same ones or at least close enough for you to take a look. Sometimes the specs are wrong, but sometimes they are dead on.
When things get here, sometimes they don’t work out. Maybe something else is wrong with it, or maybe this is one of those less reputable drop shippers, but hey, it works out enough times to make it worth checking. And, it keeps me from thinking this whole thing might not be worth my time.