Amazon Review Rules for Indian Sellers

The short version: Amazon prohibits incentivised reviews, and has done since October 2016. The only sanctioned exception is Amazon Vine, which Amazon itself operates. Anyone selling you “verified purchase reviews” is offering something outside that rule, and no phrasing on their side changes it.

That is the first rulebook. If you sell in India there are two more sitting on top of it — advertising rules from ASCI, and consumer-protection rules from the CCPA — and they govern something different: what happens on a creator’s own Instagram or YouTube account. Most seller guides cover one and ignore the other two. This page covers all three, and is explicit about where the ground is still uncertain.

This is general information for sellers, not legal advice. Every primary source is linked so you can read it yourself.

Rulebook 1: Amazon’s own policy

In October 2016 Amazon changed its community guidelines to prohibit incentivised reviews — reviews written in exchange for free or discounted product. Amazon’s own announcement, Update on Customer Reviews, states the change and carves out a single exception: Amazon Vine, the programme Amazon runs itself.

Two practical consequences follow, and both catch sellers out.

The exception is Amazon’s, not yours. Vine is sanctioned because Amazon controls it end to end — Amazon picks the reviewers, Amazon distributes the units, and the resulting reviews are labelled as Vine reviews. A private arrangement that produces the same outcome is not covered by the exception just because it resembles Vine in shape.

Discounting deeply can cost you the Verified Purchase badge. Amazon has documented that reviews on orders placed at a steep discount — commonly cited at around 20% or more off — do not carry the Verified Purchase badge. Sellers who try to engineer reviews through heavy promo codes therefore often end up with the weakest possible review: unbadged, and produced by a route the policy prohibits.

Read Amazon’s current seller policies directly in Seller Central rather than relying on a summary, including this one. They change, and the version binding on you is the one live on the day you act. Breaching them is a contractual matter — Amazon does not need a court to suspend a listing or an account.

If you want the full breakdown of what a seller can legitimately do inside the review section, we have written that up separately in Amazon review policy in India: what sellers can do.

Rulebook 2: ASCI, for anything posted on a creator’s channel

Here is where most seller guides go quiet, and where Indian sellers actually have room to work.

A post on a creator’s own Instagram or YouTube account is not a marketplace review. It is advertising, and in India advertising is covered by the Advertising Standards Council of India’s guidelines for influencer advertising in digital media, published at ascionline.in/social.

The ASCI position that matters most to you: disclosure is required wherever there is a material connection between the advertiser and the endorser. A material connection is not limited to a cash fee. It includes free product, barter, discounts and other benefits. A purchase that the brand reimburses is a material connection, and so a reimbursed-purchase collaboration requires disclosure exactly as a paid post does.

ASCI is also specific about how the disclosure appears, which is where well-intentioned campaigns fail:

• The disclosure must be upfront and prominent. ASCI’s words: “Disclosure must be upfront and prominent so that it is not missed by an average consumer”, and it is “likely to be missed if they appear only on an ABOUT ME or profile page, or bios, at the end of posts or videos, or anywhere that requires a person to click MORE.” It “should not be buried in a group of hashtags or links.”
• For video, the requirement is on-screen duration, not verbal timing: the label must stay up for at least 3 seconds on videos of 15 seconds or less, a third of the running time for videos between 15 seconds and 2 minutes, and for the entire promotional section on videos of 2 minutes or longer.
• For live streams, ASCI does require a spoken announcement: “the disclosure label should be announced at the beginning and the end of the broadcast.” The same applies to audio, plus before and after every break.
• A platform’s built-in tool, such as Instagram’s paid-partnership label, is a good mechanism, but the obligation is to actually disclose — not merely to have a label available.

Those quotations are from ASCI’s guidelines for influencer advertising in digital media. Read them at the source — several widely-circulated seller guides assert a ten-second verbal-disclosure rule for video that does not appear anywhere in the document.

ASCI is a self-regulatory body rather than a statutory regulator, so its guidelines are not a statute. In practice that distinction offers less comfort than sellers expect: ASCI complaints are publicised, escalated to the relevant statutory authority where warranted, and the reputational cost of an upheld complaint lands on the brand, not only on the creator.

We have written a practical, format-by-format version of this for brands and creators in what counts as a disclosed collaboration under ASCI.

Rulebook 3: consumer protection — CCPA, and the BIS review standard

Two more documents apply, and their statuses are genuinely different. Conflating them is the single most common error in seller content on this subject.

The CCPA’s dark patterns guidelines are binding. The Central Consumer Protection Authority issued its Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns on 30 November 2023, under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. They name specific deceptive design and marketing practices — including false urgency and, relevantly here, practices that manufacture a misleading impression of a product’s popularity or endorsement. These are in force.

The BIS standard on online reviews is voluntary. IS 19000:2022, Online Consumer Reviews — Principles and Requirements for their Collection, Moderation and Publication, was published by the Bureau of Indian Standards in November 2022 as a voluntary standard. In May 2024 the Department of Consumer Affairs announced that a proposal to make it mandatory had been accepted, initially for sectors such as travel and e-commerce.

As of this writing we have not been able to confirm that IS 19000:2022 has been made legally mandatory. We are therefore stating it as it stands: voluntary, with mandatory status pending. If a vendor tells you the standard is now law and uses that to sell you a service, ask them for the notification. If you need certainty for a specific decision, check with BIS or the Department of Consumer Affairs directly, or take professional advice.

You will notice we have said nothing specific about Flipkart’s written policy on paid reviews. That is deliberate — we could not locate an authoritative, currently published Flipkart policy document stating a specific clause, and we are not going to invent one. Read your Flipkart seller agreement and seller help centre directly. The general principle holds across marketplaces: the platform’s terms bind you contractually regardless of what the law does or does not say.

What this leaves you able to do

Put the three rulebooks together and the picture is clearer than it first looks.

Closed to you: buying, arranging or brokering reviews inside a marketplace’s review section. Amazon’s policy prohibits incentivised reviews, and the CCPA guidelines address practices that fabricate an impression of popularity. There is no clever framing that reopens this.

Open to you: paying a creator to make disclosed content on their own channel. This is ordinary influencer advertising. It is lawful, it is what every large brand in India already does, and the obligations are clear — disclose the material connection, follow ASCI on placement and format, and do not make false claims about the product.

The distinction that carries the weight is where the content lives and whether the audience is told. A rating inside Amazon’s review system with the commercial relationship hidden is one thing. A creator’s Instagram reel, labelled as a paid partnership, is a completely different thing under a different rulebook.

How Hypedrive sits inside these rules

Stated plainly, because the question always comes up: Hypedrive does not sell, arrange, script or broker marketplace reviews or ratings of any kind.

What a Hypedrive campaign produces is content on a creator’s own Instagram or YouTube. The mechanic: a brand funds a campaign, a creator buys the product from the brand’s store with their own money at the normal price, posts about it on their own channel, the brand reviews the post against the brief, and on approval the creator is reimbursed plus a bonus.

The word “review” on this site means only one thing — the brand reviewing creator content before it pays out. It never means a marketplace review.

Two honest notes on that. First, because a Hypedrive collaboration is an incentivised relationship, ASCI guidelines require the creator to disclose it on the post, the same as any other brand partnership. That is a statement about what ASCI asks of the creator. Second, a brand approves whether the brief was met — a campaign cannot be made conditional on the creator’s verdict being favourable, because paying for a specific favourable opinion is precisely what makes an endorsement misleading.

If you came here because you cannot get into Vine, read what to do when you can’t get into Amazon Vine in India. If you are launching and have no proof at all yet, social proof for a product launch with zero reviews is the more useful starting point.

Primary sources

Read these rather than anyone’s summary:

• Amazon — Update on Customer Reviews — the October 2016 announcement banning incentivised reviews, and the Vine carve-out.
• ASCI — Guidelines for Influencer Advertising in Digital Media (PDF) — disclosure obligations, including the permitted labels and the on-screen duration rules for video.
• Bureau of Indian Standards — for the current status and text of IS 19000:2022 on online consumer reviews.
• Department of Consumer Affairs — for CCPA guidelines, including the dark patterns guidelines of 30 November 2023.
• Your own Amazon Seller Central and Flipkart seller policies — contractually binding on you, and the ones most likely to change.

What to do on Monday

The three rulebooks rule out one tactic and leave the largest one open. So the practical next step is not more research into what is prohibited — you now have that — it is deciding what to commission.

If you are ready to do that, how brand campaigns run on Hypedrive sets out the campaign side end to end: what you fund, what the brief specifies, and what you approve before anything pays out. If you would rather see the marketplace-specific orientation first, Amazon’s review policy in India is the version written for sellers deciding what is allowed inside the review section itself.

Either way, the useful reframe is the one this post opened with: the review section is closed, and the creator’s channel is not.

Not legal advice. Hypedrive is not affiliated with Amazon, Flipkart or any other marketplace. For advice on your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.