Buy & rebate UGC campaigns: how samples and Amazon work

A UGC video needs the product in the creator’s hands. There are two ways to get it there, and they are two separate features on a campaign: Samples, where you ship it, and Buy & rebate, where the creator buys it and you pay her back. Brands that sell on Amazon lean on the second, because a real order on the listing is worth more to them than a box sent from the office. This post walks through both, with the decisions each one puts in front of you and the exact moment the money moves.

Samples: you ship it, they film it

Samples is turned on from the campaign with Add features. The products come from your own site: the read we already did of your store lists them, and you tick the ones creators may ask for. No store connection is needed for this. If the site was never read, one button reads it; if there is no site, one field takes a link and the same read runs. Then you turn it on, and that is the whole set-up.

From then on a creator in the campaign can request a product, and the request lands in the Samples lane under the Ads tab. The one decision in that lane is whether you post this person a box. Approve, ship it, and she films when it arrives. The lane is a table with a filter bar, one row per request and a fold with what you need to decide, so a team can work through a morning of requests without opening anything else.

Buy & rebate: they buy it, you pay it back

Buy & rebate is the same shelf with one more idea and one more consequence. The idea is spots: each product carries how many reimbursements it funds, because a rebate is money you give back, and you decide how many times. The consequence is that turning it on spends. The spots are funded from your wallet the moment the feature goes on, the total is stated in full beside where it comes from before the button, and whatever nobody claims comes back when the campaign wraps up. You add a card or wallet funds first; the screen will not let you switch it on without them.

The creator’s side is what you would expect from a real purchase. She requests a spot, buys the product herself, and sends the receipt from the campaign room. You accept it. Her first approved video in that campaign is the moment the price goes back to her, from the spots you funded at the start.

Where Amazon fits

For a brand that sells on Amazon, buy & rebate is the closest thing to a verified purchase video. The creator orders on the listing like any customer, the product arrives in the usual box, and the proof is a picture of the order. Nothing about the purchase is special: no gifted unit, no code, no seller note. That is why brands with Amazon catalogues run most of their UGC this way, and why the receipt is the thing you look at before deciding.

Two things make the Amazon flow smoother in practice. First, name the product in the campaign the way it reads on the listing, so the creator buys the right variant and the receipt matches what you expect. Second, say in the brief what a usable receipt is: the order page with the product name and the date, as a screenshot. A creator who knows what you will accept sends it once.

If your store is on Shopify

With Shopify connected in Settings, buy & rebate gains a second path on your own store. The product card says it in one line: creators buy it on your store and send the order number, and their first approved video refunds it on that order. The order is read from Shopify, so there is no receipt picture to judge, and the refund goes back to the method the creator paid with. Without Shopify nothing changes: the receipt flow works as described above for any store, Amazon included. Both paths share the same spots and the same lane.

Running the lane well

• Answer receipts the day they arrive. A spot is held for the creator who took it. Rows that lapse because nobody looked can still be accepted while spots remain, but a creator who bought the product and waited a week for an answer is a creator who films one video and leaves.
• Fund the spots you can review. Ten spots on a campaign nobody opens for a month are ten purchases waiting on you. Start with what the team can approve this week and add spots as videos clear.
• Keep the product campaign separate. One product per campaign means the receipts, the videos and the spots line up, and a creator never uploads a receipt for the eye mask into the hair-care campaign.
• Say what the video should be. Buy & rebate gets the product into her hands. The brief gets the video you want. The post on writing a UGC brief creators follow covers the styles and hooks that make the upload approvable the first time.

How it combines with the rest of the campaign

Samples and buy & rebate are add-ons, not a kind of campaign. The base is still how creators get paid: hourly sessions, per video or a commission, which is the subject of hourly sessions versus paying per video. A per-video campaign with buy & rebate is the common shape for Amazon brands: the creator buys, films, uploads; your approval pays the slot and triggers the rebate in one decision. A creator share of ad spend can sit on top, so the same video keeps paying her if you run it as an ad from your own account.

Approved videos go to the Library with the rights to keep them, and from the Library into Build Ads. A product bought on Amazon by the creator, filmed at home and approved by you is already where your ads get made; the content library page shows how it is organised, and the high-volume UGC page shows how teams run several product campaigns in parallel.

A checklist before you turn it on

1. The product is on your site or pasted in as a link, and named as it reads on the listing.
2. The number of spots matches the videos you can review this week.
3. The wallet or a card covers the spots: the screen tells you the total before you confirm.
4. The brief says what a receipt must show and what the video must be.
5. Someone on the team owns the lane and answers receipts daily.