@Uprisinghope Let me respond to your questions each in turn:
1) Amazon is going to declare that they paid you a certain amount. However all of that amount was actually received as merchandise samples, not cash. So you just spent that amount buying samples that you need to review. So you have income and a matching amount of expense.
Now the question is what do you do with those samples? If you sell them, you have more income. If you convert them to personal use, you have the equivalent of income. The amount of income you have if you sell them is pretty clear--and depending on your jurisdiction, you may also need to collect sales tax. If you convert them to personal use, you will need to value the items you have converted to personal use (as if you sold them) and you may also owe sales tax.
2) If you are holding the samples for resale, then they become inventory. You will need to value your inventory each year if you are reporting inventory on your Schedule C personal business return. If you do not report business income and expenses, then you are converting all the samples received into personal property. You will need to report this value, whether or not it is the same as what Amazon reported they gave you. If your valuation is different, you should have supporting documentation as to how it differs.
3) You can only donate personally to a non-profit, not from a Schedule C business. Amazon's agreement with you specifically prohibits you from accepting their products directly into a non-profit, which by definition is not owned personally. You can do business activity for reasons other than making a profit, though, and the IRS accepts that. They still want you to report business activity and pay taxes on any profit. They do not want you to report continual losses and call it a business. They consider that personal activity, sometimes referred to as a "hobby business." For instance, you could race cars, paint, or build furniture, but not do it to make money. If you do make money, though, the IRS wants it reported and then you can deduct expenses of making that money. By the same token, you can write reviews with no expectation to make money--except that when you joined the Vine program you started making "money" in the form of free samples while before that you were doing it as a "hobby."
