Amazon Will Not Give Commission To Affiliate Sales Via Twitter
An interesting case has been reported today with Amazon apparently refusing to honour commissions on affiliate sales generated via Twitter.
It seems they are relying on TOS that say any link has to be from “Your Site” in order to be eligible for commission and Amazon is keen to enforce that.
“Your site” means any site that you will link to the Amazon Site (and which you will identify in your Program application)
This sets a worrying precedent because Twitter has potential with affiliate marketing (as long as you do it right) and there could be a lot of other networks following Amazons lead.
I’m also wondering how this works with people who read an RSS feed via Google Reader or a similar service – they are not following a link from “Your Site” so will the commission be honoured?
Post category: Affiliate Marketing Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 22 comments below, or add your own!
This would likely also mean that if anyone is using a URL shortening service to manage affiliate links, that Amazon might reject those as well.
Technically it might do although if the referrer was correctly passed then they would never know.
Good point. (*goes off to make sure my own private service does it correctly)
Well, if you use your own url shortening service, then maybe it is ‘your site’ .
No, Matthew, I have my own service set up under its own domain, so that I can use it for all of my sites (rather than setting up a separate service for each site). So the shortened URL is its own domain. Nevertheless, I did just go run a test, and the log does show the site as the referrer, so the referrer is being passed correctly. Whew. (Thought I’d set it up properly, but couldn’t remember for sure).
How will this affect affiliate links from sites like Squidoo? and Hub?
I guess that Amazon won’t be paying out on those either – they don’t seem to be treating Twitter as a special case.
I wonder where aff links in email marketing lies in this as it’s not on-site.
If Barnes and Noble were smart, they’d make it clear that they have NO problem honoring Twitter commissions… guess who would suddenly find themselves receiving a lot of exposure on Twitter.
so just setup a redirect script on your homesite and send the traffic through that? problem solved no??
Problem solved IF you pass the referrer as your main site using a meta redirect or something.
Isn’t there a work around for this?
Using Twitter, you could just link to a page on your website which the affiliate link can be navigated too, or alternatively a page that automatically redirects to the product on Amazon
A related question, for forum sites with tons of natural user generated links if the site owner converts those links retrospectively will referrals be paid? I asked Apple and it said no comment. My thought is Apple will not want millions of natural links across forums converted into affiliate links but how will it know? Commercial services have offered to do this for 25% commission – is there a catch?
Cherry I don’t see any problem with that at all.
What if you create a plugin that’s used by several sites that don’t show up as coming from your site but rather from their site? Amazon are really squeezing hard on all their affiliates now. Pretty soon they’ll just create their own versions of their affiliates’ apps.
Your topic was great! Thanks for taking a moment to draft such an interesting piece…
I don’t see any issues with people generating sales via twitter. What the issues amazon have with that? Ultimately they are going to give commission only on sales, which in any case they have to give.
Great post was really helpful
This all seems pretty baseless scaremongering to me. I’ve been directing traffic to amazon from various sources and never had a problem with it tracking and paying, squidoo, tinyurl, bit.ly, twitter for example.
The ‘tweet this’ link in the associates tool bar does work slightly differently and ok, clarification could be useful. The tracking of using this tweet function should be clarified as it doesn’t work as well as creating your own link.
You would expect that creating a link from a product page this way would show on your tracking as ‘clicks with no orders’, but you have to dig deeper and look at link type reports to show proper stats for tweeted links.
As for the TOS in regard to owning the sites which you send traffic from, Amazon don;t really pay attention to this or enforce this. Though having said that, a lot of things change when you start earning 4-5figure sums on amazon and they will scrutinise accounts to see if they breach TOS at this stage. Otherwise, it’s a pretty relaxed program and people should learn how it works rather than make outrageous statements about how Amazon are enforcing the TOS
what a load of rippoff crap
Patrick, great post and discussions. Along the same line, do you think that it is ok to post Amazon links in article directories if the URL is your URL which then redirects to Amazon?
So what does this mean for squidoo lens which actively push the Amazon affiliate program. Or does squidoo collect the money and then pay you a certain share afterwards. In which case could twitter provide a service like this too?
4 trackbacks
July 7, 2009 at 9:27pm
July 8, 2009 at 1:51am
July 8, 2009 at 10:03am
October 23, 2009 at 11:19am