I am wondering if anyone has an idea on how to manage commission and principal payment automatically without creating an accounting mess. Is there a checkout software or company that you can recommend? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Wale

Amazon is not banning affiliates from using paid search completely, they are preventing affiliates from linking directly from their PPC ads to the amazon site.

IF the affiliate has their own site they are sending people to from their PPC ads then all is good.

Quote right from their site:

“Q: How do I know if this change will affect me?
A: If you are using paid search advertising services like Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter to send users directly to the http://www.amazon.ca, http://www.amazon.com or http://www.endless.com website, this change will affect you. If your own website has links to Amazon’s US or Canadian sites and you are using these or other similar services to send users to your own website, you should not be affected by this change as long as you comply with all terms of the Operating Agreement. “

1) Is it worse for Amazon to compete against say 5 out of 11 first page Adwords advertisers for the same keyword all driving sales to Amazon or now have up to 10 out of 11 advertisers on the first page of search results sending traffic to different sites other than Amazon

2) How many millions of pages indexed by the search engines contain affiliate links to Amazon? would those affiliates all changing those links to promote somebody be a good or bad thing for Amazon

3) If Amazon eliminates Paid search affiliates doesn’t this effectively eliminate all Adsense advertisements as well…just the single largest contextual advertising network in the world?

Pretty bold I think and I can only assume they have crunched all those numbers.

-They have an internal search team and they are worried about cannibalization between the two channels

-Over ten states have come out with affiliate taxes nicknamed the Amazon Tax focusing on Amazon as a target. Shifting to CPC in those states makes the most sense. Why pay search affiliates on a click that will be taxed when you have an internal team?

1. Amazon will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to the site through keyword bidding.

2. They will not be pay referral fees for search traffic.

3. They will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the site.

So how else can an associate make money in their so called advertising Program? Price comparison sites use data feeds. We know now that as of May 1, 2009 every lead to Amazon.com is “gratis”,

IMHO, Amazon affiliate program is dead in US and Canada.

Also, the margins can be so small on certain products, “a few bucks” can make all the difference between black and red. Besides, Amazon can always continue to privately keep it available to certain sites they find beneficial to them.

What people do is make their own purchases through their own associates account to get an extra discount. I know, I know, that violates TOS. Oh my, there is drinking going on in this establishment???

from amazon’s or affiliate’s perspective?

I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I would think people would check out what something costs on Amazon before buying something online, especially books. They and ebay are the places you look for price comparisons. If people do that, why pay for traffic that you will get anyway?

Apologies in advance for the following rant:

You “talked about it”? Really? You mentioned it in a very short blurb, with absolutely no analysis and no opinion on anything. If you’re going to blog, try to actually say something and stop spanning us on TechCrunch. Jeeez.

Assocatiates may not use interstitial pages to redirect traffic from search engines to Amazon. They may however use PPC to promote their own sites and content that may include links to Amazon, but the click has to originate there…not from the engine itself.

Most likely this is a way to reduce their own marketing expenses and CPA as affiliates were adding little value when they were simply redirecting to Amazon.