This is a word of warning to any of you who have a blog or a website and are considering becoming an Amazon Affiliate. This may matter to some and be disregarded by others. But recent events have led me to learn that Amazon will not pay you commissions on any purchases that you make through your own affiliate links or store. You earn commissions when others make purchases that originated from one of your affiliate links or through your affiliate store. But if you make a purchase, you receive no compensation. In essence, you actually have no incentive to purchase through your own links or your own store. You would be better served by trying to negotiate an affiliate relationship directly with the stores that supply Amazon. The following is an excerpt of a communication directly from Amazon:

I apologize for any misunderstanding to our personal orders policy, but Associate members do not receive payment for referral fees on any personal orders placed. We operate a referral program rather than a discount program. Our goal is to have our members refer new customers to us, and we then pay you for this effort.

It states this in their Affiliate Agreement and is apparently overlooked by many. I personally find this as odd due to the fact that a sale is a sale. People, more often, will continue a behavior when rewarded. And this system is counter intuitive to building this type of behavior from the very people they rely on for future sales.

If you know of another Affiliate Program that covers the variety of products that Amazon does and rewards its affiliates regardless of who makes the purchase, please contact me and I will evaluate and possibly post about it as a follow up to this post. Stay tuned, if Amazon changes their tune I will notify you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Memos, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.