Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Amazon Changes for eBook Promoters

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Amazon Affiliate Program ChangesIf you are a member of the Amazon Associates Program (the real name of the Amazon affiliate program), you need to be sure that you keep up with the changes to their terms. In particular a major change was made on March 1, 2013, for those who promote free Kindle eBooks. If you are not in compliance, you may lose your commissions completely.

What Are the Changes?

Effective this week, Amazon is limiting your overall commissions if you are promoting too many of the free Kindle eBooks. The text reads:

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

While this does not impact all affiliates, it will impact those most who 1) primarily promote deals and free products, and 2) those who promote eBooks. In fact, I have seen a number of affiliates who primarily promote the free eBooks.

Why Is This Change Important?

A lot of deal and coupon sites/bloggers use the promotion of these free Kindle eBooks in order to set cookies in the hopes that the readers will also purchase other items while at Amazon. This change will force Associates to no longer rely on that cookie setting method and instead promote the regular priced products as well to ensure that they do not tip the scales on the 20,000 eBooks at 80% free limit.

The limits that Amazon put in place do allow for the average blogger or deal site to mention free Kindle eBooks now and again. However, affiliates will want to keep an eye on their accounts if they promote them regularly. It’s also possible that even if you are promoting the free eBooks in order to set the cookies that customers are not always downloading them but are, in fact, making other purchases. That will likely depend on your audience.

Are the New Terms Fair?

Amazon is just essentially closing up a loophole here, although it will likely impact the way that many affiliates promote the free eBooks (which isn’t a good thing for the authors of those eBooks). Amazon recognizes that a certain percentage of sales made through their affiliates are purchases that the customer only made through an affiliate link because they had clicked on the free eBook link. I can’t fault Amazon for that, but it does make promoting the free eBooks less desirable.

There are certainly other merchants where the same holds true but the case is particularly strong for Amazon because they have such a loyal shopper base that can find anything from DVDs to Cheerios to yoga pants after one generic affiliate click. I do think it’s harsh that affiliates would lose their entire monthly revenue because if they have a really popular deal site, they may hit these minimum numbers every month that they promote any of the free eBooks. I also wonder if upcoming changes might also target Associates who promote the free mp3s or various free credit offers that they run.

Will you be impacted by this change? Do you think Amazon was fair in making it? Either to Associates/affiliates or to the authors of the free eBooks?

Pinterest Blocking Amazon Affiliate Links?

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The other day Nathan Smith from Zynali Marketing Solutions commented on my “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing” webinar post about how Pinterest was starting to strip the tags out of Amazon affiliate links. Shawn Collins tested it out and verified it. However, he was able to go in and edit the link properly. Today Shawn reported that all of his Amazon links on Pinterest are now going to the “spam page” notification below.

Pinterest Amazon Spam

Clicking through other people’s links, it looks like Pinterest is temporarily blocking all Amazon links as spam. Interestingly, I used PrettyLinks to build a redirect for an Amazon link using my www.tricia.me domain. Pinterest still recognized the final destination (Amazon) domain as “spam” and killed the link. Although it’s possible that it is just a glitch, this raises some big flags for affiliate marketers using Pinterest.

  • Pinterest can at any time block any domain and render everything that you have pinned from that domain useless. Be careful how much time you spend pinning links to other sites because in one flip of a switch they can all go dead.
  • Pinterest is clearly watching for too many pins from one source. Don’t get your own domain flagged for spam for having too many spammy pins.
  • Use redirects for all affiliate links. You can always direct the links to another domain from the back end if the end domain does get blocked. You’ll just need to find the same product through a different merchant.
  • Although this will probably get switched back because Amazon needs to place nice with Pinterest, it is likely that Pinterest will continue to strip out the affiliate links. Pinterest is onto affiliate markets and can very easily strip our coding from naked links. It would not be hard for them to do a search and replace of our affiliate codes for any network and substitute them with their own if they want.

There isn’t any reason that we all can’t participate in Pinterest in different ways to boost our traffic and our revenue. But Pinterest is not going to allow affiliate marketers to ruin their site (and should not!). Are you an affiliate, merchant, or OPM using Pinterest to build your business? How far should Pinterest go to protect itself from us?