pbazomAmazon Affiliates watch out.  In an article posted on searchenginejournal.com by Jashua Odmark he tells of a situation he ran into recently where Amazon have refused to pay affiliate program commission for an item he promoted via a social media network.

To cut a long story short Amazon are refusing to pay affiliate commission for sales via twitter and facebook claiming a breach of their TOS. For example if you were to get an Amazon affiliate link shorten it with a URL shortening program and post it, any sales via this link will not be honoured commission from Amazon.

The link must originate from “your” site.  If you use a short URL service then the referrer will be their address and not yours.  This is going to open a can of worms and I think we are only at the beginning.  This won’t just apply to Twiter and facebook etc it’s going to effect all social media sites when using url shortening.

This leads to other questions like:

  • What if I run my own URL shortening service on my own domain ?
  • What about affiliate links from article sites like squidoo etc
  • Afiliate links to products in emails
  • The list goes on

We will all have to wait and see what comes out of this.  Will Amazon look at changing their rules ?  Will they start to lose affiliates.  Once thing is for sure, times are changing and social media like Twitter and Facebook are not going away and affiliate programs run by large organisations like Amazon need to be prepared for change.

Good Luck

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