Amazon nixes Twitter, Facebook affiliate commission » Adotas

Amazon nixes Twitter, Facebook affiliate commission

Written on

July 7th 2009

Author

by Edward Barrera 

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ADOTAS — The e-retailer has made a nice living off affiliate members who have been a large commission-only salesforce for a long time.

But the love doesn’t go both ways. Joshua Odmark, a technology consultant at Simply Ideas LLC and who also blogs for Performance Marketing Blog, found that out recently. He wrote a recommendation and product review with a link from an Amazon link page — except he did it through Twitter and Facebook. Amazon later killed a commission, pointing to its TOS, which says that ‘“Your site” means any site that you will link to the Amazon Site (and which you will identify in your Program application)”

But as Joshua notes:
“If you really think about it, what is the difference between posting a link on my blog, which is read by subscribers who are interested in what I have to say, as compared to the followers who are following me because they are interested in what I have to say? Seems to me a simple matter of semantics. Oh, and that whole character limit thing.”

As states start to squeeze e-retailers like Amazon (forget the bite from other countries), I find the company’s position odd. It’s losing money from affiliates and penny-pinching its salesforce instead of expanding with the different ways the Internet allows users to find and buy products. But I guess since Amazon’s profits have doubled to $207 million from last year, based mostly around the Kindle, it couldn’t care less about the people who helped it.