Amazon Will Not Give Commission To Affiliate Sales Via Twitter

This would likely also mean that if anyone is using a URL shortening service to manage affiliate links, that Amazon might reject those as well.

Good point. (*goes off to make sure my own private service does it correctly)

No, Matthew, I have my own service set up under its own domain, so that I can use it for all of my sites (rather than setting up a separate service for each site). So the shortened URL is its own domain. Nevertheless, I did just go run a test, and the log does show the site as the referrer, so the referrer is being passed correctly. Whew. (Thought I’d set it up properly, but couldn’t remember for sure).

I guess that Amazon won’t be paying out on those either – they don’t seem to be treating Twitter as a special case.

If Barnes and Noble were smart, they’d make it clear that they have NO problem honoring Twitter commissions… guess who would suddenly find themselves receiving a lot of exposure on Twitter.

Problem solved IF you pass the referrer as your main site using a meta redirect or something.

A related question, for forum sites with tons of natural user generated links if the site owner converts those links retrospectively will referrals be paid? I asked Apple and it said no comment. My thought is Apple will not want millions of natural links across forums converted into affiliate links but how will it know? Commercial services have offered to do this for 25% commission – is there a catch?

Cherry I don’t see any problem with that at all.

I don’t see any issues with people generating sales via twitter. What the issues amazon have with that? Ultimately they are going to give commission only on sales, which in any case they have to give.

This all seems pretty baseless scaremongering to me. I’ve been directing traffic to amazon from various sources and never had a problem with it tracking and paying, squidoo, tinyurl, bit.ly, twitter for example.
The ‘tweet this’ link in the associates tool bar does work slightly differently and ok, clarification could be useful. The tracking of using this tweet function should be clarified as it doesn’t work as well as creating your own link.
You would expect that creating a link from a product page this way would show on your tracking as ‘clicks with no orders’, but you have to dig deeper and look at link type reports to show proper stats for tweeted links.

As for the TOS in regard to owning the sites which you send traffic from, Amazon don;t really pay attention to this or enforce this. Though having said that, a lot of things change when you start earning 4-5figure sums on amazon and they will scrutinise accounts to see if they breach TOS at this stage. Otherwise, it’s a pretty relaxed program and people should learn how it works rather than make outrageous statements about how Amazon are enforcing the TOS

Patrick, great post and discussions. Along the same line, do you think that it is ok to post Amazon links in article directories if the URL is your URL which then redirects to Amazon?