Upset with Amazon
Yesterday I was so excited to see I had made some money (about $10) through Amazon's affiliate program, only to come back this morning and have trouble logging in. It said I didn't have an amazon associate account. I checked my email and found something from amazon saying that they had reviewed my account and shut it down because of: lack of content that was original to my site and beneficial to my visitors and because pages were mainly empty when advertising content was removed. I don't think either of those are true...
Now for the real kicker, anything I had already earned but hadn't had paid out to me yet, was forfeited. Yeahhhh, upon googling I found this happens a lot and some people have lost thousands of dollars because of whatever vague reason amazon gives. Not sure I will try and become an amazon affiliate again. Pretty annoyed right now, time to go take down all the amazon affiliate links off my site.
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If you read the whole terms of service for amazon affiliates there are some questionable areas within there but again they need to protect themselves from liability of third party issues as well as keep quality control for their vendors. Have you tried calling customer service to have this resolved. I find it best to read through the contract see if your website follows the contract ( without making any adjustments) and then call and discuss with them . Sometimes it is just a mistake that can be fixed with a call but you have to make sure that your covered on your end by making sure your site followed all the terms of service contract when affiliating with them.
Heres some things you can't do that will get you banned
1. Send Amazon Affiliate Links In Email
2. Affiliate Link Shortening or Link Cloaking / Hiding
3. Including links in eBooks or PDF documents
4. Using Your Affiliate Link for Items You Purchase
5. Operate More than One Account
6. Use Amazon User Reviews as Your Own
9. Auto-Tag Amazon Sessions (iFrame, Automatic Cookie install)
10. Buy Paid Search Placements
“Prohibited Paid Search Placement” means an advertisement that you purchased through bidding on keywords, search terms, or other identifiers
11. Violate Amazon’s Trademark Policy
Amazon owns a ton of trademarks, not all of which have anything to do with the phrase “Amazon.”
Proprietary products like Kindle are trademarked too, and you can quickly violate these trademarks by including trademark information in your site’s Domain name.
12. Mentioning Price in Niche Site Contents Manually
discussing prices in your content directly could result in a ban.
But check out the terms of service as these do change often and make sure to reread it monthly or bi monthly to make extra sure . I hope things can get fixed on your end and I hope this helps!
I did post an affiliate link on a comment in Facebook... if that was it then okay I won't do that again... but that wasn't the reasoning they gave. My content is unique and useful and my pages are not empty without ads... Maybe I will try calling them to see if that was all it was.
Yea its always best to find resolution when a problem comes up, in all areas of life this is the best way to go. I hope everything goes well for you!
Yes, It's just frustrating to not have direction to fix the problem. I did call and was told the reasons in the email are generic bullet points they throw in there that may not necessarily be the reason they denied you. So I simply took down the links I had posted on FB and then reapplied to see if that is in fact the only problem... Fingers crossed.
Lets hope the best!