Are you violating Amazon Policies? Outdated WA training could get you banned!

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Online Entrepreneur Certification - Level 3 : Lesson 6 of 10

Kyle advocates that we include pricing in our review posts, but there is a problem with this.

Manual insertion of pricing for a product is not allowed!


In Amazon's policies: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies...
You will see the following under:
2. Links on Your Site
(b) General Requirements Applicable to All Special Links

T
his cannot be clearer, any pricing being manually inserted into your posts will be considered a violation of Amazon's terms of use and they have the right to revoke your access based off of this policy. Only Amazon's API is allowed which updates the pricing for you.

Here is a post I found online that talks about 9 things that will get you banned on Amazon, apprently, showing pricing is one of them! https://marketever.com/mistakes-get-banned-amazon-affiliate/
(I have no affiliation to this site, it is displayed for educational purposes)

They also made another disconcerting rule in another section of thier policies:

Under:
6. Content on your Site

(t) You will not display or otherwise use any of our customer reviews or
star ratings, in part or in whole, on your Site


Basically, you can include star ratings on your site, but they cannot claim to be Amazon's unless they are automatically being updated by Amazon's API!

Apparently, I have a lot of editing to do. I've been including star ratings saying they are Amazon's and manually placing pricing for a long time.

Also, if you don't believe me, do a search for the top ranking reviews on something, I think you will find most if not all of them comply with these policies.

FYI: I love Wealthy Affiliate,I don't want to see anything bad to Wealthy Affiliate or it's members, this post is meant to help you not get banned by Amazon!

I want to see WA's training updated to match Amazon's policies immediately.

I think many people could get banned very quickly if Amazon sees that they have outdated pricing or star ratings on their posts!

As listed in Amazon's policies, I also include this in my affiliate disclosure and disclaimer forms:

***Amazon Content Disclaimer***

CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON (website name) COMES FROM AMAZON. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.

Regards,

Jacob H.

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Recent Comments

20

This is good to know even before I get to it. I've been writing online articles for a long time, so i won't have too much trouble with getting content, which is where I am now. But I will remember this.

Thank you Jacob H, had no idea about the pricing thing or the review stars. I have a lot of deleting to do, WOW! I can't believe this crap. Thanks again Jacob!

As long as you aren't claiming that the review stars come from Amazon, you should be good on that note, but yeah, any manual pricing needs to be removed.

Thanks Jacob, I appreciate it.

I love it!
Help, protect us! You don't know, what you don't know!
Barb

Thanks, Barb :)

Thank you for this update.

no problem :)

Thanks for the heads-up!

Your welcome. :)

To Kyle's defense, not all affiliate programs have these "harsh" requirements that Amazon is demanding from us. I believe that lesson 6 doesn't mention all that much about which affiliate program.

Also, if you use the Product API (only possible nowadays if you got your sales requirement through), in combination with those premium plugins that allow for it, you can display product pricing on your site.

The reason that Amazon has this rule has to do with that your content gets quickly outdated. They want to keep control over the price and prefer to use their systems to display pricing so that it is correct everywhere.

On top of that, if you use the SiteStripe code that Amazon provides for displaying text and image, I believe the price is also included in that little box for a product.

star rating by the way is also linked on the product API and can be accessed through plugins.

What it comes down to is that you cannot hardcode them in your blog, they should be dynamically updated remotely from Amazon themselves.

As for disclaimer placement, Amazon requires them to be visible at all times for every affiliate offer you have. So either you place the disclaimer in your footer of your site, or you make note of it within every blog post that you referral link something to Amazon.

Steven

The lesson I linked to shows Kyle using an Amazon product and he still has his amazon product review linked as an example.

Instead of focusing his attention and more
content towards affiliate bootcamp/super affiliate
challenge,Kyle should give his attention to
"Online Entrepreneur Certification" too.

Not every member is here to "Promote" WA.
"Making money online" is not about promoting WA.

People have their own passions and interests.
Which they can monetize through a niche site.

If everyone is promoting WA and the referrals
end up with an outdated "Online Entrepreneur Certification"
to build their own niche site, what is the point of promoting WA?

Another excellent point. As others have said in the comments here, people aren't paying for a training that requires they read updated terms of service and policies, they should be getting top of the line training.

I agree that the Certified Course needs some love!!!!

When we pay for something, even if it is not
"perfect", it must be "complete".

Complete in the sense that a paying member
won't have to do his/her own research to "make things work".

Don't think Kyle spends all is time on the Super Affiliate Challange, I can tell you now he is not. You're all barking up the wrong tree there.

We have had 1 lot of large instructions for this month with videos, some dating back to 2016. I think the instructions are from last years challenge also. But the instructions and videos made some wealthy people last year, so why not re-use them. They work.

But Kyle is only human and can only do so much, I am 100% sure the training will be updated. I think a lot of WA time is going into making the platform better for us, with back end stuff none of us sees.

Sure, the platforms here-siteContent, comments etc
must be updated.

But more important than that is to keep the training
up-to-date.

Because there are other affiliate marketing courses
which do not provide services like hosting, writing
platform etc because there are several already providing
those.

What these courses provide is uptodate training.
We can get hosting and other services from different
companies.

Most people are primarily in WA to learn affiliate marketing,
which means the focus must be first on making the training
top notch.

Yes, this stuff should be updated.

Wow, thank you for this information!

Glad this was helpful for you!

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