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As Amazon gets more and more established, the value of their affiliate program drops. They end up giving up margin for a sale they are likely to capture anyway.
by gav 14y ago
As Amazon gets more and more established, the value of their affiliate program drops. They end up giving up margin for a sale they are likely to capture anyway.
I predict that as time goes on, they will cut back their affiliate program. Once you have the data to determine on a per-product-category basis what kind of affiliates are worth it and which aren't they next step is to prune back the latter.
- FreeKill 14y agoThey've already been well on this path. Every year or so they make a change to their API which always reduces what you can do with it. One year they removed much of the data people were using on their sites such as shipping costs and comments. Last year they removed your ability to access all the products in the Amazon marketplace (now you can only get the cheapest). They also constantly make the terms of service more restrictive. In the last update, they added wording that completely forbids use of Amazon associate links in websites or apps designed specifically for use on mobile devices (without written permission).