No more Free Ride from Amazon.com

Review sites are in for a big hit in the next coming months as Amazon.com announced major changes to the affiliate API.  Starting in November Amazon will not longer let you pull full reviews from their website on products that you want to promote as an affiliate.  Instead they will be replacing this with a link back to the full reviews on Amazon.com.

Many website developers, including myself,  build small niche review sites where they pull in Amazon.com products as well as the reviews of these products to display on their own sites.  It’s these reviews that help drive the popularity of these review sites up in the SERPs.  This of course creates a ton of duplicate content that Amazon.com often losses out on.

Amazon.com, I’m sure, is  tired of the lost revenue because of it and has finally decided to keep that very valuable content to themselves.

Many software products that are available to website developers will be effected by this and I’m sure we’ll be seeing new updates very soon.  Some of these products that could be affected are:

• ReviewAzon
• phpzon
• Keywords 2 Websites
• WP Robot
• Comparipress
• WP Zon builder

and a lot others

Mark Hansen has a great post about this on his blog.  Check it out its a great post.

I know many developers of these products are scratching their heads trying to figure a work around.  And all will be making updates soon to reformat how Amazon.com products are displayed or creating another way to pull in reviews, if its possible.

For now, just be aware that this change may effect any of your websites pulling in content from Amazon.com.  What are your thoughts on this? Do you this this is crap or do you think it was just a matter of time before Amazon.c0m put the breaks on some the spammy sites out there.   Is this the end of the free ride for some on the coat tails of Amazon.com?

Well it looks like Amazon.com is making some big changes that will effect a lot of affiliates who use PPC.  Effective May 1st, Amazon is no longer going to pay affiliates who use PPC to send traffic directly to Amazon.com.

This is not going to effect most affiliates who build good content rich websites and get feeds from Amazon.com to display links on their pages. Amazon.com will still pay these folks for referring their readers to Amazon.com  Its the folks out there who setup Pay Per Click ads that, when someone clicks on the ad, they go directly to Amazon.com.  It seems Amazon.com considers this a conflict with Amazon’s advertising policies and is now completely discouraged.

This makes sense really if you think about.  A lot of people have been making some quick money by setting up cheap PPC campaigns, focusing on very specific products.  These ads then route people directly to Amazon.com.  People buy products and these affiliates make money.  There really is no value that the affiliate is providing at all and no website involved either. Its just a simple man-in-the-middle selling games.

For more info on this change in the Amazon.com affiliate advertising policy check it out on their website at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/promo/paidsearch.

What are your thoughts?  Do you think Amazon is completely out of whack?  Have you ever setup PPC directly to Amazon? Will this effect you?  Let us know what you think!