The Marketing Technology Blog

John Chow recently wrote why he didn’t utilize Amazon for affiliate marketing, the primary reason being the commissions are quite low. I’m about to join John for a different reason.

Amazon makes it nearly impossible to use their Associates package. It’s absolutely insane every time I go in there for a link, I can’t get it. Here’s an example. I recently purchased Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing our True Nature (by Mark Earl) after reading about it on Hugh MacLeod’s blog - gapingvoid.

1. I login to Amazon.com Associates Central.
2. I go to Build Links.
3. I select Product Links since I know the name of the product already.
4. I enter Herd with the product category as Books.
5. I get back 10 results. Of the 10, Mark’s book is the only one actually called “Herd” but it is number 3 on the list. Number 1 is The Elephant’s Secret Sense. Thanks Amazon!
6. Now I have to click “Get HTML” which brings me to a terrible page to make my link:
   
7. If I select a different Affiliates-ID now, the page wipes out all my selections and I have to start all over again. Arrgh.
8. I copy and paste the code into WordPress and post it.
9. The image doesn’t show up. I figure out that Amazon is not including a relative path to the image via their domain. They email me back and tell me that’s because I should be hosting the image on my server. Are you kidding me? Isn’t Amazon the home of S3?

Some Product Improvement tips for Amazon:

1. Put a “Get Links” form of some sort on the Login Landing page.
2. Let me build my favorite template and save it in my account (I only use 1 layout).
3. When I do a search for the item, respond with the template HTML that I designated in step 2)
4. Don’t say it’s the HTML unless it really is the HTML. The HTML you provide does not contain the right URI to the image!
5. Please take the image tracking pixels out of your simple text links. Geesh. It hoses up my layout. Take a look below where I have an Amazon link to “Ajax”. Notice the gap after it?

This would take my 20 minutes to find the darn code and take it down to under a minute. In all honesty, I don’t think the design of this affiliate service has changed since its inception. The link builder even still does post backs (Amazon - look up Ajax in your book selection). It was terrible on day 1 and it’s terrible now. So… not only is the commission low, the interface sucks.

PS: A link to Herd is now included on my Reading Page. I’m looking forward to this one!