This is just a quick note to let you know that Amazon has banned us from their affiliate program, the official reason given was that “You are bidding on or purchasing Amazon’s proprietary terms (for example, ‘Amazon’, ‘Kindle’, or ‘ amazon prime deals’) for use in a search engine and, as a result, your ads are appearing in search engine results when users search for our Proprietary Terms.”
The problem is that we don’t use keyword advertising like that at all, despite sending in proof to Amazon that shows we don’t use this type of advertising they have still decided to ban our account. Going forward nothing will change, we will still post Amazon deals that we think readers will find useful and we will still be providing prime coverage (don’t worry, more of that to come shortly). The only difference is that our posts won’t have Amazon affiliate links anymore.
This was a large source of revenue for us, so I won’t pretend that Chuck & I aren’t disappointed. We can still appeal the ban (and we will) but given the size of Amazon I’m not at all hopeful that we will be successful. The main reason I wanted to write this post is so that users can choose to use Amazon affiliate links from other bloggers they find useful instead of ours. Thanks for the support.
[Update: we are now un-banned from Amazon. Shop on Amazon link.]
