Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#2I've always found Amazon a bit weird/frustrating with regards to i18n/localization.
As a user, I should be able to decide, independently,
* What language I want to use the site in.
and
* Where orders should come from.
In other words, if I'm an American living in Austria or Italy, I should be able to just go to Amazon.com, have the site in English, and have it route books/whatever from the nearest/lowest tax place. In some cases, that'd be Amazon.it, in others, Amazon.co.uk, and in some cases, it'd have to send things from the US, incurring higher taxes/tariffs.
Instead, Amazon.it and Amazon.de are very much only in "the" local language (Italy actually has areas where German and French are official languages), and routing does not seem intelligent at all.
Frustrating.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#3I think the title is a bit misleading, it should be "Why blggers can't make money by linking to books". This is a very specific case. I know people who actually their only business model is Amazon association. Risky if you ask me(as always when you depend entirely on someone else), but it works.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#4I think the title is a bit misleading, it should be "Why blggers can't make money by linking to books". This is a very specific case. I know people who actually their only business model is Amazon association. Risky if you ask me(as always when you depend entirely on someone else), but it works.
The same problems apply to electronics and other types of merchandise sold on various Amazon sites.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#5I think the title is a bit misleading, it should be "Why blggers can't make money by linking to books". This is a very specific case. I know people who actually their only business model is Amazon association. Risky if you ask me(as always when you depend entirely on someone else), but it works.
Of course this works, but i'd wager a guess and say that those are mostly US bloggers targeting US visitors.
Once your visitors are from all over the world, it is indeed as the author described - there isn't a "proper" solution available (save for e.g. a WordPress plugin that generates the link on-the-fly but this approach has other problems like non-cachability).
If there is indeed an approach that lets you monetize like 99% of international traffic/clicks i'd like to hear it.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#6insightful, thanks.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#7I think the title is a bit misleading, it should be "Why blggers can't make money by linking to books". This is a very specific case. I know people who actually their only business model is Amazon association. Risky if you ask me(as always when you depend entirely on someone else), but it works.
Article includes an example where linking to the iPhone wouldn't work.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#8I've always found Amazon a bit weird/frustrating with regards to i18n/localization. As a user, I should be able to decide, independently, * What language I want to use the site in. and * Where orders should come from. In other words, if I'm an American living in Austria or Italy, I should be able to just go to Amazon.com, have the site in English, and have it route books/whatever from the nearest/lowest tax place. In…
When I order from amazon.co.uk to Finland, often items get delivered from their German warehouse, so it seems that something like this does happen, at least in Europe.
But I agree it would be nice when I'm linked to amazon.com to easily be able to see that the same item is available from one of the european sites. As it is I have to manually check.
The lack of region/language differentiation is something that bothers me a lot from a lot of websites. As an English speaker currently living in Finland, I often change the language to English on a particular site, only to be redirected to the UK regional site which has different information that is not useful to me.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#9As 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.
Re: Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does
#10I've always found Amazon a bit weird/frustrating with regards to i18n/localization. As a user, I should be able to decide, independently, * What language I want to use the site in. and * Where orders should come from. In other words, if I'm an American living in Austria or Italy, I should be able to just go to Amazon.com, have the site in English, and have it route books/whatever from the nearest/lowest tax place. In…
Agreed, Amazon's regional stuff is really, really weird.
Base item prices seem to vary wildly between sites, and there are some real head-scratchers related to postage: amazon.es does not have free "supersaver" delivery, but amazon.co.uk will post to Spain for free for orders above £25.
Plus of course the permanent confusion about VAT: you can't get any of the websites to show VAT for a specific delivery country, it will only do so at checkout and show the VAT-inclusive price for that site's "main" country for the rest of the site. For some types of item, (mostly food and books) VAT can vary wildly between countries (e.g. 0% in UK, 10% in Austria), but there are at least small differences for all items between most countries. So bizarrely, it's cheaper for me to get non-book items sent to Spain from the .co.uk site, but for books I'm best off buying them when I'm actually in the UK. Electronics are usually cheapest on amazon.de, so I tend to get those while in Austria.
As 'bencoder says, the warehouse it actually gets delivered from mainly depends on the destination, not the website you ordered it from, despite huge price differences. Although items e.g. only available from the .co.uk site do usually get sent from a UK warehouse (so there's at least some method to the madness).
And as the article says, they IP-geolocate digital downloads, although I'm assuming those aren't necessarily Amazon's fault, but rather demanded by the contracts with the copyright managers/holders. Though they really should handle this better for Kindle books where they have a direct relationship with the author or publisher for all countries. (I can only assume it gets insanely messy with music and the draconian licensing schemes)