Last week, with very little notice, Amazon decided it would no longer pay California affiliates that chose to put Amazon links on their websites. The reasoning behind this big change was that the state of California decided it was going to have to charge sales tax for internet sales, and Amazon must have thought extra sales tax would cut into their profit margin.
I got the termination notice on Wednesday, June 29 at 9:40 pm. The new California law didn’t even take effect yet, but Amazon decided it no longer valued their California affiliates, and immediately changed their rules.
There was no transition period- there was no 10 day notice to allow loyal Amazon customers a chance to support their favorite affiliates.
California was the 7th state in the USA to charge sales tax on internet sales.
I spent some serious time coming up with a list of recommended products that I wanted my supporters to know about. I wanted to make it easy for folks to get these products for the best available price, creating special widgets for my blog.
Apparently, Amazon no longer cares about such loyalty.
This is the message I see when I log onto my Amazon Affiliates page:
With this in mind, I have removed my Amazon links from this website. There may be some individual blog posts that still have the Amazon links for products, but I plan to eventually remove all of these links.
For more information about Amazon’s disrespect for their California affiliates, please visit….
Danny Sulivan’s Open Letter to Jeff Bezos