
Ask HN: Amazon Associates closed my account with $7k revenue without warning - Matsta
I created a site back in March which is based on an upcoming product. Just over a week ago I applied for an Amazon Associates account. 7 days ago I was approved.<p>This morning I woke up to a rather vague but stern email from Amazon Associates saying they closed my account. The moral of the email says:<p>&quot;You are not in compliance with the Associate Program Linking Requirements because your site makes inaccurate, over-broad, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims about Products, the Amazon Site, or our policies, promotions or prices.&quot;<p>My account has been closed, and they are hinting that I will not be paid for the revenue that I  have currently earned.<p>It has been seven days since Amazon approved our site, so I find it hard to believe that they changed their mind even though we have made no changes to the content.<p>If they had warned us that some of the content had not been compliant, we would have fixed the issue ASAP.<p>Our site is very factual, and we don&#x27;t have any &quot;sales speak&quot; trying to promote people to buy products. Our site focuses on one particular product, so there are no competitor products nor do we mention any other retailers or pricing.<p>I talked to Amazon on the phone; they didn&#x27;t seem to have any more information beyond the email.<p>After talking to other people that monetize their sites with Amazon associates, they said it&#x27;s almost impossible to get a detailed response from them, and they usually aren&#x27;t interested in re-assessing your account.<p>If you guys have any ideas, can you please help me out!
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mstolpm
Help me understand the numbers: "Amazon Associates" means you got a new Amazon
Affiliate account seven days ago, not a merchant account, right? And you made
$1k with referrals per day since that?

Amazon pays its Affiliates roughly 5 percent ("up to 10 percent") of a sale,
so you generated nearly $20k in sales for promoting one particular product
from the first day on, constantly? And you wonder Amazon is terminating this
Affiliate account?

If the $7k revenue really accounts from Affiliate promotions for only one
product and a time span of the first 7 days after approval, I'm pretty sure
that rings a lot of bells in Amazons fraud detection systems. I'd really like
to know how one could get to these numbers without at least bending the rules
of the Affiliate program.

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Matsta
Correct, I'm putting Amazon ads on the site.

And yes I'm making around that. It's all from Google/SEO traffic. You can make
up to 8% of the retail price depending on how many items you sell.

The site has been ranking in Google for months now, and traffic has slowly
been building up.

I agree that it could ring some bells being so sudden, but because Xmas is
coming up people are starting to buy more and more.

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Dr0Dre
Out of curiosity what niche is this? Did you read theit T&C carefully? you are
not allowed to put pricing on your website for example.

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Matsta
It's an electronic item. I've read their T&C's very carefully, as well as had
a few other people check the site to make sure everything is 100%.

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someotheridiot
I had an account closed with about 2k in it and no amount of pestering them
made a difference. Then suddenly, about a year afterwards (I think), they sent
me a cheque with the balance. Also, I was able to create a new account after
fixing what they didn't like and haven't had issues with it.

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Matsta
Yup, seems like the consensus, no matter how you try, not much will change.
Nice to know they did eventually pay you out. It sucks for me that everyday
traffic is increasing, but I can't monetize it.

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amit312
If you can have earned this profit, you have really doing great job. When
amazon ban account them it become very hard to contact only mail is a chance.
If you are really profitable for them then can call you do not miss that.

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cft
Is it possible to escalate over the phone to their content quality team?

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Matsta
I've tried, they've told me an "account specialist" will get back to me via
email, but I don't think I can talk directly to them over the phone.

