

Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does - surfingdino
http://artymiak.com/what-amazon-com-associates-cant-make-money-even-when-amazon-does/

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davidw
I'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.

~~~
pmjordan
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)

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lazyjones
You have to cut Amazon some slack there. They have to deal with all kinds of
stupid regulations that demand different compensations to copyright
collectives whether e.g. Amazon.de sends a memory card to a visitor from
Germany or Austria (or elsewhere) and the fact that they have merchants listed
in their marketplaces from other countries than the marketplace itself (so the
greedy copyright collectives from that other country demand their share)
further complicates things.

As if the VAT regulations and translations for all products (and reviews and
sometimes product info entered by users) and (former) price fixing on books
for some countries weren't complicated enough already ...

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surfingdino
VAT and sales tax is something that kills businesses. It is a tax specifically
designed to be punitive and it is a major stumbling block in growing a
business.

~~~
pmjordan
[citation needed]

I dislike paying taxes as much as the next person, but where exactly are you
getting these supposed facts from? Particularly in retail, the fact that VAT
is an indirect tax doesn't really matter much as late payment basically
doesn't happen. (whereas I'll accept that it can sink your company if you
invoice your customer some huge amount and they don't pay and you still owe
the VAT on revenue that never materialised)

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lazyjones
We have the opposite problem, our income from the associate program is growing
at such a rate that we're becoming increasingly dependent on it (i.e. changes
in their terms could have a huge impact on our company). Amazon is cornering
many markets because other merchants have inferior websites and are often
under (illegal) pressure from vendors to keep prices high (specifically in my
country).

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gav
As 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.

~~~
FreeKill
They've already been well on this path. Every year or so they make a change to
their API which always reduces what you can do with it.

One year they removed much of the data people were using on their sites such
as shipping costs and comments. Last year they removed your ability to access
all the products in the Amazon marketplace (now you can only get the
cheapest).

They also constantly make the terms of service more restrictive. In the last
update, they added wording that completely forbids use of Amazon associate
links in websites or apps designed specifically for use on mobile devices
(without written permission).

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alanfalcon
Amazon KDP Authors have trouble making the money they seem to be promised as
well: even though my novel is available for sale through every Amazon.com
website, and even though I'm supposed to receive a 70% (minus "delivery fees")
royalty on sales in every market, I routinely have 15-20% of my sales in the
US store get marked down to a 30% royalty. The explanation appears to be that
these are sales from outside the US made on the Amazon.com website, but I fail
to understand why that should affect my royalty rates. So Amazon's strange
compartmentalization is at fault again. The net effect is that my actual
royalty rate drops to about 64% of the sale price. This isn't a huge drop, but
it certainly feels sneaky especially when apps sold through Apple net me the
full 70% I'm promised every time.

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duiker101
I 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.

~~~
moepstar
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.

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ljd
I've been reading more blogs on how people are upset or confused by Amazon's
economics. I'm not necessarily taking an opinion either way but it is
important to realize that Amazon is commoditizing every product they can to
increase their complementary product: the market itself.

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paulhauggis
Amazon is a terrible company. When will people realize this? They have been
abusing their Internet marketplace monopoly for years because we don't really
have any other choice.

