Amazon Associates links blocked by Amazon

I am the bearer of horrible news.

We discovered this week that our Amazon Associates ad builder ads were empty space.

Amazon blocked us for insufficient sales. Locked us out. Because since January 23, 2019, we have not had any sales through our links.

I chatted with an Amazon Associates representative to confirm our account was indeed throttled to ZERO accesses per day.

She said they cannot override the automatic system, no matter that our site was down for six weeks due to other issues.

The web page describing this new policy provides a link to a testing solution called SCRATCHPAD. You will need all your credentials including your secret key to test. If you get a 503 error, you are kicked out of the API (until someone buys a product through your links).

They also suggest you can download a “Link Type Performance” report of your store. If you look at the last 30 days, and see zeros, you have met the criteria to be banned.

Instead they direct you to use their new SiteStripe feature. This must be turned on by you for your browser. You will need access to Amazon Associates Central to enable this browser feature. It runs as a bar at top of the Amazon.com store.

You must visit each product and capture embedding codes for your html. Stripe provides 6 ad templates that cannot be easily formatted. I fixed one ad by combining the large image-only template with a text link template. The text link provides only the URL, you need to make your own link. Formats that show price have other junk (ad choices) and are very tiny.

Will SiteStripe work for several of products displayed on a page? Only as a text link. So if you have a gallery, as I do, have fun!

I recommended to my client that we have to rebuild all our ads and may as well rip out the AALB plugin. We advertise about a dozen items.

Policy URL:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/TroubleshootingApplications.html#EfficiencyGuidelines
SiteStripe URL:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/stripe.html

This took me over 15 hours to diagnose. I had our site host and web firewall vendors checking. I ran debugger to see if any error codes appeared. (None, but the WAF vendor found some time-out codes). AALB did not throw any errors or inform developer why the pages were blocked. I raised a ticket with AA Central support and they did not check to see if we were locked out. There is nothing in the AA Central dashboard to indicate a store is in the punishment zone.

IMHO this is the worst support and policy ever.

Happy sales!

• This topic was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by isaaa. Reason: clarification and accuracy and additional information