Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Amazon terminated jeviz.com

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Amazon terminated jeviz.com affiliate account without any valid reason

My side project Jeviz.com is basically Amazon search on steroids! which provides advanced Amazon search capabilities. I have announced my project on hackernews last year and it was generating revenue from Amazon affiliation program.

On 1th of April 2017 I have received following email:

We are writing to tell you that effective as of today’s date, Amazon is terminating your Associates account. Under the terms of the Operating Agreement, we may terminate your account at any time, with or without cause. This decision is final and not subject to appeal.

You are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement. The violation(s) are as follows;

-You may not use Special Links to link to the Amazon Site from references to products on your Site that are not “Products” as defined in the Agreement. For example, you cannot link to the Amazon Site with a link for “shoes”, however you can link to the Amazon Site with a Special Link to a specific shoe Product detail page.

It is important that you immediately remove all Amazon Content from your Site(s). Please be aware that any other accounts you have, or may open in the future, may be closed without payment of any fees. Amazon reserves all other rights and claims.

Because you are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement, Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account.

Thank you for your participation in the Amazon Associates Program.

What I understand from Amazon email is all the links to the Amazon site must be an Amazon product detail page so it can not be a product a search page. Is this really the case?

If you go to affiliate-program.amazon.com site Product Linking>Link to Any Page, Amazon provides a tool create a link for search page which basically what www.jeviz.com does as well.

Similarly Native Shopping Ads have Search Ads that have similar function.

I have emailed Amazon 3 times without any response so I called Amazon and asked why they closed my account. The person I talked from Amazon Associates program said me that just re-apply to program he could not gave me any valid reason about the problem.

I re-applied with same email with same site without any change because I have done nothing wrong or nothing to hide. Then few hours later I received following email:

We are writing to tell you that effective as of today’s date, Amazon is terminating your Associates account. Under the terms of the Operating Agreement, we may terminate your account at any time, with or without cause. This decision is final and not subject to appeal.

It is important that you immediately remove all Amazon Content from your Site(s). Please be aware that any other accounts you have, or may open in the future, may be closed without payment of any fees. Amazon reserves all other rights and claims.

Because you are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement, Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account. Amazon exercises its right under the Operating Agreement to withhold fees based on violations, which include the following:

-An account belonging to you (or a person or entity connected or affiliated with you) has previously been closed for violations of the Operating Agreement or one of the other Associates Programs operated by our affiliates.

Thank you for your participation in the Amazon Associates Program.

What Amazon done is unethical. There is no way I am violating their rules if so please remove Native Search Ads search version or Link to Search Result tool from their affiliate site.

Advice for startups:

If you rely on a 3rd party to generate revenue do not put everything in one basket, they can easily destroy your business without any valid reason like what Amazon have done to me.

To Jeviz.com users:

Amazon requested me to remove any content related to Amazon from my site which means that shutting down jeviz.com. There are there options for me:

• Run the site as is and add Google Adsense to cover web server costs but this option is against the what Amazon requests and I do not like putting ads on my site.
• Shutdown jeviz.com
• An another alternative is making jeviz.com a standalone application without any affiliation to Amazon. get revenue from subscription plan or donations.

I will decide what to do soon.

Thank you for all jeviz.com users making this site online.

Last word: Amazon is not a trustworthy affiliate program and only use it with alternatives. Also do not built a business solely based on a single 3rd party because shit happens!

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