Just incase you do not get the email, amazon.co.uk are dropping their "Paid Search Placement Associate" category of Associates from 1st Feb ... take note of the bold part in the quote below.
Don't like this part. Not that I have many Amazon UK affiliate links in Google but I might have gathered a few on some lesser known search engines over the years. Does Amazon.com have a similar policy? Can't remember reading that.
We should change fee stucture? Classic Fee Structure: The Classic Fee Structure is not available to new Associates. Performance Fee Structure: the referral fee payable on any Product under the Performance Fee Structure is limited to a maximum of £7.00 per Product
I believe amazon US has stopped paying the affiliate commissions by way of PPC some time ago. And a similar email has sent to their US associates earlier. I know for some of them used to make real good money by way of promoting amazon products through PPC. But that is a distant dream now. You can still do PPC, however, you need to direct the traffic to your landing pages first and from there to amazon.com. So instead of one click landing to amazon, the users have to do two click.
I don't understand why they're doing this, I guess they will eventually choke some of us out of their associate programme. This new restriction will definitely hit us really hard.
Btw, in germany it's the same from march 1st. The reason is pretty simple I think: Why pay affiliates a relatively high comission if you can bid on all those terms yourself directly and pay alot less? In addition, if someone has false claims in a ad, amazon gets the legal problems. So, a decision that's not really suprising.