No, you can't buy items through your own links. Amazon doesn't get mad, but you won't be credited with the commission.
i would advise you to refrain from such actions. although they do not say you can't it's obvious that they don't want you to
be smart - use your sisters/brothers/dads..... account to order something. of course they click on your reflink before. you cant prevent it
Amazon make it very clear in the affiliate Agreement that you are not permitted to buy anything through your own affiliate link.
Hey all. Thanks for the posts. We are new to amazon also and were planning on using our own link to purchase things. Sounds like a bad idea. I will probably use my dads. On another note, we've recently worked out how to use the Amazon API via Web Services. Does anyone else use this? If so, I'd be interested in how you apply it to drive commissions. If you don't, are you interested in using it? We've built it so that you can put in keywords and have the web services return all the products (you get to set the category to books, dvd, etc) that match the key-words. It strikes me that this could help any web store make content-specific ads that might have a higher click-through rate than generic stuff that was insensitive to the content on the page... I'd like to have a meaningful exchange of ideas around this on a forum (possibly this one) with people with real interest. I'd be willing to make our feeds available if you wanted to play with it also. Let me know.