Thought I would share this story to give all the Amazon affiliates a laugh. The full story is on my new blog: Brosense For a short recap, basically 5 years ago when google base was new I uploaded feeds of amazon products to google base with my affiliate code. I went to town on these and was eventually shut down by google, then Amazon. Was denied payment by Amazon for no specific breach of their terms of service, despite the fact that Amazon wasn't on google shopping at the time and the traffic I sent them probably would have gone to a competitor. Moral of the story: don't be a greedy A-hole like I was
What did he ruin? This hole would have been closed anyway, and be glad it wasn't you that lost all that money. Phillyphilly - I did a similar thing at around the same time but not on that scale. Amazon didn't see what I was doing as I was already a big earner, so the jump in earnings didn't show up on the radar. Did you get paid anything from Amazon.com for it? Or did they catch you before they had chance to pay you?
Nah, didn't get a penny from amazon in the US. I did end up getting a few thousand from amazon UK and amazon germany. Those got a lot less traffic. This was back when Amazon was on the quarterly payment system too, so I would have had to survive for 3 months. I actually didn't think there was any chance of not getting paid. The way I was looking at it was that I was trying to make as much as possible before it was shut down on google's end. There wasn't anything in Amazon's TOS against it at the time. I saw other people doing the same thing at the time as well. Not sure how many people were doing it, but I once saw a video of some guy who did the same thing. Can't find the link on youtube to it, but he got paid as well. I very well could have been the biggest abuser of that scheme at the time.
The title of this thread made me laugh. I was so ready to read another thread about How I made how much and bla bla and it ended up with 'lost it all' quite unusual
I still can't believe you guys thought taking Amazon products and selling them on Google would work. This thread is funny! I actually remember when the rule came out that you had to sell the product yourself, I was selling products back then.
I wonder how did they discover you were doing it. They had to feel embarrassed that you discovered a loophole. However, if it wasn't part of their Terms and Service at the time, I would have proceeded to legal action
I think there's a misconception about greed. The threadstarter's problem isn't about greed, it's about not doing things according to the terms and conditions. If you do things legally, no one can stop you from earning whatever amount you want. The more greedy you are, the more you need to provide value back to your customers/readers.
Yea, I think the key is to do things the legal way, not really the non-greedy way. Anything marketers do could be considered greedy from a certain perspective, but there are certainly good and bad ways to go about it. I know Google isn't keen on affiliate programs and they like their shopping results to be filled with direct sellers. As far as Amazon denying payment, I would think they could only do that if you violate one of their terms, but perhaps Google had something to do with it.