I have tried Amazon off and on with next to no results and was looking through their terms of Agreement again today to see if there was something I was missing. In Section 4: Referral Fees I found a line that has me totally confused as to the value of ever trying to sell with them. Could I please get an explanation from someone who does make money from Amazon about the below line that is enlarged and marked in red? ============================= 4. Referral Fees We will pay you (in accordance with Sections 5 and 6 below) referral fees on certain Product sales to third parties. For a Product sale to be eligible to earn a referral fee, the customer must click-through a Special Link on your site to the Amazon Site and during a single session, add the Product to his or her shopping cart, purchase the Product with digital fulfillment (e.g., digital download or streaming) in the case of Digital Products, or purchase the Product via our 1-Click feature. The session begins when the customer clicks through a Special Link on your site to the Amazon Site and ends upon the first to occur of the following events: (a) 24 hours elapses from the customer's initial click-through, (b) the customer places an order for a Product that is not a Digital Product, or (c) the customer follows a third party link to the Amazon Site that is formatted with an Associate’s tag. We will only pay referral fees on eligible Products after order, payment, and shipping or, in the case of Digital Products, digital fulfillment have occurred. ============================= I have a bookstore and figured Amazon would be a good place to use to offer books. However, they are not a "digital" product, so does that mean I am just working my donkey off advertising for them for free?
(c) the customer follows a third party link to the Amazon Site that is formatted with an Associate’s tag. We will only pay referral fees on eligible Products after order, payment, and shipping or, in the case of Digital Products, digital fulfillment have occurred. meaning, buyer successfully placed an order on the digital product and have successfully downloaded the item. Look on (b), purchase the Product with digital fulfillment (e.g., digital download or streaming)
The link is on my site. It is not anywhere else. According to these terms the session (which would credit me with a commission) ends when someone PLACES AN ORDER for a product that IS NOT A DIGITAL PRODUCT. I did not make these words up. It is a simple copy/paste from the Terms page at Amazon. I can understand (a) is a 24 hour cookie and I understand (c) means nothing is paid until the deal is done. It is (b) that seems to eliminate just about any order from being eligible for a commission payment.