https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies... https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/G8TW5AE...

Quite a few spots mention "original" and "creative content" - because you have essentially just a database I'm betting they do not see it as original 'creative' content. It seems the goal of their program is to have bloggers write about the products being sold. Rather than simply decode the tire, they want you to upsell.

Maybe if you were to include individual/separate pages or 'blog' posts about each facet of the tires' specs, as painful as that is.

I've shared this before, but this has happened to me - 3 times - with different sites I created. One was very similar in nature to OP's (essentially a specialized tool/calculator with affiliate links to the products), and another was a very detailed guide for making a DIY electronics product. It was "creative" enough to be featured on the front page of hackaday.com, but I guess not enough for Amazon's affiliate program.

Traffic also wasn't a problem - in one case they pulled my program membership only after I had generated hundreds of dollars in referred sales (of course they didn't pay the commission). Needless to say, it has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since. In my opinion, if they have such a narrow interpretation of what "original" or "creative" means (applying only to blog-style content, or who knows what), then I frankly don't care to do anything more with their affiliate program or drive sales to them.

This is what you get when a company is the regulator of a market. I guess government regulation isn't so bad after all.

Or you could view it as the government is just the biggest corporation.

One that in theory at least you get to vote for representation on the board.

Doesn't work very well though when a lot of people vote to kneecap it and let all the corporations you don't have any say over run the show.

That's not really a fair comparison. Most western governments have an Ombudsman where citizens can complain if they are treated unfairly. A government acting against its citizens the way Amazon does against its users would be unlikely and unlawful, whereas Amazon can get away with it because they are not breaking any laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman

I don’t know last time I complained about the dmv to the government, it felt about as useless as complaining to HR. Probably less so.

You probably have more agency to change a corporation, if it isn’t a mega corporation. Mega corporations, good luck, unless you have lots of money or influence.

Ok government is definitely just a mega corp. the other lesser mega corps have some influence, but not us peons.

In the US, maybe we citizens would have a slight chance at having influence if we eliminated the 17th amendment.

Or just don’t affiliate with amazon. Instead use an online service, that is dedicated to your niché and both profit.

Seems like government regulation against corporate control of markets is still a good idea.

Either one is no good if you allow them to grow too large to "see product level" to properly serve the "consumer".

Wow, thanks a lot for sharing your experience.

Yeah, this happened to one of our sites, and we resolved it by making a blog we post to every couple of months. We get basically zero sales through the actual blog posts.

Do you host both websites (or website and whatever "web" the other thing is) on the same domain, or those are completely different entities, so you can just point amazon to the blog?

Same domain - we just have a /blog path. So the main site is www.example.com, and the blog is at www.example.com/blog

Thanks for sharing your experience. So it really looks like Amazon expects a blog-like page.

It looks like you've already put in a lot of work to parse out individual specs and data for the tires. I bet you could inject a paragraph or 2 of text using that, and place that on the pages somewhere. Just make a few different templates with some random phrasing to generate variations, like:

- This off-road tire features a track width of xxx mm, making it perfect for...

- Designed for off-road use, this tire is xxx mm wide, and features...

- Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, produces this xyz model of tube for...

...

Am I the only one shocked that this is required ? This is essentially advocating for SERP spam, which is the bane of my existence.

Websites with generic sentences like this make everyone lose their time when they are looking for tangible information.

If Amazon asks for that kind of shitty content to justify the existence of a valuable site like yours, I’d skip them entirely and search elsewhere to monetize…

Now, you know why recipes all have that bullshit "story" above the actual recipe.

Affiliate programs act like "human interest stories" are the only way to make people intrigued or some such horse shit some MBA probably came up with and we all now have to suffer.

As you say, the sites are the way they are because that is what search engines and affiliate programs reward.

I think you can take this to a point where it's SERP spam, but what I was suggesting doesn't fall into that category, at least to me. A paragraph or two of descriptive text with actual info supplied by a specs table seems reasonable to me. Some people may even absorb info better when done that way.

My suggestion (as a reply) for spintax is a little closer to spam, especially if you get carried away. Done right, though, it's not very different from what a copy writer would do manually. Products have product descriptions, and they are somewhat formulaic even when a person writes them.

If you poke around the site, you can see that time was spent parsing out various specs that aren't understood by other similar sites as anything other than strings of text. The tweaking would mostly be to get Amazon to accept it.

From what they describe it’s not “required” by Amazon — sounds like they don’t want that sort of automated/database-oriented content at all.

What you are reacting to is a way to trick Amazons bots and the underpaid bored agents looking over affiliate sites.

Generate filler content with GPT-3.

Cool idea, thanks! I will give it a try.

There's also templates that can do "spintax", so you get more variations, like:

{The|This} tire {is $width mm wide|{features|has} a {track |}width of $width mm}}

Thank you, I have not heard of Spintax before. Nevertheless, I will try to provide added value for readers in the texts.

I'm surprised to see them take such a narrow view of what kind of sites are suitable. It seems to me that the OP is providing a useful tool, why wouldn't Amazon want to reward him for driving (probably highly motivated to buy) traffic to their site.

Good point, more written text could perhaps help.

Hey, I have no idea how to solve your situation but I really like your website.

My least favorite aspect of the modern web is that all corporate websites have been invaded by "designers" who care about the "feel" of their "content". But they have forgotten that computers are tools. When I use a tool, I want clear, simple, predictable, obvious design, not colors and animations. Like an airplane cockpit or a woodshop, not a trendy coffee bistro.

Your site looks and feels like a tool. I think the organization could be a little better, but this is the kind of website I wish was present all over the entire internet.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!

I have unwittingly 'violated' their terms a couple of times and, in both cases, received an email and notice to make the necessary changes within x number of days. They don't specify what the violation is but, in my experience, they don't require 100% compliance either.

Seems your case hasn't resulted from standard manual checks but some sort of automated sytem that was, maybe, triggered by a sudden spike in traffic?

If amazon affilliation is crucial to you then I would suggest moving your site to another domain, take on board the comments about adding blog-style content, and try again with another account?

In all honesty, all usual amazon complaints accepted, their affiliate program, in my experience, is actually run pretty fairly compared to many others. Certainly worth trying to get back on board.

Thank you for the feedback. It's not a hosting issue, my website is hosted at netcup and still up and running. I already created a new affiliate account, but if I don't change anything on the website I assume they will close it again after a while.

Which is why I suggested changing the domain name, not the hosting, and taking onboard other comments regarding the content of the site.

Thanks for the clarification, now I got the point.

It's probably their AI just sensing an abnormal signal because of the huge spike in traffic your sent their way.

It's safer and easier for them to just ban you rather than sending you an email a human has to read and evaluate your response.

It's a brave new world.

Someone probably just reported them.

All the long-standing crappy MFA sites out there make it seem unlikely that Amazon is doing much crawling.

Thanks, I will modify the page and try again, hopefully it works this time.

That would mean that you are at risk if you buy some Google ads to generate traffic. Why should Amazon want to avoid traffic?

It's avoidance of risk that the traffic is illegitimate, not avoidance of traffic. That much traffic with no sales stands out.

Why would someone spend so much cash on ads to get probably very little sales?

It's a weird egde case that is more likely as per their experience to result in chargebacks from the few sales they got. Traffic from HN is not the normal traffic the AI is trained on.

The sad truth is when you partner with a FAANG and their likes you need to think about what they have optimised for, not what is actually good for you or them. What is the easy money they want and how would they calibrate they systems so they get more of that and less 'noisy' or even 'expensive' money?

Go for that rather than something different that raises virtual eyebrows.

> It's a weird egde case that is more likely as per their experience to result in chargebacks from the few sales they got.

Interesting thought, in that case I'll just have to keep trying.

No. What you built is awesome.

It's actually much better then anything else that's probably out there for bike tires.

Amazon was just not ready for the huge traffic spike. Either relaunch with a new ID or try the support. Whatever faces less resistance.

I can second this. The site is great.

Thanks!

Sounds similar to another case I'm aware of, a blog with 15+ years of posts, author had amazon links for about 3mo and then got dropped. There were affiliate sales, even, but none of them were "qualified" and so the total payout was $0.39 as i recall.

That author didn't clean out the links they had, just stopped putting new ones up; so amazon still "wins" a little free advertising.

Would be interesting if somebody could resolve the issue and find out what unwritten rules Amazon has in addition.

I can understand why Amazon would have strict thresholds on this content, as it seems like an easy target for abuse.

If I'm reading you correctly, you were a bike enthusiast who made a helpful website for decoding tire SKUs. Does the affiliate program give you commissions on items that sell through your account webpage? Were you selling tires / an Amazon affiliate before?

It just seems like an odd thing to monetize, but I admire your entrepreneurial spirit!

> it seems like an easy target for abuse

Can you elaborate on this?

> Does the affiliate program give you commissions on items that sell through your account webpage?

Yes, that's how affiliate links work.

> Were you selling tires / an Amazon affiliate before?

No, that's the first time I try this.

Hi moasda,

I was wondering if they did or did not pay out your affiliate earnings before closing the the door.

Good luck in your endeavors. May I suggest also polishing your tool (its pretty good already. Maybe tailor it to specific use cases/back-end technologies) and offering it for sale/license it to various companies who would like to sell their tires?

I'm thinking any bike shop (if they exist, that is) could slap this on a tablet for a buck a month.

Great idea for monetization, thank you!

They mentioned to pay out the affiliate earnings (approx. 6,20 €). I'm curious to see if that happens.

I have no idea. Have you tried asking them. I know Google is notorious for being impossible to contact but I haven't heard the same about Amazon.

EDIT: On further thought I wonder if it might have something to do with the name of your site. A person might expect fahrrad-tools.com to be a site where they could buy tools, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I cannot find contact details how to ask a question. I only can find a FAQ but it also is very superficial about what could be done wrong.

So they have no appeal process for this kind of decision ?

I finally found a contact page where I will send my request to: https://partnernet.amazon.de/home/contact/

I cannot prove it, but it looks at least like that for me. I tried googling and read all the Amazon Associates pages again to find any hint. Maybe I just wasn't smart enough to find it.

Try this https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GACDBRF...

Thanks for the link. amazon.com seems to have a different process than amazon.de.

> A person might expect fahrrad-tools.com to be a site where they could buy tools

I can't imagine that Amazon evaluates the domain in that way, Amazon even accepts URL paths to a personal blog where you are not the owner of the domain.

If you suspect that it was an automated decision, in addition to any normal appeal processes, you could go through whoever their GDPR contact is and ask whether you were subject to automated decision making and if so, to please review the case manually as is your right under GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

Another obvious solution would be to find a different affiliate program (or set of affiliate programs) and point to them, since Amazon apparently doesn't want customers from you. Maybe some cycling-specific online store(s), or a price comparison web site? Probably more work and less profitable, but a potential avenue if you can't make progress with Amazon or don't want to deal with them.

Thank you for the suggestions, I will check that.

Solution: stop using Amazon. They're a complete shit company. I will never understand why people utilize shit companies.

This isn't a dig at the submitter, far from it.

When did HN became a support page for multi-billion companies? It's not that they can't afford to pay people to provide support. Or is this a sort of hidden agreement where if you make more than a billion, you can fire all of your support staff and hope the HN community fixes things for you for free.

A lot of it is simply that many customers in many industries are not worth supporting. Cheaper to lose them.

Tech just has a disproportionate number of low value customers, but you see it everywhere from flying to freelancing.

Air Canada frequently neglects my queries. As my Dad has status, he never has to wait long to help. I can point to quite a few cases where as an established customer, I got excellent support from certain smaller businesses while my friends didn't even get replies.

> A lot of it is simply that many customers in many industries are not worth supporting. Cheaper to lose them.

Turn a problem into an opportunity.

Big Tech ought to just collectively agree to all start charging $XX-XXX for well-trained, actual human support for really important problems. There's downsides to this, but the really critical issues will actually get addressed.

A low percentage of false positives is not good enough when peoples' livelihoods are at stake.

It's a hidden agreement between tech giants and their customers in that companies are so big and make so much money it's cheaper for them to lose the occasional customer than it is to provide adequate customer service.

As to when hn became a support page for this, at a minimum it was several years ago, along with the rest of social media.

Because the companies have no (and never had any) real support staff, all that's left is to try to contact one of the engineers working there. Luckily those engineers probably browse HN.

> if you make more than a billion, you can fire all of your support staff

How do you think these companies make their billions?

Little or no support staff = customers can't complain = you make profits even when your product is trash.

I believe OP got dropped from the Amazon affiliate program, not Amazon hosting.

Correct, the hosting is not the problem, the website is still up and running. I'm talking about the Amazon Associates account needed for affiliate links.