MIRO VARGA

My Amazon Affiliate Experiment: A Sequel

Mar 30, 2015

In the previous post I wrote about building a website to help people decide what to buy for their friends, family or themselves using the Amazon product advertising API.

I had some doubts whether Amazon would accept the website to their affiliate program because of lack of original content because the website just contained the best selling products from several categories I thought sold well in a nice and usable interface.

My doubts were confirmed when I got an email from Amazon telling me they rejected my application exactly because of the lack of original content. I'm including the full email:

Hello,

Thank you for applying for the Associate program. Upon review, we are unable to accept your application. A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons.

Unfortunately, we arent able to review an application once its been rejected. If your website has been further developed and now contains appropriate content, youre welcome to submit another application by using the following URL:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join

Thank you for your interest in Amazon Associates.

One thing that makes me a little sad is that Amazon doesn't mention anything about the lack of original content in their operating or API agreements.

On the other hand I got another idea while writing this post so in the end the rejection had its hidden purpose.

I decided to host the code on GitHub to help others use the API.