I tried to join one vendor’s affiliate program and was let in, then they never asked for taxpayer ID info, that was the first clue, and then they didn’t have any affiliate links, affiliate linking tools, no tracking mechanism, and when I asked them about it, they told me just do the regular links to us, we track everything and will keep track of who sends us traffic and pay accordingly. Yeah, right. I deleted everything on the spot.

But I have to say I did find one book vendor, sells new and used books, that does a similar thing, and the way they did it was very clever. I’ve actually bought hundreds of used books from them, they are a legitimate vendor, they do a good job when you purchase from them, and if you didn’t know anything about affiliate marketing, you’d never realize what was going on. For each page of product, this vendor uses their Amazon affiliate link to provide a “price comparison” with Amazon, if you click on the link to check the book price against Amazon, you’re taken to the product page on Amazon, and voila, the cookie gets placed. They also use their Amazon affiliate account to embed Amazon’s book reviews on their site, thereby placing Amazon customer reviews on their own site which might help sell their own inventory.

Its really quite ingenious, actually, they use the Amazon customer reviews to enhance the content of their own site, probably increasing their own sales, but for those who actually click on the links to compare the price, as long as they buy within 24 hours, the vendor may not get the sale, but they may well get the affiliate commission. But anyone joining their affiliate program may well be driving some traffic to their site only for that traffic to be diverted in turn to Amazon. They may well be losing a percentage of potential commissions.