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• Create Quick Linker Widget » Amazon

One of the best ways to link off of a site, is to link to the site that has everything: Amazon.

Amazon has had an associates program since the dark ages. They promoted it heavily and after some years it became a huge directed draw of buyer inflow for them. You’d think with such a cash cow, they would have a more active, dedicated, and interactive group of developers for this project. drzy has used the amazon associates for a few years, where I’ve tried to make it as non-intrusive and yet useful as possible. But the hardest hurdle in that struggle is the Amazon Associates program itself.

Only recently have they made it easy to just “post a link” to something. In the years past, it really seemed like they were actively fighting such a mechanic. Initially you could just put your referral code at the end of a link and it would work and you would get credit. Then they changed it subtly, and when people started seeing their links not working they adjusted. Repeat that a half-dozen more times until they made it be this long complicated link with a session ID and only some pages could be successfully linked to (and still get credit).

Well, they “revamped” the program a few months ago, and I was eager to see the improvements. Turns out all they really did was improve the look of the Associates site. They did add a blog widget and a wishlist widget, and something to show previews for their new video sales. Whoopee.

The one thing that I find both most-useful and least-useful are the in-line context links. And this is possibly the most broken of all their features. To put it simply, Amazon context linking cannot handle dynamic pages. And, seriously, who doesn’t have dynamic pages? This means that whenever a person goes to the front page, they will never see a Amazon generated context link, because the front page changes (almost) daily. The individual pages of articles fare better, because they do not change much beyond the sidebar content. But even those hardly ever get a link attached. There a bunch of businesses out there that offer context links exclusively, and handle dynamic pages just fine, but I really don’t like their intrusiveness. But they’ve got the whole “search page for products; link to products” thing down cold.

I check the Amazon Associates forums for answers to this, but I never see a response or even a hint of acknowledgment from an Amazon developer or employee. I’ll save you the trouble of checking, and just take my word that there a hundreds of posts on the subject and I have never seen a response. I’ve sent emails to the appropriate Amazon entities, and just get a form letter back.

So this rant is over and my story is done. But I wrote this in the hope that others out there using Amazon Associates will not feel lost in the black hole of response from Amazon, and who, like me, just manually create links when, you know, Amazon doesn’t completely change the process, or they aren’t having a root canal or something.