Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does | Hacker News Reader

Why Amazon.com associates can’t make money even when Amazon does

artymiak.com

26 pointssurfingdino20 comments

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I've always found Amazon a bit weird/frustrating with regards to i18n/localization.

As a user, I should be able to decide, independently,

* What language I want to use the site in.

and

* Where orders should come from.

In other words, if I'm an American living in Austria or Italy, I should be able to just go to Amazon.com, have the site in English, and have it route books/whatever from the nearest/lowest tax place. In some cases, that'd be Amazon.it, in others, Amazon.co.uk, and in some cases, it'd have to send things from the US, incurring higher taxes/tariffs.

Instead, Amazon.it and Amazon.de are very much only in "the" local language (Italy actually has areas where German and French are official languages), and routing does not seem intelligent at all.

Frustrating.

When I order from amazon.co.uk to Finland, often items get delivered from their German warehouse, so it seems that something like this does happen, at least in Europe.

But I agree it would be nice when I'm linked to amazon.com to easily be able to see that the same item is available from one of the european sites. As it is I have to manually check.

The lack of region/language differentiation is something that bothers me a lot from a lot of websites. As an English speaker currently living in Finland, I often change the language to English on a particular site, only to be redirected to the UK regional site which has different information that is not useful to me.

At my previous job I was responsible for the i18n of our globally-used web app. The problem came down to a choice: follow the HTTP standard and pay attention to the request header the browser sends that specifies its language setting, or ignore the browser and maintain a user configuration setting in our app. We chose the latter, which worked much better: users could choose a language from a dropdown at any time, and we remembered that choice across sessions. (They had to log in to the webapp so we knew who they were, but we also set a cookie so most of the time the login page was the right language too.)

I guess the other choice we made was to support any language through the same codebase, rather than a separate codebase/deployment per language. A lot of websites do the latter, which means that if you go to a country-specific site you're stuck with the language used for that site. Bad design; I think there are few places left in the world where a region only has one language in common use anymore... at least among people who use the internet.

Agreed, Amazon's regional stuff is really, really weird.

Base item prices seem to vary wildly between sites, and there are some real head-scratchers related to postage: amazon.es does not have free "supersaver" delivery, but amazon.co.uk will post to Spain for free for orders above £25.

Plus of course the permanent confusion about VAT: you can't get any of the websites to show VAT for a specific delivery country, it will only do so at checkout and show the VAT-inclusive price for that site's "main" country for the rest of the site. For some types of item, (mostly food and books) VAT can vary wildly between countries (e.g. 0% in UK, 10% in Austria), but there are at least small differences for all items between most countries. So bizarrely, it's cheaper for me to get non-book items sent to Spain from the .co.uk site, but for books I'm best off buying them when I'm actually in the UK. Electronics are usually cheapest on amazon.de, so I tend to get those while in Austria.

As 'bencoder says, the warehouse it actually gets delivered from mainly depends on the destination, not the website you ordered it from, despite huge price differences. Although items e.g. only available from the .co.uk site do usually get sent from a UK warehouse (so there's at least some method to the madness).

And as the article says, they IP-geolocate digital downloads, although I'm assuming those aren't necessarily Amazon's fault, but rather demanded by the contracts with the copyright managers/holders. Though they really should handle this better for Kindle books where they have a direct relationship with the author or publisher for all countries. (I can only assume it gets insanely messy with music and the draconian licensing schemes)

You have to cut Amazon some slack there. They have to deal with all kinds of stupid regulations that demand different compensations to copyright collectives whether e.g. Amazon.de sends a memory card to a visitor from Germany or Austria (or elsewhere) and the fact that they have merchants listed in their marketplaces from other countries than the marketplace itself (so the greedy copyright collectives from that other country demand their share) further complicates things.

As if the VAT regulations and translations for all products (and reviews and sometimes product info entered by users) and (former) price fixing on books for some countries weren't complicated enough already ...

VAT and sales tax is something that kills businesses. It is a tax specifically designed to be punitive and it is a major stumbling block in growing a business.

[citation needed]

I dislike paying taxes as much as the next person, but where exactly are you getting these supposed facts from? Particularly in retail, the fact that VAT is an indirect tax doesn't really matter much as late payment basically doesn't happen. (whereas I'll accept that it can sink your company if you invoice your customer some huge amount and they don't pay and you still owe the VAT on revenue that never materialised)

VAT exists only because greedy, inefficient governments could tax everyone (esp. lower incomes) easily with it. It seems most unfair to online retailers, because they usually only earn a fraction of the government's cut per sale (around here: typically 1/4th for electronics, i.e. 20% VAT, 5% merchants' margin).

I'm not saying it's easy. In fact, they seem to handle the complexity admirably: you can buy most items from anywhere in Europe from any of the sites and they charge all the appropriate fees. Which makes it all the more odd that the individual sites are so different and disjoint, when they're clearly all the same at the back-end.

We have the opposite problem, our income from the associate program is growing at such a rate that we're becoming increasingly dependent on it (i.e. changes in their terms could have a huge impact on our company). Amazon is cornering many markets because other merchants have inferior websites and are often under (illegal) pressure from vendors to keep prices high (specifically in my country).

As Amazon gets more and more established, the value of their affiliate program drops. They end up giving up margin for a sale they are likely to capture anyway.

I predict that as time goes on, they will cut back their affiliate program. Once you have the data to determine on a per-product-category basis what kind of affiliates are worth it and which aren't they next step is to prune back the latter.

They've already been well on this path. Every year or so they make a change to their API which always reduces what you can do with it.

One year they removed much of the data people were using on their sites such as shipping costs and comments. Last year they removed your ability to access all the products in the Amazon marketplace (now you can only get the cheapest).

They also constantly make the terms of service more restrictive. In the last update, they added wording that completely forbids use of Amazon associate links in websites or apps designed specifically for use on mobile devices (without written permission).

Amazon KDP Authors have trouble making the money they seem to be promised as well: even though my novel is available for sale through every Amazon.com website, and even though I'm supposed to receive a 70% (minus "delivery fees") royalty on sales in every market, I routinely have 15-20% of my sales in the US store get marked down to a 30% royalty. The explanation appears to be that these are sales from outside the US made on the Amazon.com website, but I fail to understand why that should affect my royalty rates. So Amazon's strange compartmentalization is at fault again. The net effect is that my actual royalty rate drops to about 64% of the sale price. This isn't a huge drop, but it certainly feels sneaky especially when apps sold through Apple net me the full 70% I'm promised every time.

I think the title is a bit misleading, it should be "Why blggers can't make money by linking to books". This is a very specific case. I know people who actually their only business model is Amazon association. Risky if you ask me(as always when you depend entirely on someone else), but it works.

The same problems apply to electronics and other types of merchandise sold on various Amazon sites.

Of course this works, but i'd wager a guess and say that those are mostly US bloggers targeting US visitors.

Once your visitors are from all over the world, it is indeed as the author described - there isn't a "proper" solution available (save for e.g. a WordPress plugin that generates the link on-the-fly but this approach has other problems like non-cachability).

If there is indeed an approach that lets you monetize like 99% of international traffic/clicks i'd like to hear it.

Article includes an example where linking to the iPhone wouldn't work.

Yeah, my main hobby site is a news site about a band. It supported itself through Amazon quite well up until a few years ago, when people stopped pre-ordering CDs. I've been able to recapture income by setting up a 'merch' page that hits the eBay API for things like posters and records, but in my niche, Amazon's completely dried up.

I've been reading more blogs on how people are upset or confused by Amazon's economics. I'm not necessarily taking an opinion either way but it is important to realize that Amazon is commoditizing every product they can to increase their complementary product: the market itself.

Amazon is a terrible company. When will people realize this? They have been abusing their Internet marketplace monopoly for years because we don't really have any other choice.

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