Ask HN: After great HN feedback on my web page Amazon closed my account
Background: Two weeks ago, I submitted a Show HN which lead to a lot of valuable and positive feedback - thank you very much for that, HN!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30137984
A week later I received an email from Amazon that they have now closed my Amazon Associates account. The reason given was: "Your website/app does not meet our content standards. The content of your website is insufficient. Here you can find an example: https://fahrrad-tools.de/"
Do you have an idea what they might be missing? Or could it be an automated website analyzer (AI) that expects a blog-like website?
Thanks for your ideas.
75 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadEDIT: 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 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.
That author didn't clean out the links they had, just stopped putting new ones up; so amazon still "wins" a little free advertising.
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.
- 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...
...
{The|This} tire {is $width mm wide|{features|has} a {track |}width of $width mm}}
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…
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.
What you are reacting to is a way to trick Amazons bots and the underpaid bored agents looking over affiliate sites.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman
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.
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.
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.
Interesting thought, in that case I'll just have to keep trying.
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.
All the long-standing crappy MFA sites out there make it seem unlikely that Amazon is doing much crawling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
They mentioned to pay out the affiliate earnings (approx. 6,20 €). I'm curious to see if that happens.