My Attempt To Sign Up For Amazon Affiliates
I was treated with a wonderful surprise when I tried signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program. This actually happened several months ago before I issued my statementLast Statement reviews
that I was going to clean up my blog and remove all my ads because quite frankly, I’m not going to make any money off this blog. However I still find this a little frustrating. If one attempts to sign up for the affiliate program and they’re from RI then they are greeted with the message Residents of Rhode Island are not eligible to participate in the Associates program. Why is this? Well I sent them a message asking why and their reply was:
Hello,
I’m sorry, because you are located in Rhode Island, we are unable to accept your application to join the Associates Program because of unconstitutional legislation enacted in your state. In the event that Rhode Island repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to Rhode Island residents.
Information about this legislation may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance Website: http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.
We appreciate your understanding.
I don’t want to seem crass and I don’t want to see like I’m mad at Amazon. I’m not. In fact I’m actually proud that they stood up to RI. It seems that Overstock.com and other sites are following suit to. As Performance Marketing Alliance explains it:
The Rhode Island legislature approved the state’s budget bill by an overwhelming, veto-proof majority, and it included the state/use tax nexus law. This will likely have a devastating effect on affiliate marketers in the state. Amazon announced last night that it has terminated its associates in that state, and we can expect other merchants to follow suit. When a similar law was passed last year in New York, over 200 merchants terminated their programs. We have yet to hear any direct information from other merchants.
In an article from The Wall Street :
Rhode Island’s state legislature recently passed a bill that would force companies to collect sales taxes if they have online-marketing affiliates—businesses that get a sales commission by featuring links to outside e-commerce sites on their own Web sites—in the state.
All in all it doesn’t really matter now. I don’t even want to use their program anymore, but it still burns me up that Rhode Island did this. I mean just because we’re the smallest state, and we were on of the first state to declare independence but the last of the original thirteen to join the union and all have all kinds of other troubles in our past doesn’t mean we have to be levying these kind of taxes. At least we have Dell’s lemonade though.
