Robbery #1

We registered with Amazon.com as an affiliate in 2000s.

We're earning some commissions, but the revenue stream was too small. Investment of our time in other businesses was much more rewarding. So we left our Amazon affiliate business to run on autopilot and  devoted ourselves to greater ventures.

After some time, as new technologies and services had emerged, we decided to revisit our Amazon.com affiliated business and...  we were surprised to discover that our Amazon.com had been closed and the wallet with the commissions earned emptied.

We were puzzled, but not for long. We thought some technical failure had happened, and we just let it go.

In 2018, we decided to give our Amazon.com affiliate business another try. We registered as an affiliate named "enjoy07", launched an online marketing campaign and started earning commissions. 

To our surprise, on Sep 14, 2018, we received a letter form Amazon Associates <associates@amazon.com>, saying, "We noticed that you are not using tags associated with your store ID in any of the Amazon Special Links you have created on your websites. As a result of this decision, we have closed the account".... !!!... How come? The internal account monitor at Amazon.com registered and displayed leads, sales and commission we generated every day.

Initially, we hoped that was just a technical failure. We responded to that e-mail instantly sending sufficient proofs that Amazon Associated had made a wrong decision. No answer. Our account has been closed, our earnings disappeared. That looked like a robbery, yet we refused to believe that such an icon of corporate America would do such things. We sent another message. No response again "within 24 hours" as promised at Amazon's website.

Apparently, what hoped to be a mistake turned out to be a theft.

Is this the first case of corporate kleptomania?

Or someone tries to destroy good reputation of Amazon.com by having such ugly things done to their associates?

We'll probably know this some day.

Semi-Happy End

Shortly after this article was published we received the following message from cs.reply@amazon.com of Amazon: "We’ve completed review of your site and have determined that your previously rejected application is eligible to be reinstated."

Our account was reinstalled. Yet, that was not a great customer service at all. They didn't apologize for the harmful mistake they had made, neither did they offer any compensation for the damage they'd caused... It was not at all in line with the below statement by the Amazon's Founder.