I had my first big setback on BTTR over the weekend. Amazon decided to close my Associates account.

There were a couple of reasons given. The first was that my links weren’t clear, which I disagree with and am not sure what they meant.

The second was that they saw purchases from family, friends and employees, which isn’t allowed. That one was true, I admit… but I still feel cancelling the entire account over $10 worth of toothpaste (about 50c in affiliate revenue) was probably overkill.

It stressed me out all day Saturday. I tried to appeal but got a generic response that didn’t offer any help whatsoever, which stressed me out some more.

In the end I slept on it, and woke up feeling better It’s still a massive pain, but I can manage.

Because my account was closed, I lost about $90 in revenue. It’s not that much in the scheme of things. I can reapply (or so I was told), so I’ve done that, but I need to swap over links. It would be easy if I had API access, but that was closed off as well, and I have to wait until I get it reapproved before doing it that way.

But it’s also highlighted some errors in my setup. I had manually synced my product database with Amazon for most products, which means things are broken when I switched off Amazon. If I hadn’t done that manual connection, things would have been okay.

So fixing that is my day today.

It also forced me to prioritise other partners like ebay.

So hopefully what was a stressful weekend will turn out to be better for me in the long run.