As part of my efforts to make a little money from my domain, Granola.com, I recently signed up for an Amazon Associate account.  I’d read all over the internet that it’s a great program and a way to make some money by setting up an online pseudo-store.  It was advertised as a way to set up an online presence, with niche market products, where I wouldn’t have to handle any of the  inventory or sales tax issues that come with setting up a traditional online store.

I signed up last Monday.  I got a very nice welcome message from Amazon with the links to all the resources I’d need to get things established.  I spent many hours over the next six days carefully going through Amazon’s vast catalog, picking out products I thought would appeal to viewers of my site, and adding them to my catalog.

On Sunday, I received the following e-mail from Amazon Associates:

Hello,

Thank you for applying for the Associate program. Upon review, we are unable to accept your application. A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons.

– Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors
– Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed

Unfortunately, we arent able to review an application once its been rejected. If your website has been further developed and now contains appropriate content, youre [sic] welcome to submit another application.

Well, color me unimpressed!  Nowhere in their signup did I remember seeing anything about there being an approval process.  Nowhere did I see anything that said that newly-built websites weren’t welcome.  They did ask me about how much site traffic I was receiving, which I answered honestly.  While I haven’t had any content on granola.com for a while, the domain itself has always received a fair amount of random vistors.  People tend to type the name into their browsers to see what’s there.  Right now, with no marketing, no SEO, no nothing, I’m getting about 20-30 site visits per day.  Back when I had some old content related to The Granola Board on the site, I was getting about 1,500 visits a month, just from people typing in the domain name.

My opinion of the Amazon Associates program, at least at the moment, is pretty low.  I wasted a good week’s worth of work, meticulously building a catalog of granola-related products, only to be told a week later that I wasn’t good enough to be in their program.  Shouldn’t they have told me, in big bold letters somewhere, that my application was subject to approval?  If they had, I would have saved myself a lot of effort.

Oh, and the best part?  Amazon didn’t disable my shopping cart.  If my site visitors shopped from my links, they still worked.  I just wouldn’t receive a penny in commissions.

Thanks Amazon, NOT!