Anyone noticed the daily Amazon emails with product suggestions?

Yep, I've been noticing this too. I've been getting more and more depending on how many items I view on Amazon.

I wonder if this is just a way to steal affiliate earnings. They should at least include a cookie in the emails if they are sending it our to the customers we've provided.

Yeah I noticed it too.
Amazon should have done this long time ago.

Can't you check your cookies to see what is happening? Click one of your links and see the cookies. Then check the link on the email from Amazon and see if your cookies change. My guess is that they will change. Which is not quite fair.

I am going to go through my trash and see if any of the ones i deleted are there.
I am an amazon affiliate(trying) and i will check.But,more than likely i will bet my id ain't in there.

Just another way for the big boys on top of the ladder to make sure they have a house and food to eat.

Has anyone been able to tell if these emails override associate's cookies? I've been looking at the cookies that get set but I can't even tell which holds the pertinent information. Does anyone know exactly how the Amazon cookies work?

The best I can tell is that it's not strictly stored in a cookie, but Amazon itself holds the associate's ID in the session and matches it to the session cookie on the user's computer. I don't know if that's right or not, but I don't see any other possibility. At least, I see that the session cookie persists even if you click through with a different affiliated link. Everyone talks about a 24-hour cookie, but there is no actual 24-hour cookie that is set when you click through an affiliate-tagged link.

I'm under the assumption that these override an associates cookie, but I guess it's possible that they don't which would actually be a huge benefit for people promoting Amazon. I doubt Amazon would do that though; why would they? It's just lost money for them.

Does anyone have any idea? I'm not even sure if it's possible to tell exactly how Amazon's cookies work without testing it by actually buying things. Maybe it isn't even a 24-hour cookie.

Amazon will do everything it can to save up on commissions. This must be really frustrating for affiliates, but at the end of the day, they are well within their right to do this imo

I never said they were "stealing" affiliate commissions, but if the emails they send DO overwrite affiliate cookies, they are technically taking away potential commissions. Of course what they're doing is smart marketing for them, but that's beside the point.

I'm more interested in discussing how this affects affiliates. If the links don't overwrite the cookies then this is actually a big benefit to affiliates, but I doubt Amazon would do that. I doubt they're going to give affiliates money out of the goodness of their hearts.

What makes you think it overwrites affiliate cookies?

This is what you're missing. Let's take an imaginary scenario that could very plausibly happen, and I will show why Amazon's new campaign is not separate from an affiliate's campaign in the specific way I am talking about.

Scenario: Customer wants to buy a large LCD television.

1. Customer reaches your website where you promote several types of TVs.
2. Customer sees a TV he likes, clicks through your affiliate link, but it's rather expensive so he puts off buying it for now and goes to sleep. He decides to look at it again tomorrow, and if he buys it, you will get full commission due to the 24-hour cookie.
3. Amazon notices that he was on their site and looking at a particular LCD TV, then sends him a personalized email about this item and others like it with links to where they can purchase it.
4. Customer sees the email, clicks through and then purchases the TV. You get no commission since the email circumvented the cookie that was placed when Customer clicked through your site in #2.

This whole chain of events would not have happened at all without the customer first being driven to Amazon through the affiliate's marketing efforts, so no you cannot say that the campaign is separate from the affiliate's campaign. The affiliate's campaign is vital to this happening at all. That is why it's bothersome.

I know this can happen because it happens to me. I get daily emails from Amazon highlighting items I promote myself, probably because I spent so much time looking at them on the website.

It would be like working for a used car lot, and almost talking a customer into buying a car but they decide to sleep on it. Then your boss takes the potential customer's info, calls him at his house, and seals the deal without giving you any credit for it even though you did 95% of the work.

Now, this is all assuming that the daily emails DO in fact overwrite the affiliate cookie. If not, then this is a nice bonus for affiliates and this whole scenario is a moot point.

I honestly can't tell by looking at the URLs in emails whether or not they override the affiliate cookies. They are huge encoded URLs that are difficult to make heads or tails of, especially when it's not quite clear exactly how Amazon tracks affiliate sales.

I have good news and bad news.
Amazon has legal and ethical right to email anyone that signed up on their site, regardless of how they got that customer.

What you should be doing is emailing your customers yourself.
If you are not doing this, you are losing out.

Now the good news.

This is not official research.
I checked the cookies set my amazon.
They set the cookie on Amazon.com and the cookie name is __UTMV.
Your cookie looks something like this ########.youraffiliateid-20

When I clicked on one of their email---
The original cookie was NOT removed.


So, as far as I can tell, your commissions are safe.
Amazon is not stealing your commissions.

I appreciate you trying to figure it out, but the __UTMV cookie appears to actually be your primary affiliate tag, not a cookie indicating that you've clicked through an affiliate's link.

I keep getting Amazon local Ads.. They are Annoying..