It will not good for your blog/site. There is a big chance to penalized by Google.

I use only amazon affiliate link in one of the affiliate marketing blog and lost almost 75% traffic after Penguin Update.

I don't recommend using that kind of Amazon plugin but I also don't think it can negatively impact your site as long as you write your own product descriptions. I've used it in the past and it worked great - no penalties.

I used one that imports a short snippet of product information and then put the customer testimonials in an iframe. I also write a full review with images added.

About a month ago got a manual pure spam notice for four sites. It could be a few things, one never knows with google. But all I have done is remove the iframe and Webmaster Tools, under search traffic - manual actions, it now says "No manual webspam actions found".

The site is slowly coming back with a couple products listed under several keywords.

So from that I think they are taking a heavier hand on some of the amazon plugins

As long as you have good content on the site, and it's not just full of content being pulling in by a plugin, then it shouldn't get penalized.

You people are beyond the twilight zone.

Why would google penalize that?!?!?!?!?!

Paul

No, Google doesn't penalize you for using amazon plugin ! I would say why they would there's not reason to get penalty because you simply use plugins from amazon like site ! If they would have then amazon itself will not be appearing over the SERPs.

Google won't penalize your site but your ranking will plummet when you use amazon astore sites.

You either have another site in that niche you can rank that sends traffic to the astore.

The plugins usually pull the same/exact product description and information making it a target for outright plagiarism. Just the same reasons why you can't rank an affiliate link and you have to create a new independent site using a unique article.