It wasn't just Amazon, but also sites owned by Amazon, including Audible. Amazon and Audible were my two sources of revenue for my site thestartupdaily.com
Yesterday both accounts were closed with no advanced notice and my business model is effectively broken. While I support Amazon for taking a stand, I'm angry at Amazon for not giving some sort of warning to affiliates. It also seems like they wasted a good opportunity to get people who are most passionate about the issue to make some noise for them. The could have sent emails to affiliates as the issue was unfolding, and instead of the short and rather unfriendly letter to affiliates saying "your contract has been terminated". They should have used that notice to give people more information and phone numbers and other contact details about who is behind this.
Seems to me like big chain stores buying protectionist legislation and selling it to voters as "protecting small business", while in reality they are protecting yesterday's dinosaurs and screwing forward thinking Internet based businesses.
You've had years of notice. Amazon did exactly the same thing with Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii, North Carolina... Amazon has publicly said it would do the same thing in Connecticut for months.
Of course I knew it was a possibility, but my point is that "saying publicly" in press releases or court rooms is a lot different from having a conversation with your customers or partners.
Telling people that the affiliate program will be closed to them in 30 days would have been a lot nicer than telling people that their income stops effective immediately.
Then they'd have to collect sales tax from Connecticut customers for 30 days. They'd piss off a lot more people than their affiliates, including their customers for suddenly collecting taxes they didn't used to collect, to their shareholders for creating mass customer confusion just to be nice to affiliates.
Couldn't they simply tell their affiliates they were considering terminating the program as early as possible? I have to believe they were aware of the situation, and monitoring patiently as it unfolded. For example, I knew it was imminent in Colorado. yet I've never collected a penny in affiliate revenue. It was debated quite a bit before it passed.
Edit: I guess what I'm asking is: am I missing something, or is there some reason why the affiliates couldn't have been alerted to the possibility earlier? Or, does alerting them at all require Amazon to pay sales tax?
I can't disagree that sending out an e-mail would've been nice, though it'd also not be good to stir up all the affiliates when it wasn't yet known if the bill would be made law. That aside, anyone who made a significant portion of their income as an affiliate should've been aware of the impending bill for months and have been watching whether it would pass at the same time Amazon was watching it. It's not an Amazon bill, it affects every affiliate in the state for all companies... Overstock is another big company that severed its affiliate relationships with everyone in the state when the bill passed.
Yesterday both accounts were closed with no advanced notice and my business model is effectively broken. While I support Amazon for taking a stand, I'm angry at Amazon for not giving some sort of warning to affiliates. It also seems like they wasted a good opportunity to get people who are most passionate about the issue to make some noise for them. The could have sent emails to affiliates as the issue was unfolding, and instead of the short and rather unfriendly letter to affiliates saying "your contract has been terminated". They should have used that notice to give people more information and phone numbers and other contact details about who is behind this.
Seems to me like big chain stores buying protectionist legislation and selling it to voters as "protecting small business", while in reality they are protecting yesterday's dinosaurs and screwing forward thinking Internet based businesses.