Alternatives to Amazon From an Affiliate's Perspective

you may have already heard about the tax that your state legislature put in place to help add revenue to the state budget.

In fact Amazon has probably dropped you from the program and severed the affiliate relationship you had with them. If you were looking to apply to the Amazon Associates affiliate program, most likely they will not want to do business with you.

See, previously states could only collect sales tax in the case that a business has a physical presence in the state, meaning there was a retail store, office, warehouse and/or production facility located within the state borders. In legal circles, this is referred to as having a "nexus" or sales presence. Now states are trying expand the definition of nexus by assuming that affiliates comprise an extension of a companies' sales forces. This way the states can collect sales tax on sales associated with in-state associates.

In response to these laws hundreds of companies have severed relationships with its affiliates to avoid the cost associated with collecting sales tax. Amazon just happens to be a large name and therefore one of the main faces of the movement.

What is an affiliate cookie and why should I care, you say? It is how a website like Amazon knows to pay you when someone buys something after clicking on your affiliate links. The thing is that not everyone buys something right away. It may be the next day, later on in the week, or maybe a whole month afterwards.

In Amazon's case, if someone is shopping online on their lunch break and they find your lens, article, or post on shiny triangular purple widgets and click through, you better pray they buy right then and there. Or maybe when they get home that night after talking with Momma or Poppa Bear, because by tomorrow at lunch time it will be too late. You see, you only have 24 hours to close that sale because the "cookie" stored in the shopper's internet browser when they click on your link expires 24 hours later.

This is actually pretty uncommon among affiliate programs; most provide longer lasting cookies. You will find anything from 7 days to 365 days depending on what the merchant chooses. The most common cookie durations are in the 30 - 90 days range.

So if you think about that, you will realize that if you replace your Amazon link with one from another merchant you have a better chance of receiving a commission when your visitor decides to return to the merchants site the next evening or over the weekend for instance.

As of February 2nd, 2012 Amazon changed the terms of the Amazon Associate cookie to the following:

"A "Session" begins when a customer clicks through a Special Link on your site to the Amazon Site and ends upon the first to occur of the following: (x) 24 hours (except in the case of Special Links to the myhabit.com site, in which case 30 days) elapses from that click; (y) the customer places an order for a Product that is not a Digital Product; or (z) the customer follows a link to the Amazon Site that is not your Special Link."

What this means for affiliates is that your cookie is no longer good for 24 hours in the case that a person who had clicked through your Amazon affiliate link then leaves Amazon.com and then follows another link (another affiliate or not) back to Amazon. Your 24 hour window or "session" as they call it has closed. This could be a click through directly from a search engine for instance.

One of the greatest advantages Amazon has over other merchants is the huge range of products that they carry. Affiliates can find pretty much any product to match the content and situation.

To compete with that you would need to combine the products available from hundreds of other merchants. Think about all the work you would need to do to accomplish that.

Actually there is a way to be able access all those merchants and products all at the same place. A company named Prosperent is in the business of doing just that. When you sign up as an affiliate with them, you will have access to the entire product lines of several thousand merchants all at once. The catalog of products available exceeds 50 million. Try beating that magnitude of products available for you to promote as an affiliate.

It is not only affiliates in Amazon tax states that have been kicked out of the Amazon Associates program or affiliates who are tired of Amazon's 24 hour cookies that are joining Prosperent. Anybody can join their affiliate network and take advantage of the robust and easy to use tools that they provide to affiliates to make your job easier. Join today and find out how they can help you make even more money online as an affiliate marketing professional.

Whether you already own a forum or would like to launch one, you probably will wonder how to monetize the traffic to your forum and from members. One option is making money with advertising using an ad manager. Another option you may want to consider is using the Prosperent product search plugin which will allow your visitors and members to search for niche products directly from your forum.