The Definitive Guide to the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement
Getting kicked out of the Amazon Associates programme is the single biggest risk for any affiliate marketer. One violation, and Amazon can close your account, void your pending commissions, and leave you to start from scratch. The rules are not hidden. Amazon publishes them. But the Operating Agreement is a long legal document and the “Top Dos and Don’ts” summary is buried in Creator University.
This is the plain-English version. Every rule that matters, translated into what it actually means for your store, plus a handful of gotchas Amazon does not bother to highlight. Read it once. Bookmark it. Run through the checklist at the end every few months.
Quick note before we dig in: this is not legal advice. The Operating Agreement is the source of truth, Amazon updates it without much warning, and you are responsible for reading it yourself. What follows is the practical working knowledge of the rules that trip people up most.
Why the Operating Agreement matters
The Operating Agreement is the contract between you and Amazon from the moment you join the programme. Three things flow from it:
- Your account status. Amazon can close your account at any time for violations. There is usually no meaningful appeal.
- Your commissions. Pending commissions can be voided if the account is closed for a violation. Money you thought was yours stops being yours.
- Your future access. Amazon links accounts by name, address, payment details, and site ownership. A closed account makes it harder to open new ones legitimately.
The good news: most people who get banned do so for the same handful of avoidable mistakes. Here they are.
Disclosures: tell people you are an affiliate
Do: tell your audience every time you share an affiliate link.
Don’t: bury the disclosure.
Every Amazon affiliate link needs a clear disclosure nearby. The standard line is “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases,” or a short tag like #ad or #commissionsearned in a spot readers actually see.
What “actually see” looks like:
- Above the fold on a blog post. Not in a footer, not after a 500-word intro.
- In the caption of a social post, early enough that it is visible without tapping “more.”
- On every page of your store that contains affiliate links. The homepage is not enough.
Tiny grey text, click-to-expand blocks, and missing disclosures are all violations. This is the single easiest rule to comply with and also one of the most common reasons small accounts get closed.
FreshStore stores ship with site-wide disclosure turned on by default. If you have edited the footer or a theme file and accidentally removed it, put it back.
Tracking IDs: every link, every time
Do: include a Tracking ID in every Amazon affiliate link.
Don’t: reuse old Tracking IDs if you have been rejected and are reapplying.
A Tracking ID tells Amazon which of your sites a click came from. You can create multiple IDs to split traffic by site, channel, or campaign, and Amazon reports earnings separately for each.
Two rules to internalise:
- Every link needs one. A bare Amazon URL with no Tracking ID is not an affiliate link. You earn nothing on those clicks and Amazon’s systems may flag a pattern of bare links as suspicious.
- Reapplying after a rejection? New IDs. If your account was closed and you are coming back in, generate fresh Tracking IDs and swap them onto your sites. Using the old ones is treated as circumventing the ban.
FreshStore inserts your Tracking ID into every link automatically. You enter it once. Running multiple stores? Create a Tracking ID per store in Creator Central and paste each into the relevant store so you can see which one actually earns.
Customer reviews: honest, or not at all
Do: leave reviews that reflect what you actually think.
Don’t: accept anything in exchange for a review.
This is about you as a customer, not about how you use reviews on your store. If you buy something and want to leave a review on the Amazon product page, go ahead. Just make sure it is genuine. Taking money, free products, discounts, gift cards, or refunds in exchange for a review breaks both the Associates agreement and the Amazon Community Guidelines. Your buyer account is also at risk.
Embedding reviews on your own site is covered later under the API section. Short version: you pull them through the API, you never copy-paste from a product page.
Amazon trademarks: use them, don’t claim them
Do: use Amazon’s logos and product imagery to promote products on Amazon.
Don’t: put the word Amazon in your identity.
This one trips up enormous numbers of affiliates at the domain-buying stage. “Amazon,” any variant, and any deliberate misspelling cannot appear in:
- Your domain name
- Your subdomain name
- Your Affiliate ID
- Your username, group name, or handle on any social platform
JensAmazonFinds.com, AmazonDealsDaily.com, @AmazonReviewQueen. All violations. Amazon’s compliance team scans for this and closes accounts on sight.
What is fine is using Amazon’s logos, product images, and brand name inside your content to talk about Amazon products, as long as those products are linked through your affiliate links.
If you already own a domain with “amazon” in it: change it. The risk is not hypothetical.
Sites and social channels: declare them all
Do: list every site, social channel, and app you use to drive traffic.
Don’t: list bare platform names.
If your Amazon affiliate links appear somewhere, Amazon needs to know. Log into Creator Central, open your account settings, and add every site, social profile, and app that carries your links.
For social, it has to be the full profile URL, not just the platform. www.instagram.com/YourHandle is correct. www.instagram.com is a reason for account closure. Amazon has said so explicitly.
Every time you launch a new marketing channel for a store, update Creator Central the same day.
Commissions: no self-dealing
Do: earn from customers outside your own circle.
Don’t: expect commission on your own purchases, or your family’s.
Amazon pays affiliate commission for one reason: new customers. Your own purchases and those of your friends and family are not new customers. They are self-dealing and Amazon is very good at spotting them.
The rule covers:
- Your own purchases through your own links
- Purchases by friends and family through your links
- Anything bought for resale or commercial use
- Bulk purchases that look like inventory buying
Amazon also asks you not to use their APIs to track prices or set your own price alerts, even though the data is right there. It is tempting and it is against the rules.
This is one of the most common reasons accounts get closed. Amazon matches addresses, payment details, and account signals, and a small cluster of accounts all buying through the same Tracking ID is not subtle.
Offline linking: only to people who opted in
Do: share links on sites and accounts you own.
Don’t: push links at people who did not ask for them.
Fair game:
- Your own websites and stores
- Your own mobile apps
- Your own public social accounts
- Newsletters with an opted-in list
- Group chats where members joined voluntarily
- Direct messages to people who asked for the link
Against the rules:
- Printed material (flyers, cards, magazines)
- Phone calls
- Word of mouth in person
- Cold DMs to strangers
- Mass SMS or messenger broadcasts
The principle is consent. Whoever clicks your link should have come to your content voluntarily.
Public websites: no gates
Do: keep your sites, groups, and channels public.
Don’t: password-protect them or gate them behind “followers only.”
For Amazon to verify your traffic is legitimate, the content needs to be viewable by people who are not already following you. That rules out:
- Password-protected pages containing affiliate links
- Private Facebook groups where your Amazon posts live
- “Members only” sections with the affiliate content inside
Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok are all approved channels, as long as your account and the specific posts are public.
FreshStore stores are public by default. If you have a coming-soon page, a maintenance mode, or a login wall in front of your store, Amazon is seeing nothing.
Replicas and designer imitations: watch the language
Do: say “inspired by” or “shop the look.”
Don’t: say “dupe,” “knock-off,” or “look-alike.”
Promoting affordable alternatives to expensive brands is fine. Amazon actively encourages it. What you cannot do is frame the alternative as a fake version of a specific brand. The wording is what matters.
Safe:
- “Shop the look”
- “Inspired by [style]”
- “Looks for less”
- “Similar to [style], at a fraction of the price”
Banned:
- “BRAND dupe”
- “Faux BRAND”
- “Knock-off BRAND”
- “BRAND look-alike”
Amazon’s own example is telling: you can describe a product as a “faux snakeskin bag” (a material claim) but you cannot call it a “fake BRAND purse” (a brand claim). Promoting products that display another brand’s trademark incorrectly is also off-limits.
Music: skip it
Do: use voice-overs.
Don’t: use copyrighted music.
This one surprises people. Amazon does not want copyrighted music in your content, period. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube licensing does not carry over to Amazon. Their licenses are for platform playback, not for content being used commercially to drive traffic to Amazon.
If your content needs a soundtrack, use royalty-free or Creative Commons tracks. Or default to voice-over. It forces you to actually say why you recommend a product, which is exactly the sort of content Amazon wants its creators making.
Content: original, legal, yours
Do: publish your own content, your own opinion, your own research.
Don’t: publish anything that is not yours.
You are responsible for every piece of content on your site. That means:
- Text: not copy-pasted from Amazon, not scraped, not raw AI output passed off as original research
- Product images: pulled through the API, never saved from Amazon product pages by hand
- Customer reviews: API only, never copy-pasted
- Video and audio: yours, licensed, or public domain
Your content also cannot contain hate speech, be false or defamatory, encourage illegal behaviour, or include graphic content. Amazon’s rules overlap with general laws on defamation, IP, and consumer protection. Treat this as a floor, not a ceiling.
Traffic to Amazon: organic only
Do: drive organic traffic through your content.
Don’t: send people straight from a paid ad to Amazon.
Two parts to this:
- Customers should arrive at Amazon via your site, where they have already seen your content. Ads that redirect straight to Amazon are a violation.
- Your affiliate links must be non-indexed and non-cacheable. Search engines should not be able to crawl the raw Amazon URLs on your pages.
You also cannot send people via spyware, malware, browser extensions, or plugins. And you cannot use affiliate links that belong to someone else.
FreshStore handles the non-indexed, non-cacheable requirement automatically. Unless you have overridden it with a custom theme or plugin, you are already compliant.
Linking to Amazon: deep-link, don’t dump
Do: link to specific product pages.
Don’t: drop people on the Amazon homepage.
Every link should take the customer to a specific Amazon product you have reviewed, researched, or curated. Linking to the homepage is a violation. Linking to the wrong product is a violation. The logic is customer experience: people clicked because of your content, they should land on the thing you were talking about.
Other linking rules:
- No affiliate links in pop-ups or pop-unders
- No affiliate links in transitional or layer ads on mobile
- Links must be on sites you own
- No posting your links on Amazon itself (reviews, Q&As, customer areas)
- No collecting, storing, or tracking personal data alongside Amazon activity (order IDs, names, addresses)
FreshStore deep-links to a specific product page for every product on your store. You never need to link to amazon.com/gp/homepage. If a product gets pulled or an ASIN goes bad, the admin flags it so you can swap or remove.
Bidding on Amazon keywords: don’t
Do: use paid search to drive traffic to your own content.
Don’t: buy ads that target Amazon’s brand terms.
You can buy search ads that send traffic to your site. You cannot buy ads that target Amazon’s own brand terms as keywords.
Off-limits as keywords:
- “Amazon”
- “Kindle”
- Any other Amazon trademark
- Variations and misspellings (“Amzon,” “Amazn,” “Kindel”)
Any purchases that came via a campaign targeting those keywords are ineligible for commission, and the account can be closed. The principle: you can pay to promote your content, you cannot pay to intercept Amazon’s own brand traffic.
Product Advertising API: use it right, or skip it
Do: use the API (now the Creators API) to show product data on your site.
Don’t: misuse the data or share credentials.
PAAPI v5 is deprecated on April 30, 2026 and shut off on May 15, 2026. The replacement is the Amazon Creators API. If you have anything directly calling PAAPI, you are migrating this month. We covered the whole transition in the Creators API migration guide.
The usage rules stay the same:
- Use the data to show product details, prices, availability, and reviews on your site
- Do not use it to drive traffic from third-party shopping engines (Google Product Search, Bing Shopping)
- Do not share your credentials
- Do not use the data to run price-tracking or price-alert tools for non-affiliate purposes
Amazon now requires 10 qualifying sales in the previous 30 days before they will issue Creators API credentials, up from the old three-sale threshold you still see on some pages.
If you are on FreshStore, you do not need your own credentials at all. FreshStore handles the Amazon integration for every store, so the 10-sales threshold does not apply and a brand-new store can pull live product data from day one. If you want to add your own credentials on top for higher rate limits, that is covered in Add Your Own Amazon Creators API Credentials.
Shoppable content: make it yours
Do: keep it 100% original.
Don’t: reuse images or media from other creators or from Amazon product pages.
This mostly applies to Amazon Influencer Programme members, but the principle is broader: your content should reflect your own voice and work.
- Content that is too similar to another creator’s uploads will be rejected
- Uploads identical to your own previous Shoppable posts will be rejected
- Media pulled from other creators is not allowed
- Media pulled from Amazon product pages is not allowed
- If you repurpose someone else’s content, transform it significantly
Gotchas Amazon does not put on the dos-and-don’ts page
The rules above are Amazon’s own headline list. Here is the second tier: things that catch people out but do not get their own big banner on Creator University.
The 24-hour cookies
Amazon’s affiliate cookie is 24 hours with an exception: if the customer adds an item to their basket within the 24 hours, you earn commission when that specific basket is checked out, as long as the checkout happens within 89 days.
Plan your content around this. Call-to-buy content, seasonal gift guides, and time-boxed offers convert better than general lifestyle content that might send people back later.
Commission rates vary by category, and they change
Commission is not a flat percentage. Amazon sets different rates for different categories, and the rates change without much warning. As of now, the range is roughly:
- Luxury Beauty, Luxury Stores: 10%
- Amazon Games, Handmade, Digital Music: up to 20%
- Furniture, Home, Garden, Pets: 3%
- PC Components, DVDs, Groceries: 1% to 2%
- Gift cards, wireless service plans: 0%
This is why a store centred on a category that earns 1% can feel like a grind, and one centred on a 10% niche can feel like magic. Pick categories with an eye on the current commission schedule, not just search volume.
Link cloaking: allowed, but only if you do it right
Amazon’s rules around link shorteners and cloaking are commonly misread as “banned.” They are not. What is banned is cloaking that hides the fact the link is an affiliate link, or that strips out the Tracking ID.
Fine:
- Using
amzn.to, Amazon’s official shortener - Using a redirect on your own domain (
yoursite.com/go/product) that 302s to the full Amazon affiliate URL with the Tracking ID intact
Not fine:
- Any cloaking that strips the Tracking ID on the way to Amazon
- Generic shorteners that hide the destination so completely that users cannot tell they are heading to Amazon (some bit.ly setups have been flagged)
- Link injection via browser extensions that add your Tracking ID to other people’s clicks (this is the Honey-type trick that gets accounts permanently banned)
Screenshots and copy-pasted product descriptions are ban triggers
Amazon actively scans affiliate sites for copied content. Product images saved from Amazon product pages, product descriptions pasted into blog posts, and screenshots of Amazon listings are all red flags.
The rule is: if you want to display Amazon’s product images or content, pull them through the API. The API is doing two things for you: it is keeping your content current, and it is proving to Amazon that your site is legitimate. Copy-pasting bypasses both.
Sudden traffic spikes can trigger a review
Big traffic surges with no obvious source can get flagged for review even if nothing is wrong. It is rare, but if you have just been featured somewhere (Reddit front page, a viral TikTok, a big YouTuber mention) and your numbers 10x overnight, Amazon may pause commissions while they verify the traffic.
The best way to handle this is to proactively update Creator Central with the new traffic source (add the social post or Reddit URL to your sites list) and make sure your disclosures are watertight before the wave hits.
A compliance checklist for your FreshStore store
Run through this once a quarter. Any “no” answer is a fix before you drive more traffic.
- Is your affiliate disclosure visible on every page?
- Does every Amazon link on your site include your Tracking ID?
- Are all your sites and social channels listed in Creator Central with full profile URLs?
- Is your domain free of the word “Amazon” or any variation?
- Is your site fully public, no password gates or members-only content?
- When you promote affordable alternatives, do you use “inspired by” or “shop the look” language?
- Are you staying off copyrighted music in video content?
- Is every piece of content on your site original, yours, or properly licensed?
- Are your affiliate links non-indexed and non-cacheable?
- Do all your links deep-link to specific products, never the Amazon homepage?
- Are you avoiding paid search that bids on Amazon brand keywords?
- If you use the API directly, have you migrated from PAAPI to the Creators API?
- Have you opened other country Amazoin accounts if you get non-US traffic?
- If your account is new, have you logged your first three sales before day 180?
FreshStore handles items 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 12, and 13 for you. The rest are on you.
Final word
The Operating Agreement is long, and Amazon updates it quietly. The rules in this guide are the ones that catch people out most often. The underlying principle is simple: Amazon wants affiliates who bring new customers, act transparently, produce original content, and use the Amazon brand with respect. Do those things and you will not have to worry about being banned.
Bookmark this post. Run the checklist every few months. When the Agreement changes, we will update this guide.
Further reading:
- Amazon Associates Programme Operating Agreement (the source of truth)
- Amazon Creator University (dos and don’ts summary)
- Amazon Creators API 2026: PA-API Migration Guide
- Add Your Own Amazon Creators API Credentials