www.assoc-amazon.com is slow or timing out

Last two days the www.assoc-amazon.com website has been very slow. If you are wondering what this website is and why I am writing about it, read on.

There are many Amazon affiliates that are putting a lot of effort in promoting Amazon’s product and the more effort the more they are rewarded assuming that effort translates into referring more customers who place orders on Amazon.

Amazon has many affiliate widgets and some of them are served off of www.assoc-amazon.com . For some technical reasons, because of the way these widgets are made available by Amazon, it’s not possible to load the widgets after the main page is loaded. As a result, if the above amazon affiliate web server is slow or down, the pages which include these widgets will become very slow giving the visitors of the affiliate websites a bad perception about the visiting site (and not amazon.com itself). Further, since many people want to optimize their revenue opportunity, they place the affiliate scripts prominently at the top half of the website (above the fold) and as a result, the content below the widget script won’t get loaded for a while.

Now, Amazon probably doesn’t care so much about losing a few extra orders a day that are generated through affiliates. But, for many affiliates, this is pretty much the means of making revenue out of their websites. So, everytime there is such a hiccup in the amazon’s affiliate website, it hurts the affiliates.

What’s annoying is that the Amazon affiliate program has forums and they seldom mention about their server problems or give an ETA. So, instead of trying to bring it to their attention and be unheard, I wanted to take it the web route. To talk about it in my little blog. And discuss this not so that the guys operating the Amazon Affiliate program would read it, but because hopefully it may get to the attention of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is among the few companies that are in the forefront of defining the future technologies. I have a great respect for Amazon not due to my affiliation with Amazon as an affiliate, but as a developer who understands what they are doing with Amazon Web Services with offerings such as Amazon Simple Store, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon SimpleDB and so on.

If they want the public to build their web sites, SAAS enterprise applications using their web services, and expect that there is a 99.99% service level, how can people believe in that when their own internal affiliate offerings are not as reliable?

So, Jeff Bezos, please remember many people like me are not just a bunch of amazon affiliates trying to make a few extra bucks a month, but also care and understand the technology aspect and are in a position to recommend the technologies for other startups and potentially consider using it in our own startups. Please try to spend some extra money to revamp your 10yr old affiliate program with more modernized technologies.