affiliates

Amazon.com said today that it's reluctantly severing ties with affiliates in California, a move that it hopes will let it continue shipping products to state residents without collecting sales taxes.

But a little-noticed clause in the legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed into law today gives California tax collectors a second, albeit legally untested, cudgel to use against the Seattle-based company. The law takes effect immediately.

The measure says that any retailer who "through a subsidiary" has any "place of business" in California must collect sales taxes. And--surprise!--Amazon has two subsidiaries … Read more

Amazon.com is threatening to cut ties with affiliates in any states that decide to collect sales tax, CEO Jeff Bezos said yesterday.

"We will continue to drop states who pass those affiliate laws, from the affiliate program," Bezos said at the ShopSmart Shopping Summit in New York, according to Reuters.

The company recently cut ties with affiliates in Illinois and has also done so in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Amazon is threatening to do likewise in California.

As on online company, Amazon itself isn't required to collect taxes in states where the company is … Read more

ShopSquad is a peer-to-peer home shopping network. The service connects people shopping for specific items with live, online experts who know the space. If the user then buys an item the expert is recommending, the expert makes affiliate money minus ShopSquad's cut. The service is general but currently appears to be geared toward new parents; there are more experts and products in the baby gear department than any other.

The judges at the Launch conference, where this product was introduced, believe ShopSquad is on to something, but that the demo here only hinted at the company's potential. First, ShopSquad is heavy into video advice, which is impressive to demo but overkill for shopping advice for many people. Second, the service only connects buyers to experts who are ShopSquad users. As the judges pointed out, if it could somehow find experts elsewhere and rope them into an advice session as needed, the available pool of products and experts to discuss them would be much bigger. Conceptually this means the people writing reviews on Amazon could find a new way to profit from that work. There is still the problem of shills for certain products. An expert rating system might help keep this under control.

Tech businesses pioneered the idea of crowd-sourcing customer support, with message boards and through start-ups like Get Satisfaction. Of course, many businesses have tried to use their fans to also sell products, but ShopSquad's capability to automate, institutionalize, and help consumers profit from their expertise is quite smart. … Read more

Microsoft says it's ending a business agreement with a publisher that had violated the company's affiliate guidelines by changing the default search tool in users' browsers to Bing under the guise of offering a separate service.

A report posted by Advertising Age (registration required) raised eyebrows yesterday when it pointed to a site called Make-my-baby.com as being the third largest advertiser on social networks, citing ComScore's third-quarter search report as the source.

The tool (now down), which facilitated a simulation of decorating a virtual baby, would require users to install a browser plug-in in order to … Read more

WinCatalog Light is a free disk cataloging tool that scans and catalogs your system's disks or files. You can use the listings it creates to quickly find specific files in your disk collection without having to insert a bunch of removable disks and search them one by one. It also extracts file descriptions and automatically fetches MP3 song names online. It can scan any storage device that Windows can access.

WinCatalog Light's interface is a slightly smaller version of the familiar Windows app style: File menu, icon-based toolbar, left-hand navigation panel, and main window. With a pretty good … Read more

Jeremy Bray received an e-mail message this morning with an unwelcome surprise: Amazon.com told him it had canceled its affiliate program, which provides small payments for referring customers, for everyone in the state of Colorado.

The reason? A state law, which Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week, slaps onerous new restrictions on large out-of-state sellers like Amazon, which said it has no choice but to end its marketing program in response.

Bray, a blogger who has lived in Pueblo, Colo., for more than 20 years, told CNET on Monday that he's now trying to "bring as … Read more

The dot-com era had eToys, Webvan, and Pets.com. The digital-entertainment boom has SpiralFrog.

The day SpiralFrog likely reserved a corner in the pantheon of the Web's most noteworthy busts came on July 14, 2008. At 2 a.m. that day, an agitated Amir Khan, an executive at hedge fund 3V Capital Management, SpiralFrog's main financial backer, e-mailed several fellow board members at the pioneering ad-supported music service.

Khan was frustrated by SpiralFrog's marketing efforts. In one case, the start-up spent $300,000 to host a video from pop singer Alicia Keys that managers claimed would draw … Read more

Aaron's WebVacuum promises to help users capture all of the pictures and other files they can handle from their favorite Web sites. This unique program could be a huge help to many, but runs the risk of being overly complicated.

The compact interface is densely packed with tabs, buttons, and check boxes, and may overwhelm novice users. Fortunately, a brief tutorial pops up to explain the program's purpose and how to get quickly started, which is very helpful. Like a browser, there's a field for the URL of the page you want to pull from. Below that … Read more

Girly blog company Sugar Inc. has announced a new affiliate marketing program for bloggers, based on ShopStyle, the social-shopping and product-search site that it acquired last year. It's called ShopSense.

Here's how it works: if style, culture, or shopping bloggers write about a given product that's in the ShopStyle directory, they can add a ShopStyle widget so that readers can actually buy the product or can use the ShopStyle API to further customize the app. The blogger gets a cut of the revenue.

Sugar started as a content company, with an inaugural celebrity gossip brand called PopSugar, … Read more