Amazon has a 24-hour cookie. So you get paid even if someone clicks on your link and buys something else later in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if this accounted for a huge majority of their affiliate payouts. Cases where someone buys a product directly from Amazon after reading a review are a minority, imo.
I can remember talking with the Amazon Affiliate people in a conference call 10 years ago. They have been leaders in this game a long time, and I can believe they have tightened their security on fraud as tight as it can go.
Amazon is not that big of a program actually. They have compelling data offerings, but the 24-hour cookie is a liability and there are far fewer driving traffic since Google went to town on spammy sites.
Yeah. At one point I was seeing pop-up ads on some sites that were simply random searches on Amazon - I assume they were trying to take advantage of Amazon's affiliate scheme.
My wife represented someone busted for being an Amazon cookie stuffer.
He was essentially a script kiddie who paid for the script. He wasn't as successful. I think Amazon devotes more resources to tracking this kind of fraud.
