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Comment by stuffihavemade | Hacker News Reader

"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)."

How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?

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Yes, absolutely. At one point I made about $100 through amazon affiliates ( a link on Slashdot, actually, quite possibly the only time social media has made me money).

What happened was, I linked to a book on programming that was relevant, and being broke at the time, put it as an affiliate link.

Someone looked at the book, and went on to buy $2300 or so of camera gear. I got the 4% commission on the whole bundle. You get to see exactly what people purchased (though not, of course, individually, but "X of Y")

It's very interesting, if you've never worked with Amazon Affiliates, it's extremely rich data they provide.

Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.

Thanks for the information all.

Yeah, I've even seen pop-unders on shady sites whose entire purpose seems to be to set Amazon affiliate cookies in the hope of making money off unrelated Amazon purchases.

wow

That's standard behavior in most affiliate programs, not just Amazons. They just place a sitewide cookie (or less typically, a session variable) with the affiliate's ID in it, as you guessed. It's usually not tied to the purchase of any one particular item, which is what the quote is referring to.

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