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General - North Carolina Assoc Program Closed

From:	James Barrett	6/26/2009 8:53 am
To:	ALL	(1 of 37)

27694.1

I recieved this in my email this morning and am furious with Amazon which I will explain below:

"We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation�s effective date. "

This is absurd! No Legislation has passed and been signed nor does it appear it will. The House and Senate do not agree and do not have a purposely on the table that I am aware of. If Amazon is in possession of some news of where this stands that the citizens of North Carolina don�t know about then Amazon should present that information and not some blanket, your fired, notice. The lack of notice on this so associates could take action shows me Amazon has no respect for those sites it has been getting low cost referrals from.

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From:	Gary	6/26/2009 9:18 am
To:	James Barrett	(2 of 37)

27694.2 in reply to 27694.1

Personally... I don't blame amazon a bit. I have watched NC change dramatically in the 10 years I've lived here and frankly am sick and tired of all of the new taxation.
This is the reason I left NY and moved here to begin with!
I will be looking at Texas now and will start by creating an LLC partnership with my sister who lives in Houston to get things started and move there in short time.
Good bye North Carolina!

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From:	James Barrett	6/26/2009 9:49 am
To:	Gary	(3 of 37)

27694.3 in reply to 27694.2

All fine and good and hopefully the Tax and Spend Democrats will lose this state however that does not dismiss that first off the tax change has not been approved and Amazon did this with no notice!

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From:	Gary	6/26/2009 10:16 am
To:	James Barrett unread	(4 of 37)

27694.4 in reply to 27694.3

We may be the pawn to things to come here. I for one minute would never believe this is a good thing for amazon and they are simply dismissing NC affiliates without thought.

I'm sure they are equally upset.

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Message 5 of 37 was Deleted

From:	SaWAssociate	6/26/2009 10:51 am
To:	Pam Tee	(6 of 37)

27694.6 in reply to 27694.5

Doesn't that mean they will have to collect sales tax on NC residents anyway? I feel like they are screwing over NC affiliates for unrelated reasons, probably has something to do with California.

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From:	Lisa Harkema	6/26/2009 11:17 am
To:	Pam Tee	(7 of 37)

27694.7 in reply to 27694.5

You're thinking of Apple. But they got a big tax break for it!

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From:	sforce	6/26/2009 11:40 am
To:	SaWAssociate	(8 of 37)

27694.8 in reply to 27694.6

I believe you are correct in that North Carolina is getting thrown under the bus, in Amazon's attempt to salvage California and the larger states. I think Hawaii Associates also received the same letter today.

Pretty much sucks for Amazon to throw the smaller states into the volcano, as they have.

Edited 6/26/2009 11:40 am ET by sforce

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From:	JazzFusionGuy	6/26/2009 12:26 pm
To:	James Barrett unread	(9 of 37)

27694.9 in reply to 27694.1

I have one small suggestion for folks here, (like me living in NC), and it is this. Since Amazon is obviously using the NC pre-legislation action, knee-jerk, shut-down as a type of bargaining chip for fighting state legislation elsewhere -- there ARE options.

I am a 10+ year affiliate with Amazon who devoured CDNOW.com long ago.

If you can demonstrate with multi-year records, your average earnings from affiliate earnings, then find an out-of-state friend with a website. Have them set up their website with Amazon links and set themselves up as a new Amazon affiliate.

If this is a friend you trust, then take their new affiliate code and do a site-wide search and replace all of your NC-now-dead code with your friend's new code. Your web site will then STILL earn money for you. Then your non-NC-based friend can send you the money Amazon pays them.

Simple, once you set-up the end-run with a friend or relative.

This is EXACTLY how the internet can be used to defeat mindless rules of the greed-driven corporate slugs in the real world.

Edited 6/26/2009 12:27 pm ET by JazzFusionGuy