I was just notified that my Associates' agreement with Amazon, which allows me to advertise my books on this site will be terminated August 27. Not that I made much money off it anyway, but a few extra cents in addition to my royalties was always nice.
Amazon sent me the following notice:
We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account will be closed and your Amazon Services LLC Associates Program Operating Agreement will be terminated effective August 27, 2013. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional Missouri state tax collection legislation passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Nixon on July 5, 2013, with an effective date of August 28, 2013. As a result, we will no longer pay any advertising fees for customers referred to an Amazon Site after August 27 nor will we accept new applications for the Associates Program from Missouri residents.
Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to August 28, 2013 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with your regular advertising fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of August 27, 2013, any final payments will be paid by October 31, 2013.
While we oppose this unconstitutional state legislation, we strongly support the federal Marketplace Fairness Act now pending before Congress. Congressional legislation is the only way to create a simplified, constitutional framework to resolve interstate sales tax issues and it would allow us to re-open our Associates program to Missouri residents.
We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates Program, and look forward to re-opening our program when Congress passes the Marketplace Fairness Act.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Team
This sucks, Randy--I just got a similar notice. I imagine sending a letter to Lacy Clay about the federal bill would do incrementally more good than sending a vitriolic note to Nixon and my state legislator; that all said, this really makes me question the extent to which we have any kind of a voice in our current system.
ReplyDeleteI received the same notice and wrote a similar blog here: http://conversioncoach.org/amazon-tax-missouri/
ReplyDeleteIt's unfortunate for authors for sur. I hope this doesn't have a domino effect for smaller affiliate operations. if so, we could see a lot of independant, local blogs go under.
What do you think?
I received a similar email yesterday. Very unfortunate. Amazon had been the biggest part of my website's income.
ReplyDeleteBefore the tornado I lived east/behind the Range Line Wal-Mart, conceivably although probably not in the special sales tax district that's somewhere around it.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm "living in my parents' basement" (not really, but with my father in part to take care of him), on a piece of land sandwiched between Joplin and Duquesne, with a bit of the land within the boundaries of the latter, but not the building in which we live. It's subject to the taxing power of Jasper county on up, and the Joplin R-VIII school and the Duenweg fire districts, but no city's.
If I wanted to sell vegetables from this location, it wouldn't be very difficult to ask the local authorities and find out how much sales tax to charge and who to give it to. Even a company as big as Amazon would find this extraordinarily difficult for the entire nation, and since there's almost certainly criminal liability associated with getting it wrong (if not here, in many other places), it's an impossible problem.