Transfer Amazon Associates account or start a new one?

Hey Alex, I did some research on this and haven't found any straight-forward method to transfer an Amazon Affiliate account to someone else.

The site owner in theory could give you their existing Amazon Affiliate login information, but all the history would be tied to their personal (SSN) or business (EIN) entity, and personal or business bank account -- depending on how they had their Amazon Affiliate account setup.

However, if they're using the same login for their Amazon.com account (shopping, Prime, etc.), they may not want to hand over the entire account because you could see all their order history.

If the site you are buying is ok with giving you their Amazon Affiliate/Amazon login, that would likely be the easiest option. You'd just have to make sure you can go in and change all the Tax & Payment information.

Amazon Affiliates asks:

1. What is your tax classification? (Personal/Business)
2. For U.S. tax purposes, are you a U.S. person?

Then depending on answers to 1&2, it prompts you for the additional information needed.

If you can't get the seller to give you their existing Amazon account, you'll obviously need to create a new Amazon Affiliate Account.

The only downsides I see are:

1. The rate card on a new account may not be the same on an existing account
   and
2. You'd need to go through the entire site and change the Amazon Affiliate id on all the links inside the website.

#2 could be problematic if the site owner used any shortened links (i.e. amzn.to), because you couldn't simply have a developer go in and replace the 'tag=xxxx' value in the database with your new Amazon Affiliate id. Shortened links don't show the value/pair information.

I'm working on a piece of software that would automatically address #2, because I have a similar issue on one of my sites.