[ovi256]

The purpose of the affiliate program is to bring in new purchases from customers who wouldn't have otherwise purchased. Not to be a rebate for purchases one would have done anyway.

This, btw, is the hardest problem in marketing.

[coldtea]

>Not to be a rebate for purchases one would have done anyway.

OTOH, disgruntled friends and family can also take their business elsewhere.

Not to mention Amazon tracking what your "friends and relatives" buy, not individually but as correlated back to you, is problematic in itself...

[_boffin_]

Attribution?

[jhugo]

Right, and it's the part that (on the Web) nobody wants to admit is pretty much based on magical thinking, because you only have a partial view into the actions the user took, meanwhile you're trying to infer their thoughts.