Online customers are complaining right and left to the gadget blogs about a series of Amazon.com ads seemingly touting the arrival of the iPhone 5 at Amazon.com’s website.
It’s not clear if the ads are still running, but you can type in “iPhone 5” into any search engine and see if a Google AdWords advertisement still pops up proclaiming that the iPhone 5 can be found at Amazon.com. If it does, and you click on it, you will be lead to an Amazon search page that merely offers several iPhone-related accessories that some of which have the word “five” in their descriptions.
Since this has nothing to do with the much anticipated iPhone 5, Amazon is being accused of a Bait and Switch type of advertising. However, a closer inspection of the bogus ads may show that the whole thing is not Amazon’s fault at all.
Why, in fact, would a retailer with billions of dollars of inventory risk making angry all of its customers just to get them to buy a few inexpensive accessories? It’s pretty clear that they wouldn’t do such a thing at all.
It turns out that Amazon has nothing to do with the ads. Yes, they go to Amazon.com, and even show Amazon in their destination URL. But, anyone can take out a Google Adwords account and link it to Amazon.
However, why would someone do this sort of thing? There could be many reasons, but the most likely one is an age old one – for money.
Once the ads were carefully inspected, it appears that they are part of an Amazon Associates URL. Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate program, which lets users create Internet links to Amazon products, pages, or search results and rin return, they get a commission from any sales that result. And even though these links are normally used by partner marketers on their websites to link to Amazon from, such as, information about a new type of product, no one can prevent them from using the links however they wish.
The question is whether or not Amazon should allow their partners to cause their customers to go on such as wild goose chase as these ads suggested. Amazon has yet to comment on the ads and has not yet officially said if it was them or one of their partners that created the iPhone 5 ads.
