Your Amazon affiliate links are not tracking. Here is how to find out which of the nine causes it is.
Start with the question almost nobody asks first: is the tracking broken, or is Amazon simply no longer showing you the data? In 2026 the reporting changed, and a lot of “my links stopped working” is really “my reports stopped telling me”.
The short version
- Check the delay first. Amazon’s reports lag. Nothing measured in hours means anything.
- Then check the tag. A missing or wrong
tag=is the single most common cause, and the link still works perfectly for the buyer — which is why it goes unnoticed for months. - If you cloak your Amazon links, stop. Amazon prohibits obscuring the destination with third-party shorteners or redirect plugins. It breaks tracking and it risks the account.
- Clicks but no sales is usually not a bug. The 24-hour window explains most of it, and since April 2026 sales from paid or boosted ads do not count.
- Some of your data is simply gone. Amazon reduced reporting granularity in 2026. Missing ASIN-level detail is not a fault you can fix.
“My Amazon affiliate links are not tracking” describes at least four different problems with different fixes, and people routinely spend a weekend rebuilding links when the actual answer was that the report had not caught up yet.
Work through this in order. The checks are arranged cheapest-first, and the first two resolve the large majority of cases.
Start here — which problem do you actually have?
No clicks recorded at all
Cause 1 — the tracking tag is missing or wrong
By a distance the most common cause. A correct Amazon affiliate link carries your store ID:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N5WRWNW/?tag=yourstore-20
Without tag=, the link still opens the right product and the reader still buys. Nothing appears broken. You simply are not paid, and it can run for months before anyone notices.
Where the tag gets lost:
- Copied from the address bar rather than from SiteStripe. The most frequent mistake of all.
- Stripped by a plugin — some caching, security and “link cleaner” plugins remove query parameters they consider tracking junk.
- Wrong marketplace. A
-20tag is for amazon.com. On amazon.co.uk it earns nothing. Each marketplace needs its own store ID. - Typo or an old ID from a store you no longer use.
- Lost in a redirect — see cause 2.
How to check properly: open a published post, right-click an Amazon link, copy the link address, and paste it into a text editor. Read the actual URL. Do not trust the editor view — what is stored in the post and what is served to the visitor can differ, particularly if a redirect plugin is involved.
Do this across the whole site, not one post. The failure mode here is a handful of pages among hundreds, usually the oldest ones, written before you settled on a workflow. Checking three posts by hand proves nothing. A link scanner that reports every Amazon URL on the site and flags the untagged ones takes minutes and is the only reliable way to find them.
Cause 2 — you are cloaking your Amazon links
This one surprises people, because link cloaking is standard practice in affiliate marketing generally and half the plugin ecosystem is built around it.
Amazon does not allow it. The policies prohibit cloaking, hiding, spoofing or otherwise obscuring the URL, and prohibit using a link shortening service in a way that makes it unclear you are linking to Amazon. That covers bit.ly, and it covers pretty-link and redirect plugins that turn an Amazon URL into yoursite.com/go/product.
Two consequences: redirect chains are a common place for the tag= parameter to be dropped, and using them at all puts the account at risk of termination with accrued earnings forfeited.
The compliant alternative is Amazon’s own shortener. The amzn.to links produced by SiteStripe are Amazon’s own, carry your tag, and do not hide that the link goes to Amazon, which is what the policy forbids. If you want tidy links, use those.
If you currently cloak, unwinding it is a two-part job: repoint the existing links to direct tagged Amazon URLs, and keep the old redirects alive so nothing 404s while search engines catch up.
Cause 3 — something between your page and Amazon is interfering
Less common, and worth checking once the first two are ruled out.
- Ad blockers and privacy browsers. A meaningful share of readers block affiliate parameters outright. You cannot fix this, and it is one reason your own click counts will never match Amazon’s.
- Aggressive caching. A cached page can serve an old version of a link long after you fixed it. Purge after any link change.
- Your own visits. Testing your own links repeatedly is not just useless — clicking your own affiliate links is against the terms. Exclude your own traffic from your analytics so your click data means something.
Clicks recorded, but no earnings
This is usually not a fault at all. Three explanations cover nearly all of it.
Cause 4 — the 24-hour window
Amazon’s cookie lasts 24 hours from the click. Anything added to the cart within that window still counts if the order is completed within 89 days of the click. Outside it, nothing.
This is short. A reader who clicks on Tuesday, thinks about a $400 purchase, and buys on Friday earns you nothing. Considered purchases lose a substantial share of their conversions to this, and the higher the price the worse it gets — which is the awkward trade-off against the advice to chase expensive products.
Cause 5 — the sale came through a paid or boosted ad
Since 14 April 2026, Amazon excludes purchases from customers who reached it through any paid or boosted advertisement linking to Amazon, whether or not the ad bid on Amazon’s name. Its What’s Changed page says limited exceptions apply.
Note what did not change. A shopper who clicks your link to one blender and buys a different one within the session still earns you commission, at that blender’s category rate. The April 2026 rule limiting commission to the promoted product and its variants applies to onsite commission, which Amazon pays on Influencer content shown on Amazon itself. Corrected 1 October 2026: an earlier version said it applied to all links.
If you were boosting posts or running ads that point straight at Amazon, those sales no longer pay. Point paid traffic at your own pages instead, where the reader chooses a product and clicks through themselves. There is more detail in the 2026 commission rate guide.
Cause 6 — your readers are in the wrong country
A reader in the UK clicking a link to amazon.com sees a store that will not ship to them at a price in the wrong currency. Most leave. Those who do buy, buy on amazon.co.uk, where your -20 tag does not exist.
Check the country breakdown of your traffic. If a large share is outside your marketplace, that is not a tracking bug — it is unearned revenue, and it is fixable. See localising Amazon affiliate links by country.
Earnings appear, but the numbers look wrong
Cause 7 — Amazon reduced what it reports in 2026
This is the one that produces the most false alarms, because it looks exactly like a tracking failure.
Through 2026 Amazon reduced reporting granularity: a higher threshold before tracking-ID level data is shown, and the removal of some SKU and ASIN-level breakdowns that publishers had built their whole optimisation process around.
If detail you used to see has disappeared, your links are probably fine. The data is gone, not the tracking. The practical response is to stop relying on Amazon’s reports for content-level decisions and to measure clicks yourself — your own first-party click data tells you which pages and which products readers are actually choosing, which is the part Amazon has stopped telling you.
Cause 8 — returns, cancellations and unshipped orders
Reports show ordered items first and earnings later. Returns and cancellations are deducted, so a strong month can shrink. Since 2026 the customer must also receive the item within 180 days of the click for it to qualify, which matters for pre-orders and long-lead furniture.
Cause 9 — the rate is not the rate you expected
A product’s listing category and its commission category are not always the same, and you cannot tell which applied until it appears in the report. Group earnings by category to see what you were actually paid rather than what you assumed.
How to test a link properly
Most “testing” produces meaningless results. This does not:
- Read the served URL, not the stored one. View the published page, copy the link target, paste it somewhere you can read it. Confirm
tag=is present, spelled correctly, and matches the marketplace. - Use a private window. Your normal browser may carry old cookies and your own session.
- Give it 48 hours before concluding anything from a click count.
- Compare against your own click data. If your site records 400 clicks and Amazon records 250, that gap is ad blockers and bots, and it is normal. If your site records 400 and Amazon records 0, something is genuinely broken.
- Check a sample from each era of the site. Problems cluster in posts written before a workflow changed.
The check worth automating. Everything above is a one-time audit. The version that actually protects your income is a scheduled scan of every Amazon link on the site — flagging untagged links, wrong-marketplace tags, redirects and links to products that no longer exist. Untagged links do not announce themselves, and the longer one sits there the more it costs.
Part of The Amazon Affiliate Site Playbook — the whole job in six stages, from choosing a niche to keeping a mature site earning.
Find every untagged link on your site
Ama Affiliate Pro scans your published posts for Amazon links that are missing your tag, pointing at the wrong marketplace, or going to products that no longer exist — and can retag them in place without touching the design.
Start a 14-day trialCommon questions
How long does Amazon take to record a click?
Reporting lags, and clicks may not appear on the same day. Allow 48 hours before treating a missing click as evidence of anything. Orders and shipped earnings appear on separate, longer schedules again.
Why do I get clicks but no sales?
Usually not a fault. The cookie lasts 24 hours, so anyone who deliberates loses you the sale. Since April 2026, sales that came through a paid or boosted ad linking to Amazon do not count either. And below roughly 200 clicks, zero orders is ordinary variance rather than a signal.
Can I use Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates with Amazon?
Not safely. Amazon’s policies prohibit cloaking, hiding, spoofing or obscuring the URL, and prohibit link shorteners used in a way that makes it unclear you are linking to Amazon. Redirect plugins are also a common place for the tag= parameter to be lost. Use Amazon’s own amzn.to shortener from SiteStripe instead — it is Amazon’s own domain, so it does not hide where the link goes.
Why does my site show more clicks than Amazon does?
Ad blockers, privacy browsers, bots and prefetching all create a gap, and it is normal for your own count to be higher. A moderate discrepancy is expected. Amazon showing zero while your site shows hundreds is the case that indicates a real problem.
Does the tag work if my reader buys on a different Amazon site?
No. Store IDs are per-marketplace. A -20 tag earns on amazon.com only; a reader who ends up on amazon.co.uk or amazon.de earns you nothing unless you have a tag for that marketplace and the link sends them there.
Some of my report columns have disappeared. Did I break something?
Probably not. Amazon reduced reporting granularity in 2026, raising the threshold for tracking-ID level data and removing some SKU and ASIN-level detail. If information you used to see is simply absent, that is a platform change rather than a fault in your links.
Can I click my own affiliate links to test them?
You can open them to read the URL, but you must not use them to buy, and self-referral is against the Operating Agreement. Verify by reading the served link address rather than by clicking through and purchasing.
I fixed the tag but the old link is still showing.
Caching. Purge your page cache, your CDN, and any object cache after changing links, then check the published page in a private window. A cached page can serve a stale link for a long time.