Amazon Affiliate Price Rules: Can You Put Prices in Your Description?

You film a review, you put the affiliate link in the description, and you type the price next to it so people know what to expect. It feels helpful. It is also one of the few parts of your description that Amazon has written a specific rule about.

Amazon allows your Site to show prices in only two situations. Amazon does not name YouTube descriptions anywhere in that rule, but neither one works for a price you type in by hand and leave there, so the safest thing to put next to your link is no number at all.

Everything quoted below comes from the Amazon Associates Program Policies and the Operating Agreement. Where Amazon does not address something directly, this article says so instead of guessing.

Almost every Amazon rule is written about “your Site”, which sounds like it only means a website. It does not.

The Operating Agreement says the program “permits you to monetize your website, social media user-generated content, online software application, or Alexa skill”, and it calls all of that your Site.

Social media user-generated content covers your videos and the descriptions under them. So when a rule says your Site must not do something, your channel is included. This matters for the rest of this article, because creators often assume the price rules are a website problem.

Here is the rule, in Amazon’s own words: “Product prices and availability may vary from time to time. Because prices for and availability of Products that you have listed on your Site may change, your Site may only show prices and availability if: (a) we serve the link in which that price and availability data are displayed, or (b) you obtain Product pricing and availability data via Creators API or PA API and you comply with the requirements regarding use of Creators API or PA API in the License.”

Think of that as two doors. Door (a) is a link or a widget that Amazon itself serves, so Amazon controls the number and it updates on its own. Door (b) is Amazon’s product data service, which hands you the current price through code.

A price you typed by hand is neither one. It is a number frozen on the day you uploaded, and it stays frozen while the real price moves.

Door (a) needs Amazon to serve something. A YouTube description is plain text, so there is nothing for Amazon to serve. That door is simply not available to you there.

Door (b) is harder for a different reason. Pulling the price from Amazon’s data service brings the rules of the License along with it, and those rules ask for three things that a description, once it is published, has no way to keep up with:

• 01A time stamp beside the number. You must “include a date/time stamp adjacent to your display of pricing or availability information” if the price is refreshed less often than hourly.
• 02A disclaimer beside the number: “Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.”
• 03A refresh. Price data may be kept “for up to 24 hours”, and after that you must call Amazon again and re-display the fresh number.

A description you wrote eight months ago refreshes never. Amazon does not spell that conclusion out for YouTube, so treat it as a careful reading rather than a line you can quote back: for a price typed by hand into a description, the safer answer is no.

The most common version of this mistake is not a price at all. It is a deal.

Lines like “20% off today” or “on sale right now” age badly, and Amazon has a rule aimed straight at them: “You must remove from your Site any links and related references to limited time promotions as soon as that promotion on the relevant Amazon Site ends.”

Amazon even gives the example: “if you include links to Products in the apparel category of an Amazon Site and mention that there is 15% off select products in Amazon’s apparel category, you must remove the mention of the 15% discount from your Site as soon as the promotion ends.”

On a blog you can edit that line in a minute. On YouTube it sits in the description of a video that may keep collecting views for years, long after the sale ended. That is the same reason old videos quietly lose affiliate money in general: nobody goes back to read them.

A second rule catches the same problem from another side: “You must not make inaccurate, overbroad, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims about any Product, an Amazon Site, or any of our policies, promotions, or prices.” A price that was right in March and wrong in September is the kind of claim that rule is about.

Prices are not the only number with a rule attached, and this next one surprises almost everybody.

Amazon’s policies say: “You will not display or otherwise use any of our customer reviews or star ratings, in part or in whole, on your Site unless you have obtained a link to that customer review or star rating through Creators API or PA API and you comply with the requirements for Creators API and PA API described in the License.”

So “4.7 stars from 12,000 reviews” typed into a description runs into the same basic problem as a typed price. You are reproducing Amazon’s own data by hand instead of displaying it the way the rule describes, and there is no way to keep it current.

If you run a blog or a website next to your channel, there is one more line worth knowing: “Unless otherwise agreed by Amazon, your Site must not have price tracking and/or price alerting functionality.”

That rules out adding a price history chart, or a “tell me when this drops” button, to the site where your affiliate links live. The rule is written about functionality on your Site. Amazon does not say in that provision whether checking prices privately, for your own decisions, counts as the same thing.

The fix is small, it costs you nothing, and it makes your descriptions age better:

• 01Point at the link, not at a number. “Current price on Amazon” or “check today’s price” never goes out of date.
• 02Drop the deal wording. “On sale now” becomes wrong the moment the sale ends, and you will not be there to edit it.
• 03Compare on features, not on figures. “The cheaper of the two” stays true far longer than “$40 cheaper”.
• 04Leave the star rating out as well, for the same reason as the price.

One honest gap: Amazon writes this rule about what your Site shows, and it does not spell out what you say out loud on camera. Because Amazon defines your Site to include social media user-generated content, it is not clear that a spoken price sits outside the rule. If you do say a number while filming, the safer habit is to say it was the price on the day you filmed and send people to the link for today’s number. That is a careful reading of something Amazon does not address directly, not a rule Amazon has written.

Set the rules aside for a moment, because there is a plainer reason to care when a price moves.

A product that quietly doubled in price is a product your viewers will not buy. The link still works, the click still counts, and the sale still does not happen. It is the same silent failure as a product that goes unavailable — nothing in your Amazon reports points at it.

AffiliScan records the price and the rating of each product every time it scans your videos, so you can see what moved since the last check, next to the links that are broken or gone. One warning that follows from everything above: that number is there for your own decisions about what to keep recommending. It is not a number to copy into your description.

If you want the rest of the compliance side, what YouTube creators need to know about disclosure covers the part people get wrong more often than this one.

Amazon lets your Site show a price when Amazon serves it or when your code keeps it fresh. A description you type once and leave alone does neither, so the number stays frozen from the day you uploaded.

Leave the number out, point at the link, and your description stays correct for as long as the video keeps earning. Then the only thing left to check is whether the link still goes somewhere a viewer can buy — and that one is worth checking on a schedule, because old links break quietly.