Amazon Associates 3 Sales in 180 Days Rule: What Happens If You Miss It?

When you join Amazon Associates, you are not fully approved yet. Amazon gives you 180 days to make at least three qualifying sales through your links. Once you reach three, Amazon reviews your account and decides whether to accept you.

If you do not reach three sales in time, your application can be withdrawn. Amazon says it cannot bring back a rejected account or its Associates ID, so you would have to apply again and replace your links.

The good news is that you do not need hundreds of sales. You need three qualifying sales within 180 days. For a new channel that can still take time, so it is worth making sure your links work and carry your tag from day one. This article explains exactly what counts, what does not, and how to give yourself the best chance.

Many blogs repeat this rule from memory, so it is worth reading Amazon’s own words. On its Application Review Process page, Amazon says its team will check your application once you have driven qualified sales, and adds: "we require at least three within the first 180 days". The same page says that "personal orders do not qualify".

Amazon’s Account Dormancy page explains what happens next. Once you have referred three qualifying sales, Amazon says it will evaluate your application within a day or two. If there were not enough qualifying sales in the 180 days after you applied, your application can be withdrawn.

So the rule has two parts. Three sales is what starts the review. The review itself is a separate step, and you can still be rejected at that point if your channel does not meet Amazon’s standards.

Not every order through your link counts. Based on Amazon’s Program Policies, a sale only helps you if all of these are true:

• 01Someone else bought it. Your own orders do not count, and the policies say you must not buy through your own links at all.
• 02Nobody was asked to buy it for you. The policies also say you must not ask or encourage friends, relatives or people you work with to buy through your links. Getting three family members to order something is against the rules, not a shortcut.
• 03The order was not cancelled or returned. Amazon disqualifies any order where a cancellation, return or refund has been started.
• 04The link was properly tagged. If a link does not carry your tracking tag, or is not formatted correctly, the sale is not tracked as yours. You can check this with our guide on how to tell if a link is an Amazon affiliate link.

The last point catches more people than you would expect. A product link without your tracking tag still opens the right product, so it looks fine. But purchases through it are not credited to your account, so they do not count toward your three sales. The easiest way to avoid this is to make your links with Amazon’s own Associates tools, such as SiteStripe.

Your reports in Associates Central are the easiest place to keep an eye on your progress. Open Reports from the main menu and look at the Earnings report.

• 01Items Shipped is the number to watch. Amazon describes it as the total number of items that were actually shipped to customers in the time frame you choose. You can read the full definitions on Amazon’s help page about how to read the Earnings report.
• 02Ordered items show up sooner, but an order can still be cancelled or returned. Treat shipped items as the more reliable number.
• 03Shipped items are a guide, not an official count. Only Amazon decides which sales qualify, when it reviews your account.
• 04Pick a time frame that covers the day you joined, so you see every sale since your 180 days started.

If you see clicks but no orders after a few weeks, check that your links still work and still carry your tag before you change anything else.

If you have fewer than three qualifying sales when the 180 days run out, Amazon can withdraw your application. Amazon says it is unable to reinstate the account or the Associates ID after that, so your old tracking tag stops being useful.

You are allowed to apply again. Amazon’s own help page says you are welcome to reapply when your site is more established. But a new application comes with a new Associates ID, and Amazon tells reapplying associates to update the links on their site so they carry the new tags. On a YouTube channel, that can mean editing the description of every video that has an Amazon link.

This is why it is worth taking the first 180 days seriously. Missing the window does not ban you, but it creates a lot of extra work.

Reaching three sales is not the finish line. On the same Application Review Process page, Amazon lists what it looks for. For a YouTube channel, the main points are:

• 01YouTube is an accepted platform. Amazon lists YouTube among the social networks it accepts, and asks you to give the exact address of your channel, not just youtube.com.
• 02An established audience. Amazon says your page should have a substantive number of organic followers, which it describes as at least 500 in most cases. Reaching 500 does not guarantee approval on its own. Amazon also looks at whether your page is public and has original content.
• 03Public content. Your channel must be public, and Amazon says it will not accept a page where your posts or your follower count are hidden.
• 04Original content. Amazon wants sites with real, original content that would still be useful with the links removed.
• 05Tagged links. Your Amazon links must carry your Associates tag. Amazon lists missing tags as a reason applications get rejected.

Amazon also asks you to keep your list of sites up to date, so it reviews the right channel. If you started a new channel after applying, add it to your account before the review. Amazon also says it is not able to reassess an application once it has been rejected, so it is better to fix problems before your third sale than after.

There is no trick to this, and you should be wary of anyone selling one. What works is putting honest links where interested viewers will see them.

• 01Start with videos that already get views. Adding links to an older video that still gets traffic often works better than waiting for a new upload to take off.
• 02Link the exact product you show. Viewers who just watched you use something are far more likely to buy that item than a general category page.
• 03Put the link near the top of the description. Not every viewer opens the full description, so the first few lines matter.
• 04Mention the link in the video. A short line such as "the one I recommend is linked in the description" reminds people it is there.
• 05Add your disclosure. Amazon requires you to identify yourself as an Amazon Associate. Our guide on Amazon affiliate disclosure for YouTube shows how.

If you are setting up links for the first time, our step-by-step guide on how to add Amazon affiliate links to YouTube covers where to get them and how to place them.

Keep in mind that a click is not a sale. If your reports show clicks but no orders, our article on why clicks show up but earnings do not explains the common reasons.

In the first 180 days, every working link matters more than usual. When you only need three sales, a broken link on one of your most-watched videos quietly takes away one of your best chances to get them.

Links break for ordinary reasons. Products sell out, get replaced by a newer model or disappear from Amazon, and nothing warns you when it happens. Our guide on why an Amazon affiliate link stops working covers the usual causes and their fixes.

You can check your links by hand by opening each video description and clicking every link. If you would rather not, AffiliScan scans your YouTube videos for Amazon links that are broken or point to products that are no longer available, so you can fix them while your 180 days are still running.