Amazon is currently hiring people in South Carolina, Idaho, New Mexico, Tennessee, Louisiana, West Virginia, Alabama, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Mississippi to work from home for them in customer service. If you don’t live in one of those states, they will not consider your application for this position. These are seasonal and part time customer service positions.

Military applicants are welcomed to these positions.

Requirements

Applicants must have at least one year of customer service experience.

You must go in person to a location Amazon gives you to complete your I-9 paperwork. You must have a high school diploma and be fluent in English.

This job is part time, and you may need to work additional hours during the busy season. Naturally, there are more hours available during the peak season, starting Thanksgiving and running through mid-January. There may be regular employment for some people after the busy season is over, but there is no guarantee that any seasonal employees will continue on.

Shifts may be any day of the week, at any time, as the call center is open 24/7. You must be available to work holidays such as Thanksgiving, as those can be very busy days. Prime Day and Black Friday will also be very busy, so you will likely work those days. On average, part time associates will work 20-29 hours per week.

This job will pay $10 per hour during training, and $12 per hour after training, higher if required by law.

This is not the position for you if you have to care for children or another adult during your work shifts. You must commit fully to the customer while you work. No distractions.

You must be able to navigate the internet and use multiple browsers, email, and instant messenger/chat tools. Your priorities must focus on customer needs as you resolve conflicts and set customer expectations. The job will be primarily phone based but may involve chat or email as well.

Equipment Required

Amazon will provide you with a laptop, headset, and Ethernet adapter shipped to your address. You are encouraged to use an external monitor, USB keyboard and mouse if you have them available. Amazon will not provide these extras.

Your internet speeds must reach at least 10 mbps download and 5 mbps upload speed. You must use a direct Ethernet connection to your router.

This is one of many customer service work at home positions listed on the Home With the Kids Online Job Board. Take a look at the job board to find other companies looking for people to work for them in customer service and many other types of jobs.

This position is only open seasonally. You can check Amazon’s job board to check for other remote jobs at any time to see if you qualify for other positions.

The post Amazon Now Hiring Seasonal Work From Home Customer Service Associates appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Amazon has allowed people to receive free or discounted products in exchange for review for a long time. As of October 3, 2016, they have banned that practice, with the exception of their own Vine program. Simply put, they had concerns about the quality of reviews these giveaways were generating.

The exception here is books. Reviewers have long been able to receive free copies of books in exchange for a review, and Amazon will continue to allow that.

Paid reviews for anything have never been allowed, and of course this has not changed. Amazon has banned reviewers for posting paid reviews. This is another step Amazon is taking to try to keep the quality of posted reviews up.

What Does This Mean For Incentivized Reviewers

I know a number of people who have been doing incentivized reviews of products, and there are a number of websites that help reviewers find products they would be willing to try at a discount or free. These businesses have to change their rules – if a seller wants to offer a product free or cheap through them, they can no longer insist upon a review on Amazon.

This may change how easy it is to get such products through these websites – we’ll just have to wait and see who still takes a chance on offering their products in the hopes that a review will happen without requiring one.

The basic problem is that there was a feeling that incentivized reviews were biased – more likely to be positive than a regular review. Everyone knows that the businesses offering the discounted products want a positive review, and it’s easy for reviewers to feel that there’s some level of obligation to provide one. This was making product reviews on Amazon less trustworthy, a huge problem considering how many people use product reviews there to decide whether or not to buy an unfamiliar product.

Of course, if you can get chosen for the Vine program, you can still do reviews, but it’s not as easy to get into as those websites which all pretty much anyone to review products. Amazon has to pick you as a trusted reviewer.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon monitors reviews to watch for reviews posted by people who did receive the product at a discount, but no longer disclose because it’s against the rules. If the discounted purchase is done through Amazon, this would be very easy to track. It would be harder to determine if items were sent to reviewers through some other website. Of course, Amazon often labels verified purchases on reviews, so they can also tell if someone tends to review things they did not buy there.

The post Amazon Bans Outside Incentivized Reviews appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

It’s official. Amazon should be reinstating California affiliates over the next few days as Governor Brown has signed the bill giving Amazon a break on collecting sales tax in California until September 2012. Amazon is to create 10,00 jobs in California, which makes it sound to me like we have some hope of affiliate marketing with Amazon lasting beyond that point, whether or not the Federal government acts.

I’m happy but antsy. I really want to see what happens next year, which is going to make me quite cautious about how I promote Amazon over the next year. I don’t want to be stuck in the scramble to change things over again. I mean, sure, there’s Skimlinks, but I prefer the regular Amazon program overall.

The post California Amazon Affiliates to be Reinstated appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Things have certainly gotten interesting between Amazon.com and California. They’ve come to a new agreement that Amazon doesn’t need to collect sales taxes this year, but starting in September 2012, they will. As of this writing, it hasn’t been signed by the Governor, so it’s a matter of waiting to see what happens now for California affiliate marketers.

It’s been said that Amazon will let California affiliates back into the program if this is signed, although I haven’t had any official word on that from Amazon. That said, I don’t know that it will last beyond September 2012, as Amazon could take other steps to get out of needed to collect the taxes in the free year they now have. We’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

With that in mind, I’m going to be quite hesitant to create or promote new Amazon affiliate sites. I have some, which have suffered tremendously from the lack of Amazon links, and I had hoped to build more, but I won’t until I know things will last beyond a year. I’m really not into the short term stuff.

This deal also depends on whether there is action from Congress on the matter of sales tax on online purchases. This is what Amazon has been pushing for, as it has the potential to simplify the collection of such taxes.

Even with all that, I’m much annoyed with the people who keep insisting that it is only the lack of sales tax charged that makes people shop on Amazon. That’s the line we keep hearing, and it’s just not true.

I firmly believe most people shop on Amazon because the basic price is lower even before sales tax. They also go there because local stores can rarely compete with the selection. Add in the reviews and other information available about the products, and of course people love shopping online. Having to pay sales tax on online purchases won’t change that.

Even though I won’t be aggressively promoting Amazon until I know what’s in the works for next September, I still want this bill signed. It will put a stop to what otherwise will be a nasty fight.

The post What’s Up With Amazon and California? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

It has already happened in other states such as New York and North Carolina. States have changed their tax laws so that companies such as Amazon that have affiliates in that state will be required to collect and pay sales taxes on sales made in that state. The immediate response by Amazon and many other companies has been to drop all affiliates in those states so they can continue to avoid collecting sales taxes in those states. This has been devastating to many affiliate marketers.

California, the state I live in, is seriously considering this action yet again. It’s a proposal that has been beaten back a couple times now, but it just won’t go away. The state needs money and this looks like an easy way for them to get a lot of it very quickly. AB 153 and AB 155 are proposals that might have a huge effect on affiliates in California. Hearings will be on March 7, 2011 in Sacramento, for any affiliates who can get there and testify about the impact these would have on their businesses.

Too bad it doesn’t seem to work. Once the affiliates are dropped, the companies no longer have a presence to concern themselves with, and can continue to refuse to collect the sales tax. Meanwhile affiliates have less of an income and pay less income tax. Not exactly what the states hope for.

That said, I can see where it’s not unreasonable to say that something needs to be done. Many people don’t realize they’re supposed to pay a use tax if they buy something out of state and their home state would have collected sales tax if the purchase had been made there. The use tax is the same amount as the sales tax, minus any sales tax paid to the state the purchase was made in, usually zero if you’re talking about online purchases. Yes, theoretically most states want you to pay on those purchases you make on vacation. But that’s not the focus here.

The focus here is on what you can do if you suddenly lose all income from Amazon and other such links. Being dropped from such profitable programs is painful if they’re your major income source, a potential financial disaster. You need to consider a backup plan if your state starts considering this kind of legislation with any seriousness at all.

What can you do?

Start by opposing the legislation as it appears in your state. If you don’t speak out, how will your legislators know how such a law would hurt you? Taking some time to fight the legislation before it’s passed gives you a chance to protect your income. Visit the Performance Marketing Association website to find out what’s going on in your state. There might be something you can do to help beyond simply emailing your legislators about the problem. They often aren’t familiar with affiliate marketing and don’t realize how ineffective these bills are at collecting taxes or how damaging they are to this kind of business. You can help to educate them.

For Californians, here’s a link to help you contact the Assemblymen on the Revenue and Taxation committee, as well as your own Assemblymen. Be polite and make it clear how damaging this could be to your business, plus how the bill will not bring in tax money to help the budget. Point out the responses to the bills passed in New York, Rhode Island and North Carolina, where affiliate contracts were simply terminated. Ask them directly to not support these bills.

As you fight, consider your options in case it does pass. Where else can you earn an income that won’t be lost? Are there other retailers you can affiliate with that are already in your state and therefore collect and pay sales taxes already? Will you need to go to AdSense? Are there any ebooks or other nontaxable items you could sell instead? Preparing now can limit the damage if things go wrong, as well as diversifying your income sources, always a good idea.

The problem with many of the options is that they aren’t necessarily as profitable for you as an affiliate. When you have a site set up to sell a particular product it’s not always easy to replace a merchant. Other merchants may not convert as well or may pay lower commissions. Amazon in particular is difficult to replace because even when customers you refer don’t buy exactly what you recommended, they may buy something else from a huge range of categories.

Whatever you do, don’t just sit and hope the bills don’t pass, or mope about the loss of income. Take action. That’s how you got your online business started in the first place and that’s what you need to do to keep it.

The post How Prepared is Your Affiliate Business for Tax Changes in Your State? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.