This is something that's been bothering me for awhile and may well affect other Links users. Somewhere around a year ago (very rough estimate), Amazon.com changed something with their direct linking where what formally took you to the product page now takes you to a intermediate page with a brief description and a lot of other related items. You have to then click on the desired item to get to the full page.

Given Amazon's 5/15% commission system, I've had this uneasy feeling that that requisite click through is dropping all direct links down to the 5% level... I haven't been able to find anything mentioning that, though, and the build-a-link tools still build links that point to that intermediate page, so the method at least seems current. At any rate, I've had very few 15% commissions since around the time that change was made...

I just discovered you can format the URLs differently, however. Instead of:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/...

you can do:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/...

and it will go directly to the desired product page. If you have a lot of such links that you want to update, here is a MySQL query that will do the trick:

UPDATE Links SET URL = REPLACE(URL, 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN', 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-')
WHERE URL LIKE '%http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN%';

Dan