Hi Owen, they pay the commission for referring purchasers to them (as opposed to a competitor), and an affiliate account is what they pay the commission to. I’ve expanded the brief description in the post to this effect, and linked to Wikipedia’s description of this, for anyone who wants to follow the links from there to see more detail. For anyone interested who’s reading more detail in these comments, here is the best description from Amazon I can find, though it’s less clear than Wikipedia and the pages that it links to.
Hi Owen, they pay the commission for referring purchasers to them (as opposed to a competitor), and an affiliate account is what they pay the commission to. I’ve expanded the brief description in the post to this effect, and linked to Wikipedia’s description of this, for anyone who wants to follow the links from there to see more detail. For anyone interested who’s reading more detail in these comments, here is the best description from Amazon I can find, though it’s less clear than Wikipedia and the pages that it links to.
I’ve now created a Wikipedia page on this program (‘Amazon Associates’), for people wanting more detail on it.